IN JUNE 1966, Sen. Robert Kennedy joined the National Union of South African Students for a conference held in Cape Town. Tension was running high. NUSAS president Ian Robertson had been banned under the Suppression of Communism Act, and the pressure was on Kennedy, from both the apartheid government and sectors of the anti-apartheid movement, not to attend.
Kennedy went anyway and delivered one of the best speeches of his career. “Few have the greatness to bend history itself,” Kennedy reminded the students. “But each time a [person] stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, [s/he] sends forth a tiny ripple of hope ... daring those ripples to build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”
Twenty-eight years later Nelson Mandela became the first democratically elected president of South Africa. The West embraced him, celebrating his magnanimity, “disremembering” the support it gave to the very apartheid regime Mandela worked to dismantle.
In the years that followed, Mandela’s leadership enabled a country to project itself beyond the cognitive illusion that suggested there was no way out of a pending Armageddon. He insisted that things only seem impossible until there is the will to make them possible. He created and energized that will, injecting optimism and political excitement into a desperate situation. When an overenthusiastic supporter called Mandela a “saint,” he responded, “No, just a sinner who keeps trying.”
At the time of Kennedy’s 1966 speech, however, Nelson Mandela was in prison, serving a life sentence for sabotage under apartheid; no one realized he was among the “few” who would succeed in bending history. And as we know now, there are certain things that even Mandela could not do.
THE GENIUS OF Mandela’s leadership was his willingness to charm the timid, lure the wayward, disarm his enemies, entice the reluctant, and, yes, bully the recalcitrant to accept his leadership. He worked with others in the “broad church” that was the African National Congress (ANC), which included nationalists, communists, and would-be capitalists, as well as with the apartheid government and, above all, his fellow South Africans. He built and nurtured local and global support, doing the hard work required to persuade the white minority government to surrender power and the apartheid generals to lay down their arms. Herein lay Mandela’s greatness: hard-won authenticity rather than naked power. To use Martin Luther King Jr.’s words, Mandela understood that “power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic.”
Yet Mandela was a leader who tempered moral idealism with political realism, a statesperson who balanced human rights and state security in a manner that was always going to result in criticism. When Mandela assumed the presidency in 1994, some feared “Mandela the radical” while others soon felt he had deviated from the radical commitment to human rights for which they had hoped. Mandela recognized that a first step toward peace involved the creation of a “minimally decent society.” His priority was to steady the ship at home and elsewhere in Africa; without this there would be no human rights for anyone.
And Mandela led by example. He told South Africans, black and white, that a new age was upon them and that he expected both to adjust their behavior accordingly. In his person and policies, he embodied that new age, committing himself to a nonlitigious, restorative, conciliatory exercise in nation-building. In pursuit of this ideal, Mandela rejected spurious peace offers from those who sought to promote a refined version of the old order and sought reconciliation in the face of an understandable impulse for revenge. While Amnesty International and other international agencies called for the prosecution of apartheid criminals, South Africa instead offered perpetrators a carefully constructed conditional amnesty, as a foundation for political reconciliation based on truth-telling and national reconstruction. South Africa had no lustration policy, no Tokyo tribunals or Nuremberg trials. It is an approach that some anti-apartheid activists, in South Africa and beyond, continue to find a bitter pill to swallow.
MANDELA GOT THE nuances of leadership right: He drew the country’s diverse groups into a heroic settlement; he understood and responded to minority interests; he pragmatically pursued restoration, not revenge. Why then, you may ask, do things seem to be going so horribly wrong in South Africa today?
When apartheid ended, black South Africans needed to be drawn into the economy. Whites, who owned the economy, needed to be placated, and foreign investors required reassurance that their investments were safe. The solution involved drawing black leaders and ANC supporters into the mainstream economy through black economic empowerment, affirmative action, and related initiatives. But the social democrats, socialists, others on the Left, and the pragmatists in the ANC were outgunned by economists who favored a free-market capitalist economy, thus limiting the scope for pursuing redistributive economic and social policies.
Today, most whites continue to live extremely comfortable and secure lives in South Africa. There is a comparatively small, emergent, first generation of black middle-class citizens doing well but remaining vulnerable in a teetering economy. There is also a small black elite that has established itself alongside an entrenched white economic elite. Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu suggests that the economic gravy train stopped just long enough for a few blacks to get on board before departing the station, leaving the destitute poor on the platform, where they vacillate between intensified anger and resignation.
Bluntly stated, while still characterized by gross racial inequality, South Africa has traded its naked racist profile of the past for a class-based society that is likely to be more difficult to overcome than apartheid.
The ending of formal apartheid was a crucial step forward. However, structural and institutional racism, extending from personal bias to material privilege, inevitably continues beyond the abolition of apartheid. As the immediate threat of revolution subsided in 1994, we reverted back to a brand of “normality” that carried within itself too many vestiges of the past, forgetting that what is needed is a “new normality.” In other words, structural racial advantage no longer needed apartheid laws to reproduce economic privilege. It is one thing to end segregation by law; it is another thing to end de facto segregation.
As a result, the national mindset in South Africa today is very different from what it was in the Mandela days. The president, together with some in his inner circle, live in scandalous extravagance while continuing to evoke the Mandela legacy as a ruse to distract from their own moral failings and the increasing loss of confidence in government. Men and women who constitute an emerging class of millionaire tycoons resist government economic regulation and corporate social responsibility, while trade unions shut down mines and industry with paralyzing strikes. The unemployed occupy the cities, bring traffic to a standstill, and destroy the infrastructure of the townships.
Mandela could inspire and lure, but he could not command the economy to grow, force the rich to share, insist that the poor be patient, or order the war against poverty to be won. He could not force successive leaders or even well-meaning citizens to follow his example. An African proverb says it takes a village to raise a child; it takes a nation to build a social order. This nation includes successive presidents, cabinet ministers, civil servants, security officials, faith communities, and grassroots people, as well as ill-disciplined police and self-centered individuals, who refuse to look beyond self-privilege and extravagance.
Analysts warn that South Africa is a ticking time bomb; perhaps it will go off as a series of smaller landmines and grassfires. We are a restless people.
FORMER NEW YORK Gov. Mario Cuomo, who died earlier this year, once said that political parties campaign in poetry but govern in prose. The poetry of South Africa’s years of struggle has grown dim. We remember only the distant refrains of our movement for democracy and have failed to introduce effectively the necessary verbs, adverbs, and adjectives needed to create viable political prose.
We need to rediscover the deeper meaning and connection between reconciliation and national reconstruction that was at the heart of the Mandela dream. This vision is embedded in the roots of our religious and secular legacies, but if it is taken seriously, it calls into question the lifestyles of both current political leaders and those in the top echelons of business. Mandela could, by virtue of his authentic leadership, contain the seething contradictions of our young and restless democracy; the current leaders are proving their inability to do so.
In 1968, Ghanaian author Ayi Kwei Armah published a disturbing novel, set in the wake of the coup d’état that removed then-president Kwame Nkrumah from office. Corruption was rife and greed endemic. Armah gave his novel an evocative title: The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. South Africa is not where Ghana once was, yet we too await the realization of our dream. At times we speak of South African exceptionalism, imagining we can bypass the traumas of Africa. That is not so, and yet there is political space in South Africa for dissidents, opponents of government, and the poor to make their voices heard, but at a price.
Fearing the loss of power, the government is making increasing demands for submission, acquiescence, and obedience; abuses by security forces seem to be escalating. Other nations, not least those on the African continent, have allowed their hard-won democratic victories to fall victim to oppressive laws and practices, often with the tacit acceptance of citizens who benefit from abusive government policies. South Africa dare not go there.
The good news is that there is brooding discontent in the ruling party. The constitution is threatened by some but remains fully intact, and we have an extremely brave public protector in the person of Thuli Madonsela, who gives President Zuma sleepless nights, and a constitutional court that has blown the whistle on government misconduct. So the struggle continues.
In 1994, Nelson Mandela delivered these remarks before the Organization of African Unity summit meeting: “We must face the matter squarely that where there is something wrong in how we govern ourselves, it must be said that the fault is not in our stars but in ourselves that we are ill-governed.” He continued, “we have it in ourselves as Africans to change all this.” His bequest to us is an antidote to both despair and complacency. It is to deal with our challenges. We have done so before and we will do so again.
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