Grant Farred, Ithica Journal
It is at once discordant and historically appropriate that
Nelson Mandela’s passing should have been announced by the current South
African president, Jacob Zuma. There could not be a sharper contrast between
two leaders.
The iconic Mandela, the first democratically elected South
African president, champion of racial reconciliation and democracy, has nothing
in common with a successor whose tenure is tainted by corruption, personal
excess and scandal. Zuma’s presidency has seen the increase, especially in his
home province of Kwazulu-Natal, of state violence against poor black citizens;
it has also seen the rise of xenophobic violence against foreign blacks, many
of them refugees from other African countries.
For this reason, Mandela’s death presents itself as the
occasion that demands explanation. How did Mandela’s vision of a “rainbow
nation,” in which the basic needs of all citizens would be met, mutate into a
South Africa in which only a small black elite, and the white citizenry, has
benefited from the demise of apartheid?
In 1997, Mandela promised that his would be a government
free of graft. For his own part, admirably, he was true to his word. So was his
immediate successor, Thabo Mbeki. And yet, how did South Africa become the
second most unequal society in the world, with shack dwellers barely surviving
while $27 million is spent on “securing” Zuma’s compound with a swimming pool
and a cattle corral?
The answer begins, but does not end, with Nelson Mandela.
Successful as he was in preventing a race war between blacks
and whites, today’s racialized inequity is the cost of that largely peaceful
reconciliation. In guaranteeing white property and moving away from the ANC’s
historic commitment to redistribution, Mandela wrongly put his faith in the
belief that reconciliation was the path to material equality — that equal
education, the right to housing, electricity, running water and safety from
violence would follow from nonracial democracy.
Mandela governed South Africa well, but he failed to lead.
He did not act in the interest of the nation’s most historically vulnerable
citizens. Mandela often spoke in the name of the poor, but his party has not in
the last 19 years brought sufficient redress to those whose daily and long-term
needs could only have been met through the reallocation of resources, those who
desperately needed jobs for themselves, better schools for their children,
better access to hospitals and health care, and greater state protection for
women from rape, for the youth against the ravages of drugs, for the nation
against the proliferation of firearms. Reconciliation means little in the face
of social devastation. When presented with a historic opportunity, Mandela made
no demands on the white population. To do so would have risked even greater
white flight to Australia or North America. Consequently, the opportunity was
missed, the effects of which have been catastrophic for the black poor in South
Africa. The reallocation of resources was certainly not on the agenda of the
scholarly Mbeki, laying the ideological ground for the populist Zuma to oust
Mbeki at the 2007 ANC conference. The country was set on its ruinous current
path.
But an icon’s death is nothing if not a serious moment of
public political accounting. At Mandela’s state funeral, President Barack Obama
was cheered, loudly and reverently. Mbeki, too, was acknowledged. Zuma was
booed. In those different responses, haunted by the ghost of the
not-yet-laid-to-rest Mandela, resides a thoughtful evaluation of South Africa’s
democratic past, a very recent thing and profound concern about its present.
The trajectory from Mandela to Zuma represents South
Africa’s painful confrontation with itself. The question of record is only in
part: What has South Africa become? The singular challenge that has long
awaited South Africa has been too easily postponed by the simple fact of
Mandela’s living presence. That challenge must now come into its own.
In order to achieve a future in which race-based economic
inequality is eradicated, South Africa must simultaneously refuse Madiba’s
legacy and make it anew; make it, for the first time, true to his deepest
beliefs. It is proper to laud him, to give credence to his place in history. It
is much more important to recognize that Mandela foreswore, whether
strategically or not, his commitment to equality, and that the moment is nigh to
make out of his failure South Africa’s new political project.
South Africa’s primary goal, only possible under new
leadership, must be the eradication of the extant widespread material
disparity. To do so would be to return Mandela to his most honorable
ideological roots. It is also the only fitting tribute to a life devoted to
political struggle.
Ironically, Zuma’s discordance in relation to Mandela
recalls his predecessor’s best political instincts. In announcing Mandela’s
death, Zuma inadvertently reanimated Mandela’s dedication to an equal and just
South Africa.
