In the summer that I was 17, Soul II Soul's Back to Life
played over and over on the radio. Caron Wheeler – the group's full-figured,
dreadlocked lead singer embodied a black alternative to the mainstream
straight-haired skinny girls who typified contemporary music in the late 1980s
and early 1990s. She spoke to a new wave of black pride.
The 1980s had banished Afros and dashikis as it waved
goodbye to black power and the politics that inspired it. But somehow the 1990s
seemed to usher blackness in again. I soaked it in. I wore a head wrap and hung
a leather pendant, cut out in the shape of Africa, around my neck. That year I
read the Autobiography of Malcolm X, and I found I Write What I Like and fell
in love with Steve Biko.
While I was reading words written in the 1960s and 1970s,
throughout the 1990s all eyes were on South Africa and an entirely different
kind of icon. Nelson Mandela emerged from the prison gates looking like what he
had become – a statesman. With his grey hair, his measured tones, his careful
bearing, he looked as though he had been born to lead.
I couldn't help comparing Biko with the elder statesman.
Like Malcolm X, Biko seemed a thousand times cooler than Mandela. His
intensity, his rebelliousness, his staccato eloquence spoke to me in ways that
Mandela simply didn't.
The Mandela who had gone into jail had a revolutionary
jauntiness about him, but, by the time I was old enough to be reading serious
books, no one was talking about Mandela the radical. In university I ate up
Marcus Garvey and Frederick Douglass and Malcolm and Biko. The women's names –
Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman and Angela Davis – were barely mentioned. I
eventually went in search of them myself and was richly rewarded.
As I entered my 20s and became more involved in student
politics, in adopting the positions that would define my own personal politics
I began to see Mandela as a symbolic figure, a teddy bear, whose image and
presence were necessary for stability, but whose words and persona were too
soft to reflect mine fully. I saw him as a wise and kind leader. Unlike Biko,
though, he didn't shape what I wore and who I dated. He was simply not very
present in my busy, self-righteous twentysomething life.
Sense of self-worth
Over time that changed. At some point in the past decade my
love affair with Biko and Malcolm X ended. Their ideas remain important to me.
The fire in their bellies, the rage in their heads, the force with which they
claim the humanity of black people are critical to my own political sense of
self-worth. I am grateful to them for the years they kept me company in the
United States, the long winters when their words burned bright, helping me to
love my lips, my skin, my hair; helping me to understand my rage.
In the weeks since Madiba has been back in hospital, as the
media have hovered and the headlines have been gobbled up by silly and sad wars
over all manner of Madiba-related matters, I have realised how much his
intellectual contributions to post-apartheid South Africa have changed me; not
at the symbolic level that was so appealing in my youth, but at the level of
analysis and principle that are so crucial as you move from girlhood to
womanhood. Simply by being present, by being around for so long, he has taught
me how to lead.
Sitting in a café in Norwood with my husband last week I
looked up at the TV. There he was in a grainy image, his face round, beard
shaggy. Angry, proud, determined – a pre-1964 picture. The image soon gave way
to the more familiar Madiba, the one my children now know. Quite unexpectedly,
I found myself tearing up, feeling silly as my husband consoled me, dabbing a
paper napkin at the edges of my suddenly leaky eyes.
When Biko said: "Merely by describing yourself as black
you have started on a road towards emancipation, you have committed yourself to
fight against all forces that seek to use your blackness as a stamp that marks
you out as a subservient being", I understood.
When Malcolm said: "By any means necessary", my heart
leapt. Both men were brave enough to say what others had, until then, only
whispered.
In my younger self's narrative a certain kind of bravado
signified strength and leadership. Biko and Malcolm had been killed because
they threatened the system. Once I bought into this logic it was impossible not
to believe the inverse, which was that Mandela had been kept alive because he
was a puppet, so soft that they would gain nothing from killing him.
On the other hand, the Mandela I was familiar with insisted that:
"We enter into a covenant that we shall build a society in which all South
Africans, both black and white, will be able to walk tall, without any fear in
their hearts, assured of their inalienable right to human dignity – a rainbow
nation at peace with itself and the world."
Underscoring the futility
He was correct and therefore he was difficult to contradict,
but he made me narrow my eyes in cynicism, made me want to flip the channel to
get to the action.
The lack of interest was not his fault; it was mine. Over
his lifetime he had moved from emphasising the importance of violence to
underscoring the futility of it. I had not yet walked that road. But instead of
commending his journey I was vaguely derisive of it because – this is the
clincher – unlike my dead heroes, he was still alive. My misguided exaggeration
of the benefits of martyrdom was both perverse and naive, but also, sadly,
common.
As my work pulled me towards governance and
democracy-building, in 2005 I began to respect Mandela in new ways. I began to
understand the fallacy inherent in the well-worn trope of "puppets versus
heroes". The idea that one has to be a martyr to be radical, or that one
has to be threatening in a particular way to be a hero has lost its charm.
Black people's struggles against colonialism, slavery and
racism have always required us to be agile, to change tactics depending on the
situation. They have also demanded of us deep and careful reflection. In a
world in which action is privileged over thought, Mandela spent 40 years
fighting and 27 years thinking. He emerged tougher and more resolute, but also
far less inclined to move too quickly, to jump too fast.
For this, his image – temporarily at least – took a knock
among those who define their battlefield as primarily focused on race and
racism. But the truth is that in our haste to embrace the Madiba, who emerged
from jail in 1990, we may have diminished the stature of the Mandela who went
to prison in 1961; the man who condemned himself to the gallows, who started
the armed wing of the ANC and who inspired thousands of young black women and
men to join the liberation struggle.
As we think about the legacy of Mandela it seems important
to reflect on his contributions to black people qua black people. This is an important
exercise because, today, Mandela's Africanness seems almost incidental. He has
taken on a sort of post-racial identity. He is black but his Africanness has
begun to seem like a postscript. Saint Madiba has scrubbed some of the
blackness off Nelson Mandela.
In reality, though, the arc of Mandela's life is important
both for the "rainbow" parts that are so popular today, and for the
"terrorist" bits that even ardent black consciousness fans will
recognise in their hearts. There is no question that he belongs in the canon of
African leaders and thinkers engaged in the struggle for the recognition of
black people's humanity and dignity.
Though some would place him next to Martin Luther King, I
would seat him next to Malcolm X and Steve Biko. Recognising, of course, that
this place is at the head of the table right next to Sojourner Truth.
