The Sunday News
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena
WITH decolonisation having failed to deliver liberation in Africa and the larger Global South what does it mean to be a political hero like Nelson Mandela?
Ideally, heroes are supposed to be freedom fighters and political messiahs that deliver their people from the Egypts of colonial domination to the Canaans of liberation.
True to the example of the biblical Moses, heroes are also those impossible people that tragically never arrive in the land of their own promises or they arrive but without the people they promised to liberate. Some of them arrive physically but after having left the promises that they once embodied in the wilderness of liberation struggles. Politically it also happens that frequently on arrival those who have made it realise that after all there is no Canaan in Canaan, the lands of milk and honey have come to be wildernesses of thorns and many snakes.
In the classic novel of 1968, The Beautyful Ones are not yet Born, the Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah battled with this political and philosophical dilemma of liberation and heroes that never were in post-independence Africa.
Africa is not only confronted with the historical question of what exactly happened to liberation but also what exactly happened to those that were supposed to be heroes that morphed into monsters of all kinds.
In the same way in which Ayi Kwei Armah’s forceful novel captures the political zeitgeist of the 1960s in an Africa that was still searching for liberation and for its heroes, the decolonial scholars, Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Busani Ngcaweni, have done more than only throwing the proverbial cat among the pigeons or separating the idiomatic men from the boys in their latest book.
The two have ignited a theoretical and philosophical conversation on liberation beyond decolonisation and heroism beyond illusions and fictions of it in the Global South. I was invited by the Institute for Pan-African Thought and Conversation, on the 24th of May 2018, to contribute to the conversation at the launch of the book; Nelson R. Mandela: Decolonial Ethics of Liberation and Servant Leadership, by Gatsheni and Ngcaweni.
The appropriately named Chinua Achebe Hall was expectedly packed the minds and hearts of University of Johannesburg and beyond, contributors to the book volume, book reviewers and critics, and political activists from South Africa’s many political organisations and parties. Curious minds and angry hearts brought themselves to the crowded conversation. It was electrifying as if Chinua Achebe himself was to make an appearance.
Writing and Reading Heroes
As an intellectual and political subject Nelson Mandela has been captive to two extreme currents of caricature. About Mandela there have been vivid caricatures of affirmation, hagiographies that portray the hero and the saint in the man and his idea on the one hand, and on the other hand caricatures of negation that describe the compromised and compromising sell-out.
In most cases these two contesting and contested writings and readings of the man and his idea tend to miss the critical opportunity to theorise and understand the fundaments of Nelson Mandela, they get carried away with worship on the one hand and judgemental condemnation on the other.
Those who love Mandela passionately and those who hate him zealously both fail to benefit from the analytical distance that may permit them to nuance the man and his idea.
As any other prominent leader, hero for some and traitor for others, Nelson Mandela became a forest of messages and meanings. He became a performer of power and leadership and it takes critical patience and skill to separate the person of Mandela from his personas.
Instead of being a cause for confusion, and excuse for easy analysis and lazy conclusions, the controversies around the life and leadership of Nelson Mandela should be an opportunity for critical thought. Using the example of Nelson Mandela, African thinkers should answer the question of exactly what happened to African leaders who were supposed to be heroes of liberation but became heroes of forgiveness and reconciliation.
How did it happen that those who went to the bushes and to long jails to fight for liberation came back only with democracy and the right to vote for black people and not liberation and justice after colonialism?
Heroes by their nature are complicated personalities that are also impossible as they don’t exist except in our fertile imaginations.
To make someone a hero is also to dehumanise them by investing in them expectations and wishes that they are humanly incapable of delivering.
Heroes also dehumanise those who follow them because they turn thinking people into supporters and believers in dreams that may never come true. There is also a thin line between a hero and a traitor because only those that are believed and trusted to deliver liberation easily become traitors when they fail to deliver the ordered goods.
We as the political followership in Africa, in our excitement about coming liberation from colonialism took promising leaders in the liberation movements and turned them into heroes and saints, we exempted them from probity and scrutiny, and when their human failures and weaknesses finally exploded out we cried foul.
There is nothing to heroes and saints in politics more than creatures and inventions of the imagination of their supporters and followers. Political leaders are also salespersons who sell certain ideas and their own personalities in the political market place, and it is the challenge of the voters and supporters not to buy damaged goods and expired merchandise.
As Africans, how have we performed our consumer behaviour in the political market place? Too true to be said is that our making of easy heroes led us to easy traitors.
There was a time, for instance, when the slogan “Free Nelson Mandela!” became a worldwide slogan. The slogan demanded the release of Nelson Mandela from the apartheid prison. Presently the slogan can be used to demand that Mandela be freed from misunderstandings and confusions.
Even those that jailed him now claim him as their product and hero, one that they put in the long high school of jail until he graduated after 27 years as a global statesman and not the flame throwing activist that he went to jail. Coloniality is a brilliant at appropriating those that fight it.
Like Che Guevara who died fighting capitalism and paradoxically his face is now used as a logo and a brand for goods and services in the capitalist market, colonists and racists presently use the name and idea of Mandela to silence protests against racial and economic domination in South Africa.
At some point Mandela was reduced and frozen into a symbol and metaphor of reconciliation. Once he had become an idol like all other idols he could not speak but got spoken for by many forces including his jailers and persecutors of his people.
The political idolatry of Nelson Mandela has become a political and ideological movement in South Africa that seeks to use the example and name of Mandela to bully other African leaders into emulating and imitating his debatable political example.
Nelson Mandela the man and the idea should also benefit from being written of and read about in place and in time. Mandela and all he stood for were a product of a certain history and a certain place and should be understood in that context.
To simply judge what Mandela did in the 20th Century with the eyes of the 21st Century may lead to erroneous observations and wrong conclusions.
Some observers make so much supper and lunch of the humility of Nelson Mandela, the only African President, perhaps, that would stop his motorcade in the highway to assist old ladies and old men that had breakdowns with their cars.
What is misunderstood in such spectacles of humility and goodness is that they were a performance of power and works of pride.
Such political and politicised Good Samaritanism is itself a form of deep pride and dramatisation of power. Only those that have been made political saints like Nelson Mandela have the privilege to now and again remind their audiences that “I am not a saint!”
Contrapuntal Political Understanding
Gatsheni and Ngcaweni have in their volume contributed forcefully to the critical task of providing a multi-vocal writing and reading of liberation and leadership in Africa, using Mandela as a central case study.
In many ways including in the use of decoloniality as a theoretical framework the book contributes to recovering Mandela not only “from the dry pages of history” but also from the many misreadings and post-political interpretations.
Describing how post-colonial texts should be read, Edward Said noted that the post-colonial text should be read “contrapuntally,” that is like separating strings and notes of music and peeling layers of an onion, using multiple perspectives to deduce multiple meanings.
Nelson Mandela as a personification of political messages and meanings is a site of many political clues and nuances about liberation in Africa. Easy conclusions, such as our heroes as saints and other leaders as simple sell-outs in Africa, are part of pop-intellectualism and performance rather than enactment of scholarship.
The present troubling African political condition demands from intellectuals contrapuntal readings of leadership, leaders and the question of liberation. Easy heroes have led to easy traitors in African leadership and the time for contrapuntal interpretations and understandings is overdue.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena is a founding member of the Africa Decolonial Research Network (ADERN), he writes from Sunnyside, Pretoria in South Africa.
This article is a summary of the presentation to the Institute of Pan-African Thought and Conversation at the University of Johannesburg: [email protected]
