Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 436

The photographer who showed Nelson Mandela to the world

In 1994, the ANC commissioned South African photographer George Hallett to document the electoral process and first democratic government. During the year in which Hallett covered the electoral process, his images of Mandela were published in newspapers around the world. In 1995, Hallett’s photographs were later published in a book, titled Images of Change, under the auspices of the African National Congress’ Department of Information and Publicity; the little known-publisher was Nolwazi Educational Publishers, located in Braamfontein, South Africa. The book appeared in landscape-format, with 140 pages of captioned, black and white photographs, and an introduction by Pallo Jordan. On the cover of the book is a photograph of Mandela, deep in conversation on a mobile phone—his face turned away from the camera—as an aproned woman, instantly recognisable in the landscape of domestic labour in South Africa, walks past him nonchalantly on her way to one of her many daily tasks: to put a full toilet roll in a bathroom.

Mandela on cell phone with then President FW de Klerk discussing the violence in the country just before the elections,
Johannesburg, 1994. Photo © George Hallett

The photograph is clearly not posed: although the woman faces the camera, her gaze is not directed for the shot; she is simply walking by, on her way to her duties. And although she is as present in the frame as Mandela, it is he to whom we direct our attention: his face is partially in profile and bent into the phone and his eyes are cast downward, but his tall, slim figure, impeccably attired in a dark suit, striped tie, and white shirt commands our eye.

Hallett’s photographs helped produce the iconic image of Nelson Mandela in the global imaginary; they also helped re-fashion global—and internal—reflections about the “new” nation, moulding how we continue to see South Africa via Mandela’s, his adoring subjects’, and his adversaries’ performances for the camera. While much of the iconography around Mandela reduce his visual biography to hagiography—manufacturing Mandela into a smiling, unidimensional commodity in the global marketplace, “beguil[ing] the outside world into trumpeting the ‘miracle’ of the South African transition,” as Adam Habib contends (in ‘Myth of the Rainbow Nation’)—Hallett’s body of work during this period hints at a multifaceted figure, a complex nation, and a fluid, amorphous political process that had unclear outcomes.

Part of the success of Hallett’s images depends on the fact that he does not resort to using classical tropes of iconography; instead, his photographs move beyond being simply two-dimensional “indexes” of the “real” person or recorded event. They not only provide a material connection to a complex person who appears to be at once alone with the responsibility for the future of his nation and gregariously sociable with a global audience, but invite an alchemical communion—a being there, a being with—outside the linearity and materiality of history contained by the two-dimensions of an ordinary news photograph. Many of Hallett’s photographs depict Mandela as a multifaceted character—a beloved, loving, and unguarded “madala” to the adoring public, but also a politically disciplined, sartorially aware, and psychically ambiguous figure. We see physical movement, emotional and intellectual movement, and a more elusive hope for movement to some other, metaphysical space outside of history—something not available in didactic visual narratives intended to create Mandela the Icon. These photographs move us.

For instance, in “First encounter, Johannesburg, 1994,” three women—two of them wearing the iconic uniforms of “tea ladies,” and thusly, figures as iconic as Mandela in apartheid history—run open armed towards a receptive, welcoming Mandela. His face is not visible to the photograph’s audience: we only recognise him from his height, slim physique, the greying hair, the impeccable if loose fitting dark suit. The women, their joy so nakedly expressed, are the public who waited decades for the promise of liberation—an impossible/possible dichotomy embodied by the suited, stately man now in front of them.

‘First Encounter,’ Johannesburg, 1994. Photo © George Hallett

Hallett’s memory of this moment characterises his deft hand at describing the ridiculous and the sublime:

That picture with the women running towards Mandela, which I call ‘First Encounter’—this was the first time they had actually seen him close up. And it was an incredible experience, because for the first time I saw the whole country, and the joy and the hope that people had. My God, I thought—it’s finally about to end, this crappy system of apartheid.

Mandela—and the fantasies of national and personal liberation he represents—are reflected in the faces of women who laboured daily for a state that reduced their persons to instrumentalised labour; in him, they see the possibility of being liberated from the indignities of being thusly reduced, of realising a fuller humanity, of being recognised and seen. He becomes a cipher onto whose person we—the audience viewing and re-viewing this photograph—can project unfulfilled desires.

*

Hallett, who was born in District Six to a “Coloured” family under apartheid, was living in exile in Paris at the time he received the call from Pallo Jordan (Jordan was a key advisor to Mandela; he was elected Member of Parliament in the National Assembly of South Africa and the Minister of Posts, Telecommunications, and Broadcasting in 1994). Hallett had initially left South Africa for London, where he got a break photographing the covers for Heineman’s African Writers Series, and lived for periods of time in Amsterdam, Zimbabwe, and the US before moving to Paris. He already had a remarkable body of work, including his photographs documenting District Six in Cape Town before it was demolished by the apartheid government, which had ruled, under the auspices of the Group Areas Act, to make District Six a “Whites only” area. Among Hallett’s most recognisable photographs of Mandela and the 1994 electoral process were those that were included in the World Press Photo Contest in 1995, the year after the first democratic elections in South Africa. He recounts how he was called to take on the mantle of the official image-maker:

I had a dream in Paris in early 1994 that I was going to meet Mandela and have lunch with him. The strange thing about the dream was that we were all sitting on chairs that were balanced precariously on the hind legs. When I consulted a dream interpreter in Paris at the time, she told me that I will be meeting Madiba and the reason that the chairs were so precariously balanced on their hind legs was because of the unsteady state of the nation caused by third force violence. Three weeks later Pallo Jordan called me to [ask me] to come and photograph the election process for the ANC. [He said] that I must make my way to JHB.

Hallett left for Johannesburg soon thereafter, to take his position as the official photographer. He mentions that he got to have that predestined lunch with Mandela, just as his dream had foretold; but in addition, just as his dream interpreter had announced, there were shadowy forces conspiring to use violence to roadblock Mandela from fulfilling his destiny.

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Despite Mandela’s own misgivings surrounding the cultural production of his messianic status, he realised that he had to push his “special” status in order to force change at home, and make allies abroad: Rob Nixon (in Homelands, Harlem and Hollywood: South African Culture and the World Beyond, 1994) surmises that Mandela had to play along with the “demiurgic powers” granted him by the local and global public, and, wrote Nixon, “preserve enough prominence to keep South Africa in the media’s eye and to maintain pressure on de Klerk, who clearly hoped,” in releasing the world’s most famous prisoner well before negotiations for free elections had taken place, that Mandela’s “mystique would tarnish in the open air” and that the advantage Mandela undoubtedly had as a symbol of perseverance against oppression would dissipate by the time polling day finally rolled around. Mandela also had to “campaign for funds, to raise the profile of the ANC, and to enhance the organization’s leverage”; and in order to do that, he had to “engage with the Messianic tradition” (Nixon 1994).

Hallett’s images—under the auspices of the ANC’s direction—capture some of that contradiction. His photographs helped fill the empty image spaces created by a twenty-seven year ban on Mandela’s image. They became an intrinsic part of the reconstruction of Mandela, communicating a transformative process that challenged the world to embrace a new vision of Mandela, the ANC, and the nation.

Omar Badsha, founder of the NGO South African History Online, and the photographer who co-founded Afrapix in the late 1980s, cautioned me to read Hallett’s photographs of Mandela in context of the 1980s and early 1990s; in particular, he stressed the significance of paying attention to how the ANC was portrayed by other photographers—from the time the political organisation was “unbanned by the South African authorities to the first elections”—as well as how photographers were picturing and narrating “what was happening in the country on the ground—the violence in which more people died than in the entire apartheid period.” Part of what was “key to Mandela’s image as the saviour was his trips around the country the mass rallies the TV,” wearing the world-leader’s uniform—a dark suit and tie—helping cement his role as a peacemaker. Badsha notes, with characteristic humour, “What if Mandela wore the uniform of the volunteer and armed combatant?” Or decided on the rough-hewn khaki worker’s gear that Samora Machel and Kenneth Kaunda favoured? Mandela’s new sartorial incarnation helped calm white South Africans’ fears about Mandela being a fiery communist, freed from prison with an agenda of vengeance. His appearances and speeches also helped reduce what the press routinely dubbed “black on black” violence—this without investigating or reporting on how much de Klerk and the National Party had a hand in instigating those clashes. Badsha noted that “unless you include that in the narrative…[you may] reinforce the problematic notion that the ANC and F.W. de Klerk were punting: that Mandela “is the man we can do business with.”

At the time, the narrative disseminated around the world about South Africa was one of spectacular violence.   The grim images captured what was then believed to be clashes between rival political groups in townships. In his introductory remarks in The Bang Bang Club: Snapshots from a Hidden War, Desmond Tutu links those clashes between factions of the resistance as conflicts fuelled by the apartheid government, intended to create insecurity in the nation and abroad about the viability of a black government. Although “conventional wisdom declared that most of this bloodletting was due to the bloody rivalry between” the ANC and Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi’s Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) as they vied for political turf, there was clear evidence that these clashes were more orchestrated from the outside:

a sinister third force […was] linked to the apartheid government and its security forces, which was intent on fomenting so-called black-on-black violence, enabling the apartheid government and many whites to crow about how these blacks were clearly not ready for democracy and political power. (Tutu, “Forward” x)

The picture was that of an ungovernable and uncivilised mass of South Africans, unmoored by the strictures of apartheid. In this way, apartheid appeared to be “good,” when compared to the destruction and grief meted out on the weak and innocent by apparently bloodthirsty, out-of control mobs.

Despite whatever political machinations were going on, Hallett’s work “remains a record about the hope, celebratory feeling of the members of the new members of the first parliament,” confirms Badsha. His photographs presented a powerful alternative, taking on the challenge of presenting a different vision. So much of what I see in these photographs refer to that last heady moment in South African history, when Drum magazine rolled out dazzling images of a be-suited, sparring Mandela, playing a visual game that undermined the ever-tightening noose of apartheid. Here, too, I can see Hallett’s sly wink of mockery at the colonial archive and the architects of apartheid, evident also in Jürgen Schadeberg, Bob Gosani, Peter Magubane, Ranjith Kally, and Eli Weinberg’s photographs.

Nelson Mandela going over the text of his inauguration speech. Photo © George Hallett

What is remarkable about Hallett’s photographs is that though they present Mandela as a concerned, moral presence, they do not necessarily make him exceptional. In fact, Hallett’s photographs subvert, and sometimes actually work against iconography. In these images, Mandela is never in full-frontal pose; he is usually looking to the side, or down to the ground. His eyes are never really visible, in fact—mostly because aging has caused the pockets of fat around his eyes to droop more; even as a young man, his smile was characterised by the slim line of his eye, which closed as his cheeks rose up. In a few of Hallett’s photographs, Mandela’s face is actually not visible—instead, it is the reactions of the adoring public we see. And because signs of Mandela’s aging person are also visible—the wrinkling around his eyes, his greying hair, and his tired, be-spectacled face at the end of a long day, taking in more bad news from a television—his mortality is also quite apparent, and in opposition to the typical tropes of forever-youth employed in iconography. Hallett’s images thus redirect us from resorting to notions of Mandela’s messianic status, showing us instead, that he is a product of ordinary historical, social and temporal processes, moulded by a set of particular circumstances and personal decisions, rather than the result of a predestined journey.

Outside Parliament on the 9th of May 1994. The official opening of the first Democratic Parliament with three Nobel Peace Prize Laureates: Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela and FW de Klerk. Vice President Thabo Mbeki left of Mandela. Photo © George Hallett

Should the Left celebrate Nelson Mandela?

Over the past few days some have queried the near universal sadness and admiration with which the left is responding to Mandela’s death. His government was to the right of its voters, they point out, and co-existed with rather than challenging neoliberalism. They are right, but miss the point.

The African National Congress (ANC) of the early 1990s had an enormous task to deliver a peaceful transition. And from the point of human liberation it was a victory that they did so.

People with no sense of South African history might kid themselves that the country would have benefited from a civil war as this would have been a clearer defeat for apartheid. They are wrong. Through the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, the apartheid state was preparing a civil war which would have pit East against Western Cape, the ANC against the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) with the National Party posing as honest brokers.

People forget that something like that “cold” civil war had actually begun at Boipatong and elsewhere, so that the closer South Africa came to defeating to apartheid, the more it was that the violence was not between the ANC and the state but between the ANC and various black proxies acting on behalf but independently of the old regime.

Believing in the necessary moral virtue of popular insurrection against a state is not the same thing as wishing for a civil war in which tens of thousands would have died and which would have delivered no more than was won peacefully.

Second, the price of the pacification of the revolution was that the ANC acted consciously as a moderating force on the armed wing of the revolution. But Mandela played a role that was different from and better than that of his party as a whole.

When Mandela was released, the consensus among the ANC exiles was to negotiate a peace at any price with the Nats. What happened next was a revolution within and against the ANC, characterised by mass strikes, stay-aways, “workerism,” etc. To Mandela’s immense credit, he did not turn on his party critics but essentially conciliated them, allowing their demands to displace those of the exiles..

The left which shaped things wasn’t a military one (the MK) but a political one based on the organisation of class struggle.

Under its impact, the ANC returned to the table, calling not for a compromise with apartheid but its utter defeat.

This is why my son aged eight knows the name of Nelson Mandela: because the black majority of South Africa won. (And where else in the last 20 years has our side had such a clear victory?)

This is the Mandela who needs celebrating, the Mandela who, if he was not Lenin, never pretended to be.

Finally, there is a left common sense in which the fault of our leaders is that by their elevated positions they are separated from the hardships of the struggle and return only to bask in a glory won truly by the rank and file. There are plenty of ANCers who fit this narrative, either for their separation from the bitterest periods of the struggle, or for the ease with which they have become a new owning class. But not the Mandela who rotted for decades on Robben Island.

The Brother Moves On releases A New Myth

Johannesburg outfit The Brother Moves On have finally released a full-length album, their first after two EPs and a series of loose songs floating on the internet. We had a very brief conversation with frontman Siyabonga Mthembu during a listening session this past week about the significance of the album, especially following the death of founding member Nkululeko Mthembu.

What was the motivation for this gathering today? 

We wanted to play to a bunch of our friends — the people we hardly get to see — to purge the fact that a brother of ours has passed, and the fact that we need to move on and release an album in the same month without a stop. We needed to touch base before we set out and go play far away again and this helped; it was exactly that healing.

Please speak a bit on the album.

The album is weirdly enough entitled A New Myth. It was titled this while Nkush (Nkululeko) was alive. It was first gonna be The Greatest Hits and we thought we’re not that kind of band. It’s not an album that’s gonna be about buying my mom’s first house, it’s for a group of people who need to know this happened, and that group of people needs a new myth. The space we find ourselves in the world, in our country, in our very lives — it’s a very difficult one. We need a new myth, our old ones are lies to us now, and we know it, it’s obvious.

But why is it that we fail to accept that these old ideas are dying?

Because we haven’t gotten a new one yet…

Listen to A New Myth here and below. Buy it here.

Malawian intellectual Thandika Mkandawire: The death of Mandela marks the triumphant end of Africa’s liberation struggle

It is difficult to write about Nelson Mandela without sounding sycophantic or as if engaged in uncritical hero worship. Mandela’s stature and personality left little room for other sentiments other than those of profound admiration and gratitude. The post-World War II era produced some memorable African leaders who grace the pantheon of champions of the African liberation struggle. There is little doubt that Nelson “Madiba” Mandela ranked among the best of these.

In this brief note, I will simply point to the influences the man had on my generation (politically speaking). For much of the last century during which I grew up, Africa was involved in ridding itself of colonialism and racist rule. From the 1960s onwards, the walls of colonial domination crumbled one after another as the colonialists granted independence or simply ran away as did the Belgians while ensuring that King Leopold’s ghost would continue to haunt the heart of Africa that Congo is. And so for my generation, the death of Mandela marks the triumphant end of Africa’s liberation struggle.

The name Mandela became first inscribed in the annals of African liberation as nothing particularly unusual at the time. The late fifties was an era of trials and detentions in the colonies. The Treason Trial, which took place from 1956 to 1961, was closely followed by those of my generation, largely through Drum Magazine. Mandela was one of 156 people arrested and tried for high treason. During this period leaders such as Jomo Kenyatta, Dr Hastings Banda, Kenneth Kaunda, Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo were in and out of courts, detentions centres or prison. Some, like Patrice Lumumba, were assassinated. Personally, I did a prison stint in 1961 and emerged as a “Prison Graduate” after three months of incarceration on trumped-up charges of inciting violence. We took it for granted then that being jailed for nationalist activities came with the territory.

The rapid pace of decolonisation was brought to a halt  on the shores of the Zambezi River by the recalcitrant racist regimes of South Africa and Rhodesia and the decrepit, fascist Portuguese regime of Salazar who continued to insist on maintaining its colonies.

We anxiously followed the fate of Mandela when he went underground as the “Black Pimpernel”. His arrest in 1962 and his conviction for life in 1964 together with the assassination of Lumumba and the Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) in Zimbabwe in 1965 were major reversals to the liberation of the continent. These were only countered by the emancipation of the “Protectorates” of southern Africa a few years after Mandela’s sentencing. It did appear then that not only would the wave of liberation be derailed on the banks of the Zambezi river but that it would be reversed by neocolonial machinations that included the assassinations of African leaders and coup d’états. South Africa took the war outside its border, hunting down exiled leaders.

If the life imprisonment of Mandela seemed like a major reversal for African nationalism and a victory for the remaining racist and fascist regimes, the Nelson Mandela statement at the dock of the court on 20 April 1964 was one the most inspiring statements for my generation.

“This is the struggle of the African people, inspired by their own suffering and experience. It is a struggle for the right to live. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society, in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunity. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and achieve. But, if needs be, my Lord, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”

We read it as a call for the final push in southern Africa through armed struggle. We also understood it as meaning that the usual path of “protest-detention-talk-statehouse” that had been taken by many nationalist leaders was closed for the remaining colonial regimes of the region. It was clear now that the struggle for liberation in southern Africa had taken a dramatically different turn – that of armed struggle and indeed the liberation movements of Lusophone Africa, Namibia and Zimbabwe took this position and we were to witness an acceleration of armed struggles in the region. Three decades later came the end of apartheid, a remarkable achievement in Africa’s tormented history.

Mandela’s release on 11 February 1990 marked the beginning of the final chapter in the struggle for the liberation of the continent from colonial domination but it was also a spur to the struggle for the “Second Independence” – the struggle for the end of authoritarian rule and democracy – that was being wedged throughout the continent. It emphatically underscored the fact that the incarceration of a person for political reasons had no moral basis. Political prisoners in every African country became “our Mandelas” calling for release. In Malawi one political prisoner released in 1994 had spent as much time in jail as Mandela.

There were so many features in the amazing life of this outstanding man. Highlights will differ from one commentator to another. One of the most highlighted areas has been the spirit of reconciliation exuded by a man who had been incarcerated for close to three decades. Important though this aspect was in light of the racial animosity and fears that apartheid had generated, it was not unique to Mandela.

From its original articulation by Jomo Kenyatta, “reconciliation” became the slogan of all the leading nationalist movements in white settler-dominated countries. It is often forgotten that even Mugabe was feted in the capitals of Europe for precisely conveying that message.

The focus of the West on reconciliatory overtures occluded other aspects of the leadership of these men – the avaricious accumulation of wealth in case of Kenyatta and the brutal repression of fellow citizens on the part of Mugabe. In all these cases, reconciliation skirted the issue of justice. And within South Africa the terms of reconciliation are still a hotly debated issue. So there must obviously be something more to Mandela than the “spirit of reconciliation”.

Four things struck me as to why the man is the most admired among Africans. One was Mandela’s deep commitment to the liberation of the African people, a commitment baldly stated in court and underscored by his years on Robben Island.

The second was Mandela’s deep sense of duty and a warm sense of respect for the people he led and the movement to which he had been of selfless service. Contrast that to the arrogance of some of the triumphant nationalist leaders who rewrote history for their own purposes and reduced the movements that had brought them into power into massive voices of sycophancy and intolerance.

The third feature was Mandela’s eminently sane relationship to power. It never got into his head. And for all his regal bearing putatively born of his royal upbringing one felt he was a humble and loyal servant of a movement to which he has given so much. Mandela contributed by example in his exercise of power. One unfortunate outcome of the heroic struggles for liberation and the enormous personal sacrifices incurred by individual leaders was the production of “heroes” who in turn produced, wittingly or unwittingly, hero worship. A number of leaders conducted themselves with a sense of entitlement to the throne on the basis of their contribution and sacrifices. Mandela emerged from all this with a remarkable sense of duty and recognition of the many others that had contributed to the struggle. He graciously retired from office after only one term of leadership, a remarkable gesture, given Africa’s experience with national heroes turned “life presidents” and his enormous popularity. Mandela’s gesture cast the searchlight on the “Life Presidents” on the continent and exposed much of the pomp and grand standing for what it was – waste and arrogance.

The fourth was his commitment to democracy and rule of law. In a sense Mandela normalised the idea of democracy in Africa. No leader could proudly proclaim himself (it was always a he) a dictator by claiming that African culture sanctioned it without looking extremely foolish.

Mandela was the one individual of and to whom it can be said the African continent was unanimously proud and infinitely grateful.

Hamba Kahle, Madiba.

* This article first appeared on LSE’s blog and is republished here with kind permission of the author.

Songs for Mandela: Weekend Music Break 64

This post combines Steffan’s wonderful playlist of South African tunes of and for Nelson Mandela and the international playlist we published when we first heard news of the great man’s death. When we sent around the AIAC “office” inviting our contributors to suggest songs for Nelson Mandela (both music about him and tracks that could stand as tributes to the man), the suggestions came flooding in. 

We’ll start with Miles Davis, “Amandla”, from his 1989 album of the same name (the whole thing’s here).

Next up it’s Burning Spear, and “Mandela Marcus”.

Jamaican dancehall giant Shabba Ranks, “Mandela Free” (and here’s some footage of when Shabba came to give Madiba a hand on the campaign trail):

Gil Scott-Heron. “Johannesburg”. Enjoy.

From Haiti, this is Dieudonné Larose with a live version of the hit song, “Mandela”:

Here’s Senegalese rapper Didier Awadi with a cracker from his album “Presidents d’Afrique” — “Amandla (Mandela)”. Awadi did a great job splicing in lines from Mandela’s inauguration speech. All rise.

From his 1995 album, “Folon”, this is the great Salif Keita, “Mandela”. On the same album, he sung the praises of Sékou Touré. Keita’s international career took off following his appearance alongside the likes of Youssou N’dour, Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela at the massive concert that was held at Wembley for Mandela’s 70th birthday (some clips here – for some reason only of British and American performers).

This is the title track from Youssou N’Dour’s 1986 album, “Nelson Mandela”:

Probably the most famous song campaigning for Mandela’s release, and one of the best-known anti-apartheid tracks around the world, was by a group from … Coventry, England. The Specials got a big hit with “Free Nelson Mandela”.

Let’s hear that again, this time with the much-missed Amy Winehouse on lead vocals. Her rendition closed the concert celebrating Mandela’s 90th birthday in Hyde Park.

Ivorian reggae artist Alpha Blondy tells it like it is. “Apartheid is Nazism”.

We couldn’t not have something from Linton Kwesi Johnson. First up, here’s “Mi Revalueshanary Fren”…

…and secondly “Wat About Di Workin Class”?

Here’s Zambian rapper Zubz with “My Distress”:

“Mandela, cell dweller, Thatcher / You can tell her clear the way for the prophets of rage / (Power of the people you say).” Yes, it’s Public Enemy with “Prophets of Rage”.

From Reggie Rockstone, it’s “Keep Your Eyes on the Road”

Who knew Arsenio Hall could sound so earnest? It’s because he’s introducing Maze and Frankie Beverley with “Mandela”.

The Klezmatics and Chava Alberstein with “Di Goldene Pave” (The Golden Peacock):

We’ll leave the last word to Bob. Rest in peace, Madiba.

*With thanks to Johan Palme, Jimmy Kainja, Gregory Mann,  Amílcar Tavares, Serginho Roosblad, Melissa Levin, Siddhartha Mitter, Marissa Moorman, Ngoan’a Nts’oana, Jesse Shipley, Cheta Nwanze, William Glasspiegel, Jonathan Faull, Nick Barber, Zachary Rosen, Jacques Enaudeau, Dylan Valley, Tom Devriendt, Steffan Horowitz and Sean Jacobs for their suggestions on these playlists.*

This is the South African edition of our selection of Songs for Nelson Mandela. Last night we posted the international edition and many of our readers asked if we’d forgotten about the many South African musicians who’d written music about him. We didn’t. Here is a selection of South African music about Madiba or in tribute to him. It’s a bumper playlist, and in no particular order. Of course, we couldn’t include everything from the vast and varied music inspired by Mandela and the liberation struggle. Enjoy and feel free to post your own favourites in the comments.

The selection consists of a mixture of songs suggested by my fellow AIAC contributors and songs of my own choosing.

Spokes Mashiyane – Kalla’s Special

Let’s start things off with a 1955 song from king kwela himself, Johannes ‘Spokes’ Mashiyane. The talented Mashiyane was not only a master of the pennywhistle, but a great saxophone player to boot.

Miriam Makeba – Piece of Ground

A list like this would be incomplete without at least one song from the lovely Miriam Makeba. Here’s a version of the song written by Jeremy Taylor off her 1967 album, Pata Pata.

Abudullah Ibrahim (Dollar Brand) – Mannenberg

And now for one of the greatest and most important South African jazz tunes ever released. First released in 1974, Mannenberg is not only a great song, but a major anthem of the struggle against apartheid. Featuring Basil Coetzee and Robbie Jansen on sax, Monty Weber on drums, and Paul Micheals on bass.

The Genuines – Die Struggle

Some South African rock/punk from 1986 for a change of pace.

And if you liked that, be sure to check their updated version of the Goema standard, “Die Maan Skyn So Helder” (The Moon Shines So Brightly).

Bright Blue – Weeping

We’ve featured the video before. How it made it past censors when it was released in 1987, I’ll never know. The apartheid protest anthem is allegorical, making reference to former-president PW Botha and his harsh policies. Hidden not-so-subtly in the song is a refrain from ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’ (then the ANC’s anthem, now the South African national anthem) just before a solo from saxophonist Basil Coetzee. In the same moments of the song, the video gives a nod to the cover of Abdullah Ibrahim’s famous album, Mannenberg – ‘Is Where It’s Happening,’ through the imagery of a group of boys standing against a wall behind an elderly woman in the Cape Flats.

Brenda Fassie – Black President

Here’s a song from the undisputed bad girl of South African pop music, Brenda Fassie, whose turbulent life and attitude was and still is a topic that everyone loves to talk about and on which everyone seems to have an opinion.

Boom Shaka – It’s About Time

The first single from the first major kwaito group, released in 1993.

Prophets of Da City – Never Again

An anthem from the pioneers of South African hip hop, POC.

By the way, AIAC’s very own Dylan Valley actually co-produced a documentary on the group called Lost Prophets.

Soul Brothers – Take Me Home Taximan

Some great mbaqanga from the legendary Soul Brothers

DJ Sbu ft Zahara – Lengoma

And here’s a (relatively recent) example of some of the great house music coming out of South Africa, today.

For the record, that’s Sipho ‘Hotstix’ Mabuse riding shotgun with Sbu. Starting off as a member of the Afro-rock band, The Beaters (later renamed and more famously know as Harari), his song, “Burnout,” is one of the most famous bubblegum tracks of all time.

Hugh Masekela — Bring Back Nelson Mandela

The last word goes to Hugh Masekela. “Bring him back home to Soweto.”

Here are a few more songs that I decided not to include in the main list, but are still worth a listen:

Monty Weber and Friends – District Six

Johnny Clegg – Asimbonanga (Live + Mandela himself makes an appearance)

Arthur Mafokate – Kaffir

Yvonne Chaka-Chaka – Let Me Be Free

Miriam Makeba & Hugh Masekela – Soweto Blues (Live)

Tumi – Power

Letta Mbulu – Amakhamandela-Not Yet Uhuru

Moses ‘Taiwa’ Mololekwa – Dance Africa (Live)

Zim Ngqawana – Ebhofolo (This Madness)

Lucky Dube – House of Exile

Vusi Mahlasela – River Jordan

Jonas Gwangwa and African Explosion – Switch No 1

Given Nelson Mandela’s place within South African history and our imaginations, as well as the inevitable media frenzy around his hospitalization and passing, I find the words of the late Phaswame Mpe to be particularly prescient. Hence, by way of conclusion, I offer the following passage for your consideration:

Life was going on, as it would continue to go on, long after you had bid this world farewell. Soon, you would arrive in Heaven, where you would meet…the others. You would chat with them about the continuation of life. You would share with each other your understanding of what the reality of Heaven is; that what makes it accessible, is that it exists in the imagination of those who commemorate our worldly life. Who, through the stories that they tell of us, continue to celebrate or condemn our existence even after we have passed on from this Earth.

Heaven is the world of our continuing existence, located in the memory and consciousness of those who live with us and after us. It is the archive that those we left behind keep visiting and revisiting; digging this out, suppressing or burying that. Continually reconfiguring the stories of our lives, as if they alone hold the real and true version…Heaven can also be Hell, depending on the nature of our continuing existence in the memories and consciousness of the living. – Phaswame Mpe, Welcome To Our Hillbrow

Hamba kahle, Madiba.

Nelson Mandela’s Humanity was a Political Education

If you became politically aware in the late 1970s, you became aware of a world in which no greater sustained evil existed than apartheid. There were other horrors, of course, but apartheid was insidious, entrenched, and total. It built a model of permanent exploitation and enforced it with violence. It classified human beings and forbade them from loving and living beside one another. Its apparatus of segregation, Bantustans, prisons, and immiseration abused dignity with systematic perversity. Its helmsmen spread violence across South Africa’s borders and spat in the face of a disapproving world.

If there was no greater evil than apartheid, there was no greater cause than that of those who fought it. And of the heroes of that movement, none epitomized it more completely than Nelson Mandela, whose dignity and revolutionary spirit radiated beyond the walls of the Robben Island prison and South Africa’s frontiers and into the global consciousness. We knew there were many others, too—the death of Steve Biko, when I was nearly 10, is one of my early, dim political memories; in time I would learn of Ruth First, Joe Slovo, Walter Sisulu, Thabo Mbeki, and so many more. But it took nothing away from anyone else to recognize that Mandela was special.

In 1985, when I entered university at Harvard, the American left was in shambles and college activism at a low ebb, but South Africa galvanized progressive energies. The idea of demanding that universities divest themselves of their holdings in companies that did business in South Africa was spreading. It provided a focused and coherent demand that justified action at the level of the university itself, alongside more general consciousness-raising. This demand, and with it a critical examination of all the university’s direct and indirect dealings in South Africa, mobilized as diverse a coalition of students as was possible in an Ivy League setting (and a more diverse one in public universities). They were not shopping for a chic cause conveniently distant from the scourges gathering on the Reagan-era home front. Perhaps some were—yet wittingly or not, they had chosen to involve themselves in the fight against the clearest, most total outrage of the era.

On our small, peripheral front in this battle, we—like many around the world—underwent our political education. Our own laughable tensions and schisms faintly echoed the serious ones—for instance between the African National Congress and the Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania—of which we learnt. Some of us went deeper and forged ties with freedom fighters, for instance at a conference in Michigan that gathered American and South African education activists. We, the only student delegation, paid for our travel in part with a wad of cash that Harvard’s dean of students, the late Archie C. Epps III, with whom we clashed regularly, handed me as a covert contribution to the struggle. The same year, the student Conservative Club invited to campus a South African diplomat, Duke Kent-Brown, whose speech we disrupted. Using slides, he presented a theory of petty (segregation) and greater (separation through the Bantustans) apartheid, and defended its merits with bluntness and belief. It was 1987, and as far as he was concerned, apartheid was still under construction, and the edifice would last forever.

It didn’t. Three years later, Mandela was free, and the rest is history and the present. We had made our tiny contribution to the struggle in what turned out to be, happily, its final stage. The generosity with which the freedom fighters we met or heard from welcomed these efforts, from variously-informed college kids and other self-appointed allies, only presaged the generosity that the freed Mandela would display toward all parties domestic and foreign. His demonstration of humanity was to many an education in itself, but it was really the final lesson in a political education centered on the imperative of revolution.

Mandela’s passing inevitably pulls the mind back to that political education—and to the very idea of a political education. It makes me glad that I had one at all, and grateful to the known and unknown soldiers of South Africa’s freedom struggle, from Mandela and the ANC leadership on down, for their role in shaping my generation’s understanding of purpose and struggle. Many of us failed to stay tuned to the message amid the cascading distractions of the globalized, hyper-mediated, wealth-fetishizing order that has ensued—one that has not spared South Africa either. Against all the noise and disappointments, Mandela, to the end, manifested a radical clarity. May we find, cherish, and act on our own radical clarity, now that Madiba has gone to the ancestors and we are alone.

Mandela had an Ethiopian passport under the name David Motsomayi. Where did he go?

We don’t live in a world of heroes, but at rare moments we celebrate those who emerge from the shadows to push them further back. I don’t know if Nelson Mandela had heroes. He must have done. We all know he had comrades, both within the ANC and without. When he visited Mali in 1996, he wanted to see some of those foreign comrades, men who had helped him in the early 1960s before they were all—guest and hosts alike—imprisoned. When, in 1962, he had come to Bamako before his trial at Rivonia and his imprisonment, the struggle in South Africa was accelerating. When he returned thirty-four years later, he was a sitting president. Some Malians remember with pride that pair of visits, separated by decades, one by a young freedom fighter, another by an elder sage.

In April 1962, traveling on an Ethiopian passport in the name of David Motsomayi, Madiba stayed in Bamako’s Grand Hotel. Young Mali had already put its shoulder to the wheel to aid the Algerian FLN, and the young Mandela was hoping for similar support for the armed struggle. He got it. Two years later, as exhibit R 47 of the Rivonia trial, South African prosecutors produced a letter from Mandela thanking Madeira Keita, Mali’s hard-line Interior Minister, for his support for and commitment to the ANC. Madeira, whose name he knew from Ruth First’s Fighting Talk, had promised him that if the ANC’s recruits made it to Tanzania, Mali would help to train them.

In a letter produced as R 48, Mandela thanked Modibo Keita, the proud, pan-Africanist president who hoped to resurrect ‘Maliba’ (greater Mali). The two Keitas had promised to consult with Ghana and Guinea on how best to back the ANC’s cause. Symbolic as it was, Mali’s support for the ANC would continue even after Mandela, Madeira and Modibo were all languishing in their respective prisons, the latter two following a coup d’état. Modibo would die in detention, but Madeira and others survived. In the years after his own release, Mandela retraced at least part of his African odyssey from three decades prior when he made a state visit to Mali and a personal call on Madeira.

Before Mali’s National Assembly, he recalled the contributions of South Africa’s “long-standing friends; brothers and sisters who shared in our victor as they shared in our struggle.”

The struggle was continuing, as Ken Saro-Wiwa had predicted; the Nigerian playwright had been hung only a few months before, and Madiba joined Mali in condemning the actions of Nigeria’s military government.

Madiba had already been to Georgia, and that’s where I saw him. In the late 1980s, early 90′s, I was coming up in another world, a bit of a redneck world. I did double shifts in a Georgia factory where I sorted screws so their heads could be painted, working for two things: school and records (books were cheap). Not much time for stirring speeches by world historical figures delivered in summer stadiums.

Good thing I had a girlfriend smarter than me to drag me from the screw factory to a rally in downtown Atlanta, where a host of speakers recalled local struggles and long-running solidarities before an old man made it clear that these things were bigger than all of us. There was something odd about a moment that did not naturally, spontaneously segregate by race, as things in Georgia seemed to. It was as if the social world of Atlanta was somehow briefly suspended in some other liquid. But the world had turned upside down: on a hot afternoon in the land of Coca Cola, no one was drinking it. The anti-apartheid campaign had succeeded, at least for that moment, in making something familiar stand in for an evil many thought was distant, some one else’s problem.

The soda hawkers stood there looking forlorn, but otherwise it was a moment for celebration. Mandela, the ANC, apartheid, its end: all of this was both exotic and intimately familiar in a part of the country where many were proud of the Confederacy, smug in their white suburbs, sour, righteous, anxious, guilty … And where others saw the Civil Rights movement anchored in its living activists (men like Representative John Lewis and Reverend Hosea Williams) and enshrined in the tomb of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. This place was light years from the New Orleans of my childhood. Same sun, much darker shadows. Mandela had come to talk about all that, in the broadest strokes. When he went into prison, after Rivonia, Jim Crow was alive and kicking hard in Dixie. Blacks voted at their peril. Madiba could never have visited, certainly not as he did in June 1990. Welcoming him then, the crowd in Atlanta had also come to the stadium to celebrate how far we had come.

It seemed like a big moment, and maybe it was, but things move forward in tiny increments and unevenly. Saro-Wiwa’s struggle isn’t over. Trayvon Martin passed, but needlessly. This week the U.S. Supreme Court kicked the legs out from under the Voting Rights Act—a product of the activism of King, Lewis, and so many others—but it also threw out a law that designed to make gays and lesbians second-class citizens. So here in Harlem, some are mourning, some are organizing, and today’s party is Pride. The question after Madiba is where tomorrow’s parties will be, and who will hold them.

This post draws on the following sources: Fatima Meer, Higher than Hope: the Authorized Biography of Nelson Mandela, esp. 208-09; David James Smith, Young Mandela: the Revolutionary Years; Rivonia trail documents; interviews with ex-US-RDA militants and family members in Mali. This article first appeared on AIAC in June under the title “Mandela, Maliba and Me.” In the image at the top of this post, Mandela stands with sunglasses in the center of the second row.

Three Myths about Mandela Worth Busting

I sometimes feel Nelson Mandela is in need of rescuing, trapped in some pretty bizarre narratives that have nothing to do with his own story or politics. Full disclosure: I freely admit that Nelson Mandela is the only politician for whom I’ve ever voted; that I celebrate him as a moral giant of our age, and that I proclaimed him my leader (usually at the top of my tuneless voice, in badly sung Xhosa songs) during my decade in the liberation movement in South Africa. That’s maybe why the “Mandela” I’ve encountered in so much American mythology is so unrecognizable. Herewith, the three most egregious versions:

Mythical Mandela #1: The Pacifist

“Like Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela…” How many times haven’t you heard that phrase to describe some politician, somewhere, opting for pacificism in the face of a nasty regime. Don’t take it from me, try a google search on that exact phrase.

I understand the compulsion to link figures of great moral authority, but this is a little misleading. Nelson Mandela was never a pacifist. When the Gandhi route of non-violent civil disobedience brought only violence from the state, Mandela declared: “The time comes in the life of any nation when there remain only two choices – submit or fight. That time has now come to South Africa. We shall not submit and we have no choice but to hit back by all means in our power in defence of our people, our future, and our freedom.”

He played a leading role in setting up the ANC’s guerrilla wing, and traveled abroad to gather support, even undergoing guerrilla training himself in Algeria, from the commanders of the FLN who had recently ejected the French colonials.

Mandela was no terrorist, however. Under his leadership, the movement’s armed wing targeted symbols and structures of minority rule, and combatants of its security forces; never white civilians or any other non-combatants. And most importantly, he saw it as always, immediately and ultimately, subordinated to the political leadership.

In these beliefs he remained consistent and proud. Even as the mass non-violent opposition reasserted itself, under ANC guidance, in the 1980s, he reiterated its connection with the armed wing, writing in a smuggled message from prison that “between the hammer of armed struggle and the anvil of united mass action, the enemy will be crushed.” (Of course it didn’t ever work that way– the armed struggle was never particularly effective, and mass action combined with international sanctions did more to topple the regime.) And he, like the rest of the movement’s leadership, never hesitated to take the opportunity to find a political solution for the greatest benefit of all South Africans — but that was the same spirit with which he’d embarked on his armed struggle, telling the court, “During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”

Mandela and his organization suspended the armed struggle only once the apartheid regime conceded to democracy. He was no pacifist; on the contrary, he never hesitated to pick up arms when he perceived his people were confronted with the choice between submission to tyranny and armed resistance. But nor was he a militarist: He never hesitated to take the political path when that presented itself. And in that example, he has much to teach the world.

Myth #2: The “Mandela Miracle”

Google “Mandela” and “Miracle” together, and there are over 3 million citations. This idea has entered American shorthand as follows: South Africa would have exploded in a racial war, and white people would have been driven into the sea, had it not been for the “miraculous” generosity of spirit of Nelson Mandela, who supposedly restrained the vengeful hordes.

Oy, where to begin?

The assumption that black people would seek violent revenge for the violence they had suffered at the hands of white people is racist. (Remember Gandhi’s arch put-down when asked by a journalist what he thought of Western civilization: “That would be a fine idea,” or words to that effect.)

But let’s not even go there. This myth ignores the political culture of the ANC, which Mandela helped form, and which also formed him, and was never dependent on his own, or any other individual’s strength of character. The basic political architecture of the process of reconciliation always inscribed the internal politics of the ANC which was always a non-racial movement that had substantial white membership, and whose policies distinguished between white minority rule and white people. It would be remiss of any historian to understate the role of the South African Communist Party in nurturing this culture. I’ve written some pretty nasty things about the SACP in the past, but nobody can deny that not only were they the first, and for a long time the only organization in South Africa advocating black majority rule; inside the ANC they played the leading role in shaping the analysis and strategy based on non-racialism and drawing whites into the struggle against colonial-style minority rule. When some angry youths who had left to join the guerrilla forces wanted to respond to the regime’s rampant bloodletting in the townships in the 1980s by targeting white civilians with terror strikes, it was the communists — led by Chris Hani, the commander of the ANC’s military wing and later leader of the SACP, who walked the ANC back from the brink.

And, paradoxical as it may sound, it was the Leninist realpolitik of the ANC’s communist intellectuals that led the movement to embrace the path of a negotiated, compromise solution with negligible “rejectionist” backlash.

Of course communist discourse had a downside: I remember cringing when freed Robben Island prisoners would tell me things like “In Moscow, comrade, when you come out of the subway, there’s just piles of fruit there, really good fruit, and it’s just there for anyone to take, free, for everyone…” And I nearly fell off my chair when reading a statement Mandela released to the media in Cape Town from prison late in 1989 proclaiming German reunification such a spectacularly bad idea that if released from prison, he would personally fly to Germany to try and stop it. Let’s just say he was a product of a different age.

But the broader point here is that it was not some epiphany on the part of Nelson Mandela that led South Africa to its inspiring outcome. There were no angry hordes baying for revenge. Everyone understood what freedom meant, and it had nothing to do with revenge. To imagine otherwise is to insult the millions of ordinary South Africans who struggled and sacrificed to free Mandela, and bring him to power.

Myth #3 Marcus, Malcolm, Mandela and Me — It’s a Black Thing, You Wouldn’t Understand

When I first saw that on a T-shirt being sold in Chinatown, Manhattan, in 1991, I laughed out loud. And actually, when watching Spike Lee’s Malcolm X movie at an ANC fundraising premiere in Cape Town, I’ll never forget how the audience of Mandela loyalists erupted in raucous laughter when their good-natured leader appeared in the final “Spartacus” scene, intoning “I am Malcolm X.” The implication that their leader was inspired by a figure entirely unknown in the South African liberation movement discourse was pretty funny.

Louis Farrakhan was probably a little surprised when he visited South Africa in 1995, and received a verbal dressing down from Mandela over his separatist politics.

My own favorite encounter with the Marcus-Malcolm-Mandela myth came one night in 1997, at a media party where I was chatting with a well known hip-hop scribe and his girlfriend, who ended up giving me a ride home in their rented limo. I should have known trouble was coming when girlfriend said to me “So, what was it like coming to America and meeting FREE black people?” I told her that I had worked in the struggle, and although the black people I met there were viciously oppressed by a colonial regime, their minds were always free.

But the scribe and his girlfriend simply could not accept that I, a white boy — a Jew, to boot — had been in the ANC. “Mandela didn’t work with white people,” he insisted. Uh, actually, of the eight men on trial with Mandela in 1964, three were white (all of them Jewish, actually). By the time the regime fell, there were thousands of whites in the broad liberation movement led by the ANC. A minority of the white community, to be sure, but a consistent presence in the ANC. Neil Aggett was killed in security police detention, just like Steve Biko. David Webster was murdered by a police assassin, just like Matthew Goniwe. Of course the vast majority of the people waging the struggle and bearing its sacrifices were black. But there were always a handful of whites alongside them. And so I went on, but none of this was making any impression.

Finally, the limo driver turned around, exasperated. He was Palestinian, he informed us. From Ramallah, where he’d been active in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a leftist faction of the PLO. “And we always had Israeli Jews in our organization,” he said. “Not many, but always a few. Because we were against Zionism, not against Jews.”

And so it went on. The South African Jew and the Palestinian leftist trying, in vain, to explain Mandela’s basic non-racialism to the hip-hop philosopher who preferred the Mandela of his own fantasies. Only in New York.

This article first appeared some years ago on “Rootless Cosmopolitan” and is republished here with permission of the author.

Tata Mandela

June 16 is a national holiday in South Africa – Youth Day, commemorating the June 16, 1976 Soweto student uprising and those who lost their lives in the violence that followed. This year, June 16 was also Father’s Day. In the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands it was a bright, sunny day, lit in dramatic relief by a warm, winter sun that hung low in the Southern hemisphere sky. It was a Sunday and the archive was closed, so I spent the day lingering around one of South Africa’s newest memorials – the Mandela Capture Site outside of Howick, which marks the spot where apartheid police finally caught up with the leader of the South African armed struggle in 1962. I went as a historian and as someone interested in public art and sites of memory, so I spent time assessing the crowd and the amazing memorial that commemorates the spot where Mandela’s decades of imprisonment began. But then I got bored, so I just stood there and watched families.

It was a beautiful day in a diverse country whose better off citizens like nothing more than to cruise around. Not surprisingly, a steady stream of visitors parked, bought a cup of tea or browsed the small museum, and eventually walked down the path to walk among the staves of the sculpture. I could rehearse the rainbow nation doggerel about the blacks, whites, Christians, Muslims, etc., who were there that day, and could analyze who did what at the site, who looked moved and who bored; who posed with a smile, who grimly. But Nelson Mandela finally died last night and that’s not what I remember about my visit to the memorial. Instead, maybe because I missed my kids back in New York, I remember fathers hugging their children, I remember children running around, I remember people walking hand in hand and chatting, enjoying the light and each other. I don’t remember what race they were – at that moment and place, there was no bigger narrative, no greater lesson than that of people being together with other people, freely and joyfully spending time.

When icons die, it is understandable that we ask what their lives meant to the world. It is fitting that we mourn them and distill for the future what they meant to the past. In the next many days the world will be awash in tributes to Nelson Mandela, as it should be. There will be heartfelt, tear-jerking and moving tributes; there will doubtlessly be crass opportunism and from certain quarters, sheer hypocrisy. Mandela the legend will eclipse the man and South African’s long struggle for equality will be reduced down to tasty, easy to digest morsels – and perhaps Oscar nominations.

But the capture memorial tells a different story. It speaks eloquently to the essential truth: that in South Africa, some families mattered more than others. The white and wealthy ones could drive the Midlands roads near where Nelson Mandela was captured as they wanted; the black and poor could not. Colonialists, industrialists and bureaucrats thought little of enacting tremendous restrictions on black family life because it suited their ignorance, their greed, their pettiness and their fear. When people stood against this – men, women, children like those Soweto youth – they courted arrest, imprisonment and death. The Mandela capture memorial reminds us that the simple joys I witnessed on June 16, 2013, were in the past reserved for some; others, forced from their land by settlement and legislation, restricted in their ability to teach their children, and to promise them a better future. They could only adapt or, courageously, resist.

Nelson Mandela was one of the courageous ones. He was one among the thousands – millions – around the world who recognized this great injustice. His name is the most celebrated, but it is only one name and we do him no disrespect by recalling the countless others who also saw wrong and tried to make it right, who spent decades of nights separated from their loved ones, who suffered and died for essentially a simple truth: people ought to be able to live with their families, as they choose, to raise their children securely, confidently, with faith that such simple, quotidian joys are the markers of lives well lived and deaths satisfyingly met. South Africa in the past was not a place that agreed about this. Large segments of the white South African population, their political leaders and their supporters around the world – including many citizens of my country and elsewhere, who today will claim to mourn – instead fought their own struggle to keep Nelson Mandela from his family. Millions turned a blind eye to families ripped apart by resettlement and migrant labor, by poverty, disease and ignorance, and explained away the killing of children in Soweto’s streets. The violent reality of the past is what the capture memorial captures so vividly. To stand there is to look around and see so many of those laughing families fade away because others wanted it that way.

Human lives are perfect stories: they begin, they have an arc, and then they end. When they end, the story stops and we all strain to figure out what it meant. When I was younger the story of Nelson Mandela and the ANC swept me off of my feet and set me on the path to South Africa and the study of its past. Over time, I moved in a different direction, but that story stuck with me. Yet, I must admit that I don’t know very much about Nelson Mandela. I don’t study the ANC, and I have lost much of my interest in nationalism of any sort. I don’t know what Nelson Mandela really thought about those who hunted him down in Howick and jailed him for three decades. I don’t know whether he really forgave them, or whether his smiling face and reconciliatory rhetoric were just the tactics of a shrewd politician.

I do know that the world is better for all of his years, yet I can’t help but wonder whether the story would have been better if it had stopped in Howick, by the side of the road, where and when the rights of some versus the rights of others were made abundantly clear. I don’t begrudge the time that the families I saw spent at the Capture Memorial – far from it. But I weep to think of a humanity that needed a Nelson Mandela to lay bare the reality of what we have done to each other, and I shudder to think of all of the families that cannot pass time together as they would like, because of the suffering world that we have created.

So today I remember Nelson Mandela as a parent who was blessed with the recognition that society needed to change. I was out when I heard that he had died, and I came home thinking of that sunny day in the Midlands. But I was coming home to my kids, which meant no sitting in front of the computer to gorge on the world’s loss; instead, it meant dinner, stories and their warm, safe beds. Those simple things are my greatest gift, and tonight especially so. They remind me of times and places where such simple things were not assured. That security of family was resisted in Mandela’s South Africa and he and others fought for it, as millions around the world continue to do against similarly daunting odds.

When I close my eyes and think back to the Memorial, to place myself back on a bench, among people, thinking about a man and his captors, the rewards of such struggles are obvious. Mandela was the father of a country where parents and children can smile together on a Sunday, hold each other and take a moment to remember the past together. I spoke to no one about what they were thinking this past June 16. But I hope that some were prompted, like I was, to dwell on the suffering of the students in Orlando West and the father in Howick and to be grateful that on Youth Day and Father’s Day, they would get back in their cars together, to make their way peacefully home. Hamba kahle, tata.

Madiba: I remember

I remember not knowing what you looked like; at sunrise seeing the regime’s footmen erase your name from walls before the paint had dried.

I remember, as a child, sitting on the back seat of the car on the way to town, and at the top of Hospital Bend, my aunt pointing to Robben Island and saying that was where he lived; where the government had sent you.

I remember the news saying you were a terrorist; and my parents having to carefully explain to my seven-year-old-self how you were a hero to the people; that the news and the government lie.

I remember the first time I saw you – the first time any of us had seen you for decades – walking free from Victor Verster, fist aloft, and in your smile, the uncertainties, violence and angst of those heady days somehow dissipating. The spectacle of your release; the joy of a people unleashed: the chaos of your arrival at the Grand Parade…

I remember your words pulling us back from the brink of fratricidal explosion: “This killing must stop… we must not permit ourselves to be provoked by those who seek to deny us the very freedom Chris Hani gave his life for. Let us respond with dignity”. On that day you already were our President.

I remember a year later – almost to the day – walking to school the day after the elections, and every person I passed, meeting my gaze and smiling at our new found wonderment.

And ten days later, in my school uniform, bunking off and heading to the Parade to hear you speak as our State President: immersing myself in a throng of nationhood and unburdened happiness; being hoisted atop shoulders to cling to a lamp post, to see you.

I remember the farce of the time that I met you: when while working as a waiter at a State Banquet for Bill Clinton, I abandoned my table and cunningly intercepted you… and hugged you before your bodyguards prized the crazy white kid from your smiling and surprised embrace.

I remember when you visited Zackie Achmat on his near-death bed. You probably saved his life, and – through his service – the lives of hundreds of thousands of South Africans in the face of your successor’s madness.

I was there when you had to be hoisted to the stage at UCT to celebrate the life of Steve Biko. How at the conclusion of your speech you announced your “retirement” from public life: “Don’t call me; I’ll call you.”

And I will remember this day – alone and bereft in Washington DC – so far from home and the people who have come to call you Tata…

Hamba Kahle Madiba.