Madiba Belongs to the Ages

 John Oyewale

Today-December 9, 2013  

I have never been woken out of bed by sad news, as far as I can remember. But early Friday morning, what got me out of bed was the lamentation of a man’s death. A student said in Yoruba, ‘Mandela ti ku?’ (‘Mandela is dead?’) And he must have got a sad yes for an answer, for with a sad falling inflection of voice, he cried, Ah! And then, sympathetically, ‘The old man has lived so long, he’s tried….’

I knew, with a hardening realisation, that I could sleep no longer.......

Nelson Mandela. About him no commentary is needed, you might well say, and rightly so. Still: Born Rolihlahla Mandela on the 18th July, 1918, to the Madiba clan (Madiba would go on to become the affectionate soubriquet he would be called to his dying day), named Nelson by a teacher, he went on to study law, to join the African National Congress (ANC) in 1944, to join in the monumental long-drawn struggle against white domination in South Africa, to get guerrilla training in Morocco, to be hauled to courtrooms on charges of inciting protests and sabotage and treason and whatnot, to be jailed for twenty seven long years, most of which he spent on the dreary Robben Island, to emerge Nobel Peace Prize winner alongside Johannes F.W. de Klerk, South Africa’s then president who released him, and then to become South Africa’s first and the most influential black president (‘Father of the Nation’), and then the citizen of the whole world and leader of the ages. And then he expired a few minutes before nine on Thursday night.

Here was a man who had known failure, having tried without success (but not for want of intelligence) more than once to obtain university degrees (he later did). Here was a man who had known subjugation and slavery, having been haunted along with many black South Africans by the implacable grotesque spectre of Afrikaner-motivated Apartheid. Here was a man who had known horror, the horror of that lopsided unjust ‘war’ in which the police attacked unarmed protesters in Sharpeville, killing sixty nine in cold blood. Here was a man who suffered failed marriages, the fate of many a person who has lugged the burden of a whole class of people onto their shoulders, often at great cost to their personal relationships, unfortunately. Here was a man who had known personal tragedy: one which I can never forget is him losing his own son, Makgatho, to AIDS. Here was a man once vilified, harassed, crushed as a rose underfoot…

An ellipsis is the most fitting punctuation with which to end the foregoing paragraph, if you ask me. For here was a man whose life has fuelled and filled many a book and essay and film: you could speak of him and yet not exhaust everything there is to say.

What do I remember of Robben Island? It strikes me as South Africa’s Patmos, and Mandela as the country’s political version of John the Beloved, the ancient Christian apostle. What pictures of it now do come to mind again? That one of Mandela’s law books on the table in his cell (he, still trying to study, through those dark times of backbreaking penal labour!)…that other one of Clinton and himself looking out through the bars of the window…

What do I remember of the man himself? A picture: a young man in a suit, leaning against a wall, arms folded across his chest, his eyes somewhat glum. Another: a sad, pensive face, at a court session. Another: the big grin—I think that must be following his acquittal after the 1954 Treason Trial. Another: greying, worn, but then a winner, freed, his hand, linked with his second wife’s, upraised. Yet another: he and Walter Sisulu, both reflective—it seemed a private conference of them both contemplating the future.

Was he a man? Yes, very much so. A man ‘of like passions’. A man who had made mistakes which he would have rather blotted out of his personal history, were he able. But, as Monica Furlough wrote of the Catholic theologian, Thomas Merton, ‘unafraid to be man’. Interestingly, history is forgiving; it has its own way of smoothening out rough edges of anyone’s mistakes, provided they have done so well as to have become indispensable toworld history. Of immortalising them. People write hagiographies of such persons—this is not justice, anyway. What is important is that such persons as Mandela are ‘unafraid to be man’, unafraid of being wrong (that sounds like Sir Ken Robinson’s voice, yes) and therefore strikingly original.

Tributes, glowing, are pouring in. Said South Africa’s President Jacob Zuma, ‘Our nation has lost its greatest son, our people have lost a father.’ Said Clinton, ‘Today we have lost a light in the world. Mandela was a true leader, a statesmen, and the defining symbol of reconciliation.’ Ban Ki-moon, United Nations Secretary-General: ‘No one did more in our time for the values and aspirations of the UN. I will never forget his selflessness and deep sense of purpose.’ F.W. de Klerk: ‘Mandela’s biggest legacy … was his remarkable lack of bitterness and the way he did not only talk about reconciliation, but he made reconciliation happen in South Africa.’

And Barack Obama, whose current status, of a long time before the dream of the leaders of the subjugated race of blacks, so strikingly mirrors Mandela’s, said, with an enviable leaning on history, on Edwin Stanton’s immortal tribute to Lincoln, ‘He no longer belongs to us, he belongs to the ages.’ That remarkable Stantonian phrase, He belongs to the ages, was what occurred to me spontaneously when I thought of what I might like to say. Along with Martin Luther King, Jr., Jawarhalal Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi, Chinua Achebe, Doris Lessing, Kofi Awoonor, and a host of other greats, Madiba now belongs to the ages.

Borrowing from Margaret Atwood’s tribute to Lessing (another great mind and Nobel laureate), I would say that if there were a Mt. Rushmore of the greatest world political figures of all time, Mandela’s face would certainly appear there.

*

So, I could sleep no longer. I can sleep no longer. I have to be awake now, be alive now, live now, be in motion now, work now, labour now, do the best I can now, before the news of my passing will someday shake someone out of their own sleep.

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