R.I.P. Nelson Mandela
Dec. 5th, 2013 06:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabotabby"Mandela once told me, son, when you're engaged in guerilla warfare, take advantage of any toilet you come across — you never know when you'll come across the next one." — Ronnie Kasrils, ANC military coordinator
The world lost a great man today, and while it's not a tragedy as such—living to 95 and seeing your dreams, for the most part, fulfilled is a triumph that deserves more celebration than mourning—even a long-anticipated loss of someone so incredible is still painful. I won't write a long eulogy or reflection; there will be enough of those soon enough, most of which are probably already written. (I mean, he was 95 and very ill; don't tell me that the chattering class didn't have his obituary written for years.)
What I want to write about instead is the importance of memory. Tomorrow morning, I'll find out if my kids even know who Mandela was. I certainly did at their age. I'm part of the shrinking group of people whose memory—political memory, that is—is just long enough to encompass the 80s and the anti-apartheid movement, and it's strange sometimes, and it will be stranger in the next few days.
In my earliest memories, opposition to South African apartheid was radical, subversive, and dangerous. The boycott movement was a grassroots thing; governments didn't get on board until much later. Friends of mine who were active in the movement had their phones tapped—and this was here, in Canada, where they could be little threat to a racist regime on another continent. It wasn't a popular or palatable fight, not here, not in the beginning. And yet. Many of the politicians who, over the next few days, will laud his legacy, did not support the ANC's struggle, and in fact opposed it, as the ANC were deemed uncomfortably communist. (Mandela, of course, was arrested in 1952 under the Suppression of Communism Act and found guilty of "statutory communism," though the sentence was suspended. What a thing to get charged with!)
Now, we'll see a distortion of Mandela's struggle as world leaders clamour over each other to proclaim him a saint. Which—while he was very close to one in my eyes—is an insult to history and his memory. Did those proclaiming his greatness and that of the anti-apartheid struggle now support it then? Do they support today's liberation movements, today's struggles for justice and against white supremacy, poverty, and oppression? We will see him held up as somehow beyond politics (he was not), as a pacifist (nope); we will see his legacy simplified into convenient soundbites. Just like the American Right today claims, inexplicably, Martin Luther King Jr. as one of their own, ignoring 99% of what he ever said, the Hang Mandela lot will no doubt demand his legacy, and theirs, sanitized.
If you want to honour Nelson Mandela, and you should, don't let them. Don't let them turn him into someone bland and unobjectionable. Don't forget that the ANC were derided as violent terrorists, that they were radicals in favour of redistribution of wealth and land (at least before the struggle was won and they were quickly co-opted into the global austerity agenda) it was grassroots activists and not governments or elites who started the boycott movement outside of South Africa, don't forget that the good fight, on occasion, can be won.
Mandela can rest in peace, now. The rest of us shouldn't.
ETA: Three Fingered Fox's brilliant post on Mandela and peaceful resistance.
The world lost a great man today, and while it's not a tragedy as such—living to 95 and seeing your dreams, for the most part, fulfilled is a triumph that deserves more celebration than mourning—even a long-anticipated loss of someone so incredible is still painful. I won't write a long eulogy or reflection; there will be enough of those soon enough, most of which are probably already written. (I mean, he was 95 and very ill; don't tell me that the chattering class didn't have his obituary written for years.)
What I want to write about instead is the importance of memory. Tomorrow morning, I'll find out if my kids even know who Mandela was. I certainly did at their age. I'm part of the shrinking group of people whose memory—political memory, that is—is just long enough to encompass the 80s and the anti-apartheid movement, and it's strange sometimes, and it will be stranger in the next few days.
In my earliest memories, opposition to South African apartheid was radical, subversive, and dangerous. The boycott movement was a grassroots thing; governments didn't get on board until much later. Friends of mine who were active in the movement had their phones tapped—and this was here, in Canada, where they could be little threat to a racist regime on another continent. It wasn't a popular or palatable fight, not here, not in the beginning. And yet. Many of the politicians who, over the next few days, will laud his legacy, did not support the ANC's struggle, and in fact opposed it, as the ANC were deemed uncomfortably communist. (Mandela, of course, was arrested in 1952 under the Suppression of Communism Act and found guilty of "statutory communism," though the sentence was suspended. What a thing to get charged with!)
Now, we'll see a distortion of Mandela's struggle as world leaders clamour over each other to proclaim him a saint. Which—while he was very close to one in my eyes—is an insult to history and his memory. Did those proclaiming his greatness and that of the anti-apartheid struggle now support it then? Do they support today's liberation movements, today's struggles for justice and against white supremacy, poverty, and oppression? We will see him held up as somehow beyond politics (he was not), as a pacifist (nope); we will see his legacy simplified into convenient soundbites. Just like the American Right today claims, inexplicably, Martin Luther King Jr. as one of their own, ignoring 99% of what he ever said, the Hang Mandela lot will no doubt demand his legacy, and theirs, sanitized.
If you want to honour Nelson Mandela, and you should, don't let them. Don't let them turn him into someone bland and unobjectionable. Don't forget that the ANC were derided as violent terrorists, that they were radicals in favour of redistribution of wealth and land (at least before the struggle was won and they were quickly co-opted into the global austerity agenda) it was grassroots activists and not governments or elites who started the boycott movement outside of South Africa, don't forget that the good fight, on occasion, can be won.
Mandela can rest in peace, now. The rest of us shouldn't.
ETA: Three Fingered Fox's brilliant post on Mandela and peaceful resistance.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Date: 2013-12-05 11:25 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2013-12-06 11:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-12-06 12:09 am (UTC)I do try to share with students, on any occasion, how much the public image of such "saints" leaves out a lot that is still revolutionary and disturbing; this especially comes up with MLK Jr., who is a favored example for the SAT I essay and, as you can imagine, almost always discussed in the most reductive and comfortable/comforting way possible.
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Date: 2013-12-06 12:15 am (UTC)And I also think (I both really, really want to think, and I do think) that along with the taming/forgetting process, we're seeing that over the years sometimes people do learn something, sometimes, and accolades for someone once condemned as a terrorist can be a sign of that as well as co-opting.
If they renounce their previous position, absolutely. If they take action today that proves their commitment to the equivalent social justice struggles, more power to 'em. I love a redemption story. Can't think of many examples, though; most of the figures I'm speaking of are still very much active in creating or supporting policy that reinforces a racist, sexist, classist world order.
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Date: 2013-12-06 04:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-12-06 11:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-12-06 02:03 pm (UTC)We've wandered, but this may be a basic disagreement, and in some ways an interesting one. I try to keep both sides in mind.
ETA: I should say that I really, really can see criticizing individuals who have improved only because it is part of the zeitgeist & still, in fact, live down to the kinds of cruelty and selfishness that are not (yet) socially condemned. I'd be less likely to criticize their praise for Mandela and more likely to point out how ludicrously far they are from emulating him. But I can understand your anger.
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Date: 2013-12-06 11:14 pm (UTC)In other ways, I feel that the discourse is shutting out all sorts of possibilities. Say what you will about the excesses of the Soviet Union and the terror of the Cold War, but having a visible alternative to capitalism, however flawed, kept a strange sort of balance. Now there's an economic consensus even in the midst of handwringing about poverty, and it's a fundamentally flawed and evil consensus.
I don't know if you can say one kind of death is worse than another. I'd personally choose a bullet in the head over starvation, and the thing with outright mass horror is that it is much easier to condemn and overcome than systemic, slow-moving horror. Line 21,000 up against the wall and shoot them, and there will be widespread outcry. Allow 21,000 children a day to die for the sake of a fucked-up economic theory and it's business as usual, out of our hands and unpreventable. Is economic apartheid worse than political apartheid? I don't know, but the worst massacre of black South Africans since the end of political apartheid happened in 2012.
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Date: 2013-12-07 04:04 pm (UTC)The main takeaway of this discussion for me is mulling over whether there is a moral difference between actively killing someone and not changing a system that lets them die or even makes it more likely they'll die. The NYTimes recently had a feature article that is relevant here: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/24/books/review/would-you-kill-the-fat-man-and-the-trolley-problem.html?_r=0. In a way that difference doesn't matter, since we agree both are wrong and should be changed, but in some ways it does matter to me. More thought.
Also, not taking any comfort until everything is made just/right seems to me like a very frustrating life, as well as unrealistically pessimistic.
Anyway, thanks for clarifying your position.
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Date: 2013-12-06 12:39 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2013-12-06 12:51 am (UTC)Apparently David Cameron is already claiming Mandela as his personal hero. Having been in the Young Conservatives during their Hang Mandela days and gone on boycott-busting trips to SA funded by pro-apartheid lobbyists.
When Obama cites campaigning against Apartheid as one of his earliest involvements in political activism, he might just be truthful though.
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Date: 2013-12-06 12:57 am (UTC)I have to admit, I found out about Mandela's death and one of my immediate thoughts was that I couldn't wait to hear what David Cameron, the blithering racist shitbag, had to say. I've had that Hang Mandela poster saved in a folder for some time now.
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Date: 2013-12-06 04:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-12-06 11:47 am (UTC)God *damn* #Sabotabby!
Date: 2013-12-06 05:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-12-06 11:47 am (UTC)drunkenexhausted stupor, so I'm always glad if they turn out to be faintly readable.no subject
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Date: 2013-12-06 03:42 pm (UTC)Thanks for writing this. And for once I was glad that the only coverage I watched was Rachel Maddow's where she did mention that Mandela and the ANC had decided sabotage was the only way after the Sharpeville Massacre and that Mandela was chosen to go underground and start that fight. She got the history right. And I appreciated her for it. B'c there are those today who have not lived during those years and plenty of those who did with shorter memories.
Perhaps it is b;c people only want to remember the very good things about a person that they sanitize them? Much of history does get sanitized for reasons I can never fathom. Ease of passing down the story? Life is too messy to get it all down? I don't understand. But I do think that if a balance of a person's life is more good than bad the bad tends to get removed. To keep the memory only for the good I guess.
I read about SA and Mandela and the ANC when I was 15. It was my first taste of social activism. Nelson Mandela and the ANC were my first heroes. I was deeply pleased when he was released when I was a senior in high and even more pleased when he became president when I was a senior in college. My grandmother was a immigrant to the US from SA when she was young (3? 5?) and I have tried very hard to understand the country she came from and the choices they made.
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Date: 2013-12-06 10:18 pm (UTC)See, I don't think many of the things being sanitized are actually bad. (He did, of course, do some bad things, like palling around with Gaddafi and later Thatcher, and embracing neoliberalism when he was president of SA.) It's very good things that are being sanitized in the name of turning him into a fuzzy, ill-defined "symbol of hope" that the right can claim as easily as the left.
I'm seeing a bit more critical stuff today, which is promising. Love Maddow; she's fantastic.
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Date: 2013-12-06 06:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-12-06 10:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-12-07 09:48 am (UTC)I remember, when my sister was in Mocambique trying to construct a fish factory on a people-to-people aid program and she wrote me letters saying, how at transporting material on trains they were shot at by the South-African army in Mocambique territory because at the time, the people´s choice of president was http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samora_Machel.
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Date: 2013-12-07 08:15 pm (UTC)I'm sad that he died, though for me it's more because of what I read about him over the years and not because of what I actually remember, so it's probably less personal.
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Date: 2013-12-07 08:20 pm (UTC)