R.I.P. Nelson Mandela

[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.

Comments

[nellorat.livejournal.com]

I've thought about this a lot since I read it right after your posting it, and I finally have at least some words. I guess I think that most people on earth just don't think very well or self-critically, and that as a result they will be appallingly limited in their compassion and will never go beyond what they soak up from the culture around them. So what I meant by "learning something" isn't really coming to genuine principles on their own. But if they come to adopt a position that is less harmful to others, that's still an advantage, for themselves and the world in general. Now that I look at this, it seems baldly, horribly pessimistic. And yet I actually do think that I see a lot of progress over the past century, and it's in large part because people with revolutionary ideas have made some of those ideas become part of the zeitgeist.

[sabotabby]

I get what you're saying—I just don't see it. What's the good if David Cameron no longer believes that people ought to be lynched for demanding equality in a far-off country if he enacts murderous policies against disabled people and migrants in his own? Or Harper, whom I'm sure has something touching to say about Mandela (I haven't looked because I'm drinking coffee right now and don't want to throw it up), who is continuing Canada's long campaign of genocide against our indigenous people and shakes hands with international butchers? I wish I saw progress, but all I see is continuity.

[nellorat.livejournal.com]

We can agree to disagree, but I see both. (And such is my nature that if an LJ friend was writing about the progress, I'd probably be commenting about the continuity.) At least over the long haul. Within two centuries, in my own country, Andrew Jackson was getting kudos for literal, not in any way subtle, shoot-em-in-the-head genocide. With no other reason than genocide.The closest to that now in the USA is the drone strikes, and that ostensibly has some more self-protecting purpose. If it didn't--if Obama was literally saying "The only good Muslim is a dead Muslim"--some fanatics would approve, but not enough people to elect a president. OK, now I've depressed myself by what we consider progress. But it is progress. I can see the argument that it's the same old under a new name, but to my mind we're ashamed of some aspects of the past, and we're not going to do that exact thing again. As a result, I sometimes feel you use words like "murderous" and "genocide" too loosely--what we really still do is bad enough, and part of that is that many people *don't care* if some kinds of people die, or may even prefer it to spending money, but to me that's still different from actually murdering them--which the USA has enough of a history of, thankyouverymuch. Again, maybe the difference between death by a bullet in the heart or a forced march or lynching on the one hand and death due to lack of proper medical care or in prison or by drugs or violence due to hopelessness on the other isn't that major to you--I can actually fully understand that--but to me it is.

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.

[sabotabby]

I don't think it's an "or" question. In some ways, we've progressed. Individual liberty, for example—ten years ago, gay marriage was inconceivable in the U.S., and no one anywhere was talking about ending the drug war.

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.

[nellorat.livejournal.com]

Final paragraph: Except that, as far as I can tell, when actually murdering someone is accepted, helping them starve is completely OK *also*--even in much more active forms, such as killing the buffalo and letting them rot rather than letting Native Americans hunt them. Is economic apartheid, or imprisonment rates of African Americans now, worse now than in the Jim Crow South? That's a genuine question.Maybe it is.

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.