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R.I.P. Nelson Mandela
Dec. 5th, 2013 06:18 pm"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.
