Nelson Mandela – media’s deified icon airbrushes away the dynamic revolutionary

English

20.12.2013 - 17:22 (Muokattu 6.11.2025 - 13:38)

Mark Waller

Even before he died Nelson Mandela’s legacy was being successfully sanitised of its left politics and revolutionary perspective by the commercial mass media and political elites across the world. It’s now the job of alternative media and progressive people to set the record straight.

The eulogies and memorial events for Madiba will no doubt continue, marking his birthday (18 July), declared by the UN General Assembly in 2009 as International Nelson Mandela Day, and the anniversaries of his inauguration in 1994 as South Africa’s first democratically elected president (10 May), and, now, his death (5 December). The world singularly lacks political leaders who are inspiring, visionary and uncorrupted, and Mandela seems to be needed more than ever. He had long been out of the public eye at the time of his death, but his authority as a reconciler, peacemaker and champion of individual integrity resonated everywhere. This, however, is only a small part of what he represents.

It would be an injustice to the memory of Madiba to let the image of the schmaltzy icon prevail – the smiley old grandpappy, who sets Michael Jackson on one knee and Bono on the other, and dishes out platitudes about inspiration and motivation. Corporate sectors in South Africa and elsewhere readily generates images of a mythologised Madiba to boost their image, and in part and to make it appear that they were always hand in glove with everything Madiba stood for. And yet much of these same sectors were responsible for propping up apartheid.

To understand the context of all this we need to go back a bit.

Apartheid was the systemized the racial oppression of black and other people of colour. A main reason for it was to use ‘non-white’ labour to generate wealth to keep the small white population in comfort and security. Apartheid was also based on a clearly defined racial ideology that saw black people, in particular, as inferior, of lower moral worth, in need of only rudimentary education, health and nutrition.

Apartheid propaganda depicted this ideology as a fair system of “separate development”, but in reality everything was weighted against black people through legislation and brutal social conditioning. Underlying it all was a hatred of black Africans and African traditions, societies, and populations in general – hatred rooted in fear. “Development” had nothing to do with it.

South Africa, according to PW Botha, South Africa’s penultimate apartheid president, when he was defence minister in the late 1960s, was “a symbol of stability, peace, happiness and development in the midst of the dark, confusion of this unhappy continent of chaos, tyranny, hatred and misery.” By South Africa he did not mean the ‘homelands’ created for the majority of black people and distinct from South Africa. These bantustans, as they were called, were far-flung territories of inferior resources, enclaves of mass poverty presided over by puppet governments created by the Pretoria regime. They functioned as labour reserves for apartheid South Africa’s industry and foreign owned platinum and gold mines. Black people staying in white South African cities had to carry passbooks showing whom they worked for and thus justifying their presence in these otherwise off-limits areas.

Some of the best accounts of the resistance and opposition to apartheid by the African National Congress are contained in Mandela’s autobiography Long Walk to Freedom, Padraig O’Malley’s Shades of Difference: Mac Maharaj and the Struggle for South Africa, and Joe Slovo’s Slovo – the unfinished autobiography of ANC leader Joe Slovo.

Resistance to apartheid

Apartheid formalized, codified, and regulated the racial segregation that had been in place in various forms since shortly after Europeans first started to colonise South Africa in the 1650s. The right-wing nationalist white government of the National Party, elected by enfranchised whites in 1948, formally established the policy of apartheid.

The African National Congress had been established 36 years earlier, uniting a wide range of groups and interests among the black population that sought a fair dispensation on a par with the rights enjoyed by the white minority. The entrenchment of racist laws after 1948 saw the rise of passive resistance and defiance campaigns, and the steady radicalisation of the ANC. Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu and Oliver Tambo had been founders of the ANC Youth League (ANCYL) in 1944. The ANCYL was to spearhead much of this radicalisation through new forms of mass action and protest at the growing encroachment of apartheid laws.

In early 1955, the ANC sent out tens of thousands of volunteers into the townships and rural areas of South Africa to collect the demands of the African population concerning what sort of South Africa they wanted to live in. The resulting Freedom Charter was adopted at a mass gathering of 3 000 people in Kliptown, 26 June, called the Congress of the People. Nelson Mandela and many other leading activists, including Joe Slovo of the then outlawed Communist Party of South Africa, were under banning orders and had to keep a low profile at the Congress of the People to evade being caught.

The Freedom Charter envisaged a non-racial South Africa that belonged to all who lived in it, with provision of human rights, housing, work, education, land reform and public ownership. The apartheid government dismissed the Freedom Charter as a communist document, and while it was hardly this, it does contain many key demands of a socialist transformation.

Radicalisation

Initially Mandela had had little time for communists, though the communist party worked closely with the ANC. He identified with the nationalist element of the ANC, but this changed during the second half of the 1950s, as members of the banned communist party engaged with him more and he identified increasingly with their socialist aims. It was also during this time that he and others, such as the banned communist party activist Joe Slovo, began to see the need for armed struggle against the apartheid regime, which answered non-violent resistance and protest with growing levels of brutality.

The tipping point came in March 1960, when police opened fire on a peaceful anti pass law protest in Sharpeville, killing 69 people. The apartheid regime then banned the ANC. The establishment of Mkohnto we Sizwe (Mk, meaning Spear of the Nation) in 1961, with Mandela as its commander in chief, marked a new stage in the struggle, with all anti-apartheid militant activity now underground.

Mandela was sentenced to life imprisonment with eight other Mk activists in 1964 in the Rivonia trial. Earlier, he had travelled in Africa seeking support for Mk and receiving military training. He had been caught in 1962 and imprisoned for five years for inciting strikes and leaving the county illegally. The Rivonia trial was a major success for the apartheid regime, which had effectively captured most of the Mk high command. He spent 27 years in prison, 18 of them on Robben Island.

In its tribute to Mandela, following his death in early December, both the ANC and the South African Communist Party acknowledged that he had been a member of the underground SACP and its Central Committee at the time of his arrest in 1962. Later, when the ANC leadership decided to make Madiba the figurehead of the campaign for the release of political prisoners, they tactically played down his communist party background.

Mandela’s ties with the SACP and his close personal and political relationship with SACP leaders, such as Joe Slovo and Chris Hani, have been airbrushed out of most tributes to Madiba during and after the official period of mourning his death. They are constantly glossed over or ignored by the mainstream media.

Three-dimensional view of SA history

But the reason why thy are important to our appreciation of Madiba is that they reflect the integral role the SACP has played in the struggle inside South Africa against apartheid, in the development of the ANC and its armed wing Mk, in the international solidarity movement against apartheid, and in the strategy and tactics of the ANC in the negotiations that led to South Africa’s first democratic elections, in 1994.

We cannot understand South Africa’s history for most of the 20^th century and up to today unless we understand the relationship between the SACP and the ANC, on the one hand, and the development of the ANC-led Tripartite Alliance (comprising the ANC, SACP and the Congress of South African Trade Unions – Cosatu) on the other.

The reason why this history of this special relationship is so comprehensively ignored by mainstream news media and conservative politics around the world is because of their hardwired anti-left ideology. This in-built bias is infinitely replicated, until the majority of people in just about any country who maybe only take a passing interest in world events and the news have no inkling that Madiba was anything other than the travesty of the loveable cross between Jesus and Father Christmas who wanted black people to be nice to white people.

There are plenty of statements by Madiba made at different points in his life that underscore his close affinity with communists and the SACP. In his famous speech from the dock at the Rivonia trial he tried to explain the thinking behind the ANC’s relationship with the communist party:

– It is perhaps difficult for white South Africans, with an ingrained prejudice against communism, to understand why experienced African politicians so readily accept communists as their friends. But to us the reason is obvious… For many decades communists were the only political group in South Africa who were prepared to treat Africans as human beings and their equals; who were prepared to eat with us; talk with us, live with us, and work with us. They were the only political group which was prepared to work with the Africans for the attainment of political rights and a stake in society. Because of this, there are many Africans who, today, tend to equate freedom with communism…”

Many liberal and conservative analysts try to explain away Madiba’s attitude to communists by saying that he was merely being pragmatic at a time when the ANC needed allies. But he was no less forthright in his affection for the SACP when he was President, as when he addressed the 9^th Congress of the SACP in Johannesburg in 1995:

– It is not given to a leader of one political organisation in a country to sing praises to the virtues of another. But that is what I intend to do today. If anything, this signifies the unique relationship between the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party.

– It is a relationship that has detractors in abundance; a relationship that has its prolific obituary scribes. But it is a relationship that always disappoints these experts. Because it was tempered in struggle. It is written in the blood of many martyrs. And, today, it is reinforced by hard-won victory.

– Individuals and groups who profess to be democrats lose all rationality when gripped by the venom of anti-communism. We in the ANC are driven by a different logic.

– And we do not apologise for the fact that our alliance with the Party is also based on the warm sentiment of experience in struggle against apartheid. It is only natural that we should feel the welling of emotion, when we remember heroes and heroines of the calibre of Bram Fischer, Malume Kotane, Alex la Guma, JB Marks, Moses Mabhida, Yusuf Dadoo, Ruth First and others. Whatever seemingly powerful friends we might have today, the ANC cannot abandon those who shared the trials and tribulations of struggle with us.

Reconciliation strategy with political goals

In the years immediately after Madiba’s release from prison and the unbanning of the ANC, the SACP and other organizations, the apartheid National Party government under FW De Klerk sought to cripple the ANC and sever its links with the SACP in a mass of covert and semi-covert ways.

Using a loose clandestine network of security operatives and right-wing elements, it promoted violence between supporters of Inkatha Freedom Party leader Mangosutho Buthelezi and the ANC, and thousands of other random killings and attacks.

Mandela condemned the regime for playing a double game of being in talks with the ANC in the Conference on a Democratic South Africa, but all the while stoking violence throughout the townships. He and SACP leader Chris Hani had worked together closely, and toured the country together to urge peace making in communities.

Mandela and the ANC saw the urgent need to foster reconciliation, not only to tackle the violence affecting the country, but also in order to narrow the divisions that apartheid had created between the population groups. Doing so was the key to gaining the stability needed to sustain any sort of democratic future.

Hani’s assassination in April 1993 put South Africa on the verge of civil war. Mandela devoted all his efforts to calming the situation, wholly eclipsing De Klerk in moral authority and gravitas. A white assassin had murdered Hani, a point the ANC leader used astutely in a television broadcast to the nation:

– A white man, full of prejudice and hate, came to our country and committed a deed so foul that our whole nation now teeters on the brink of disaster. A white woman, of Afrikaner origin, risked her life so that we may know, and bring to justice, this assassin.

Mandela set the tone of the reconciliation needed to sustain the democratic transformation – the National Democratic Revolution (NDR), beginning with the country’s first democratic elections. The South African ’miracle’ and the ’rainbow nation’ were born, and with them much of Mandela’s global kudos. Mandela’s many gestures of reconciliation across South Africa’s raw racial divide, and his determination not to allow bitterness at past injustices to poison the new dispensation made him seem a near saintly figure to many. But there was more to it than this. Mandela, the rest of the ANC and its allies were pursuing a resolute strategy that saw reconciliation as a key aspect of efforts to reconstruct the country along non-racial lines.

In his recent tribute to Madiba, SACP General Secretary Blade Nzimande wrote:

The SACP supported Madiba’s championing of national reconciliation and nation building. But national reconciliation for him never meant avoiding tackling the class and other social inequalities in our society, as some would like to make us believe today. For Madiba, national reconciliation was a platform to pursue the objective of building an egalitarian South African society free of the scourge of racism, patriarchy and gross inequalities. And true national reconciliation shall never be achieved in a society still characterized by the yawning gap of inequalities and capitalist exploitation.

Madiba in context

Mandela frequently frustrated many an interviewer by rooting his motivation for his part in the struggle in the collective decisions and orientation of the ANC and its allies, and not in some one-man crusade steeped in the aura of personal charisma. This is essential if we are to understand the course of the liberation struggle, the negotiations for the democratic transition and the subsequent highs and lows of national reconstruction.

But it is the sentimental declawed, depoliticized Hollywood view of Mandela that drenches all the tributes and sanctimonious eulogies we hear from nearly every area of public life in most countries. Outside the ANC and the Alliance, Madiba is hardly ever depicted in the political context that shaped him. Conservative politics in South Africa and elsewhere also opportunistically use their version of his image image and stature to draw a negative distinction between him and the current ANC, as if the two had little relation to one another.

Setting the record straight is not just about seeing Madiba in his true context. It is also about taking a long, hard look at what has and has not been achieved in South Africa to tackle the poverty, disease, lack of education and general underdevelopment that apartheid bequeathed to the black majority of South Africans.

Most mainstream news media have no interest in these issues, and in ignoring them when covering Madiba they miss much of what concerned him as a political activist and leader. The ANC has made great improvements to the lives of the majority, but massive problems persist, and both national and international corporate power remains a stubborn obstacle to realizing equality.

We need to see Madiba’s life and struggle in this setting, and in particular to recall his insistence that the Long Walk is far from over.

Mark Waller

Nelson Mandela – media’s deified icon airbrushes away the dynamic revolutionary

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