South African writer Andre Brink (A Dry White Season, inter alia) is unhappy with the potential encroachments on the media with which the ANC appears to be tinkering and seems dismayed by the general direction of things in South Africa. Naturally he invokes Nelson Mandela, because everyone who wants to establish (or remind us of, in Brink’s case) his or her pro-liberation, anti-Apartheid bona fides feels the need to invoke Mandela.
The problem here, of course, is that Mandela becomes a symbol and not a flesh and blood human being. Mandela becomes shorthand for a sepia-toned golden age that never really existed. For all of the good that Mandela did as President, before, and after, the reality is that the hangover from the Apartheid years always made progress — economic, political, what have you — intermittent rather than inevitable. The shift from Mandela to Thabo Mbeki seems more dramatic than it was largely because Mbeki isn’t Mandela. And the various machinations and transitions since then seem even more unseemly even though those machinations rather than the idealized version of Mandela really are more representative of politics the world over. Mandela might be how South Africans would like to see themselves and their politics. Jacob Zuma is probably more a reflection of how South African politics actually are — imperfect, messy, problematic — and indeed, are more reflective of how they really have been all along since 1994, Madiba Magic notwithstanding.
