Schoolchildren hold candles and portraits of former South African President Nelson Mandela during a prayer ceremony at a school in the southern Indian city of Chennai December 6, 2013. REUTERS/Babu
It happened when I was watching ESPN. I discovered that Madiba had passed.
It was like a punch to the gut, even though I knew it was coming. He had been ill since I was in South Africa in June, July, and August, and yet it came from nowhere.
And so now I have to assess what Mandela means.
And the answer is that words escape me. I have wept, but weeping seems insufficient. I should celebrate his life, but celebration seems callous. I miss him already not because of what he was, exactly, but because of what he means.
And I already miss him especially because I know that what Mandela was will become secondary to how he will be used going forward. He will be used by the ANC to justify the status quo and he will be used by opposition parties for an imagined future they may never have to deliver.
Mandela, who meant so much to so many, will become whatever the beholder wants him to be, and that will somehow both elevate and reduce him. He does not, of course, need us to elevate him. But sadly we do have the capacity to reduce him – to use him for what we want rather than for what he was.
Nelson Mandela believed that his country belonged to all who live within it, but he also believed that his was a country, a beautiful, wonderful country, that belonged to all equally. Mandela did not believe that his country belonged solely to “Africans,” whatever that means, but he believed that Africans – Xhosa and Zulu and Venda and Sotho and so many others, including those whose native tongue was Afrikaans and English – deserved their rightful place in determining South Africa’s future.
The question, then, is how Mandela’s legacy will push forward, beyond the ugliness of the temporal present into a future that we, and he, could only imagine. We miss him already. But I hope that his vision sustains the country that he so loved.
