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Very little can be taken away from Mandela in terms of what he managed to achieve for his great country, and the ripples that swept various parts of our continent and indeed our world as a result of those achievements. At face value, the ideals for which Mandela stood - and was prepared to die for - did raise a few hairs on some backs particularly because of their implications as regards leadership on this continent and beyond. But a deeper view into Mandela's ideals reveals perhaps the workings of one of the most prudent political minds we have yet seen on our continent.
I think Mandela keenly understood the human condition, and firmly believed that the majority of human suffering was a direct consequence of mostly selfish and self-serving human actions. In respect of that realization, Mandela sought out to make the most of what such an unenviable condition could conjure up if only it were political configured in specific ways for its own internal egocentricities to consolidate into a form of cooperation and co-existence.
Of all the fights for self-rule on the African continent, no designated group of Africans ever cooperated with each other in order to inherit a bigger and wealthier economy than that of South Africa. And by extension, the shear promise of being in charge of such an monument of an economy naturally shifted that economy into a center of focus for the various racially differentiated factions of the South African "nation". In this regard, while the calls for nationalization and indigenization rang louder as their fore-running calls of Ujama and African communism declined, they did not dissuade Mandela into heeding them. For him, the bare pragmatics of the long awaited transition into self-rule that his organization alongside the many others who have today been overpowered by the ANC's liberation rhetoric, required the careful preservation of the common center of stakes which was the economy, tinged with the gradual and cautious transition that would enable Africans to slowly filter into its ranks. The logic for this move was simple: radical transformation would only be sustainable in the short and barely into the medium terms precisely because a destroyed economy which had become the focus and aspiration of the previously oppressed would only become a catalyst for rogue centers of power each of them committed to their own ambitions. But implement a gradual transition, then all you have to deal with are the on-going cries of those who felt the transition was moving too slow while the economy itself cushioned and soaked up some of the discontent as more and more people were absorbed into it. This is why for me, as much as many people cry foul about Mandela's handling of South Africa's transition, I think that their ability to cry and to feel like they have been heard has lot to do with the fact that South Africa is what it is today rather than what it would have been if there had been a radical shift at "independence". And to add more flesh to this argument, there is still not yet an African president who inherited a country at independence and didn't treat its inherited economy as a sacred-cow. Kamuzu Banda of Malawi did it, Mugabe did it (up until he became radical), Dos Santos did it, Kaunda did it and several others - albeit within the constraints of that characterized their times. The overt difference therefore between Mandela's transition and the transitions of others was simply this: while other African countries aspired for self-rule with less of an impression of the economies they would inherit because they were significantly smaller, South Africa's much larger economy made a deeper impression of the gains to be realized upon the realization of self-rule. And by default, the economy was the battlefield which Mandela, in his political shrewdness, quickly moved to de-militarize.
Now the questions that need to be asked within such a scenario can only be about the practicalities of implementing the vision of the South Africa so many seek to see while accepting the centrality of South Africa's economy in that entire process. After all, there is nothing else that, even within the vague definition of Africanness, acts as a distinguish-er between "Africans" as a whole and "South Africans" as a specific group of Africans other than the economic difference between other African countries and that of South Africa. And this is not to mention the place such an economy accords South Africa globally. Now, if the economy of South Africa is so central to the extent that it has demarcated and instilled African identity itself into two blocs namely "South Africans" and "Africans", what kind of a man would realistically implode such an economy upon which the very warring and radical factions themselves based their radical ideas? For me, Mandela saw an imperfect but prudent resolution to an enormous dilemma, and opted for it. He would preserve the economy, and champion a painstaking slow process of integration that would span several decades, fully aware that that very thing everyone was very radical about was the sole entity that gave a nation rising out of decades of conflict and violence any chance at cohesiveness and perhaps a shot at unity. And furthermore, if democracy would remain the aspired-for ideal, then radicalism could not be an option. The process therefore of building a nation sat squarely on creating the impression that given the de-racialized and objective systems that would come with democracy, the country then emerge de-personalized and as such united in a seemingly disembodied and automated economy... an economy that seemed to represent everyone and no one in particular with the grand effect of instituting a formative or an embryonic state of unity essential for holding the entire contraption, if you please, together.
But then a surface examination of such a prudent choice would point us to what remains the dominant criticism of Mandela which is that he was too good to the oppressor at the expense of his own people. There is always a certain level of substance in every argument but I am not so inclined to take such a criticism wholesale, because like I have argued above... South Africa's economy is its identity, as in a great sense the focus of its struggle, and today remains its basis of difference from the rest of the continent. It was therefore within the parameters of that economy that human dignity had been lost under the evils of racism. And as such, dignity would be restored largely through re-integration into it. Perhaps this is why the economy is concurrently resented and loved by its citizens on the basis of its exclusion and its rewards respectively. Radically tampering with it would no doubt have created a different South Africa. I am just not sure if that alternative version would have yielded greater levels of hope than we see presently.
But in a few weeks or months, who knows. I might be compelled to think differently about this entire topic. Sometime next week, I hope to post an argument about Revolution within the African context. I will pre-empt the following: I don't think that such a concept exists in the real world outside the realm of ideals.
