With the death of Nelson Mandela the world has lost a fighter for the freedom and dignity of the African people. But his death should not be a prelude to the sanctification of a hero, the veneration of an idol, or his reduction to a pop-icon gadget. This needs to be stressed, above all out of respect for a man who always refused to be made into a living myth and to the very end set the common good of the South African people above the cult of his personality, despite being hailed as a kind of saint even while still alive. But it also needs stressing because the elaborate ceremonials accompanying his long departure from this world are in danger of becoming a purification rite for the bad conscience of the West. They risk spreading a sanctimonious veil of oblivion over the tragic history of South Africa and the biography of its first black President himself, hastily obliterating a violent past and the memory of revolts repressed in blood. It was to forestall this that Madiba made Truth and Reconciliation the guiding principles of his political action during his presidency (1994-1999), which coincided with the foundation of the Rainbow Nation on a multiracial basis.

Before becoming an internationally-esteemed statesman, Mandela suffered the injustices of racial segregation, the hardships of underground militancy against the apartheid regime, and the privations of twenty-seven years in prison spent largely in solitude. His imprisonment was treated for the most part with indifference, or even openly supported, by many western powers, especially the USA and the UK. Under the alibi of needing to contain the spread of communism in Africa, they protected the racist regime of Pretoria until the fall of the Berlin Wall, implicitly subscribing to the official position that Mandela was a dangerous terrorist.

His political activities began in the mid-nineteen-forties when, as a young lawyer, he founded the Youth League of the African National Congress (ANC), which he had joined a few years earlier. He realized that it was necessary to radicalize the party's campaigns in order to raise awareness. He set out to organize civil disobedience, boycotts, and strikes. He was put on trial for this in 1952 and sentenced to nine months in jail for 'communism'. In the same period, together with fellow party-member Oliver Tambo, he opened the Mandela & Tambo law office, which offered legal aid to needy blacks. After Mandela had been charged with high treason in 1956 (the case against him was dismissed five years later), the massacre of Sharpeville took place. Sixty-nine unarmed Africans were massacred by the police, many shot in the back, during an anti-apartheid demonstration. The state of emergency was proclaimed, the ANC banned, and Mandela went underground. He realized that armed resistance had been made inevitable by the stubbornness with which the racist regime denied any political space to blacks struggling against racial discrimination and for emancipation from poverty. It was a dramatic moment, reconstructed by Mandela in his statement at the Rivonia trial (1963-1964), which saw him sentenced to life imprisonment for sabotage and insurrection against the power of the State.

In 1961, while underground, he had helped found Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), the armed wing of the ANC. The organization adopted a strategy of sabotage against targets linked to the regime, and contemplated the possibility of guerrilla warfare, while rejecting terrorism. This armed structure began realistically preparing for the possibility of a future 'civil war'. To this end, Mandela made various trips abroad in 1961 and 1962, especially to African states, in search of arms and training-support for the Umkhonto fighters. Meanwhile the ANC was increasingly collaborating with the South African Communist Party, already outlawed by the regime. On this point Mandela was quite clear in his statement, maintaining that, although never a communist himself, it must be recognized that “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”.

He was equally open about the international relations of the anti-apartheid movement when he stated that “in the international field, communist countries have always come to our aid. In the United Nations and other Councils of the world the communist bloc has supported the Afro-Asian struggle against colonialism and often seems to be more sympathetic to our plight than some of the Western powers.” (Statement from the dock at the opening of the defence case in the Rivonia Trial, Pretoria Supreme Court, 20 April 1964). On his return from his mission abroad (autumn 1962), Mandela was arrested and sentenced to five years imprisonment on Robben Island. In 1976 the Soweto student revolt against the imposition of Afrikaans as the medium of instruction broke out, causing six hundred deaths over eight months. In the nineteen-eighties there were various uprisings in the townships, the police being allowed a free hand during the violent repressions, culminating in the 1986 State of Emergency. Meanwhile the ANC’s guerrilla strategy changed, beginning now to target human symbols of racist power and collaborators of the regime. President P. W. Botha, elected in 1979, offered Mandela freedom in exchange for rejecting violence, but he refused. Archbishop Desmond Tutu openly took the side of the anti-apartheid struggle. Throughout the world, starting in the mid-eighties, there were demonstrations in support of the release of Mandela.

In this climate secret discussions began between Mandela and the regime. These were criticised by some sectors of the ANC, which accused their leader of betraying the ideals and aspirations of black Africans. In Pollsmore prison since 1980, Mandela was now moved to Victor Verster prison near Cape Town, where from 1989 negotiations continued with F. W. De Klerk, the new South African President. Meanwhile the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union was disintegrating. The regime gradually came to see the anachronism of racial segregation and the detested pass laws, in a country increasingly dependent on black labour and destined to become an active player in the global market. The result was Mandela’s release on February 11th 1990. This was the beginning of a difficult transition during which the National Party (NP) and the ANC began negotiations to form a multi-racial government. They were dramatic years marked by a resurgence of violence, protests, strikes, and boycotts.

Mandela presented himself as the symbol of the potential unity of a new South African nation, skilfully handling negotiations while preventing violence from turning into a full-scale civil war. The prison years had transformed him. He taught the true meaning of non-violence: not surrender but strength, the strength of those who are in a position to resort to violence, but refuse to do so because there is an alternative: namely, cultivating the practice of listening, and respect for a former enemy. It was a daunting undertaking: to overcome the fears of the whites and the anger of the blacks by pursuing a future of peace and social justice, equality and prosperity for all; by laying to rest the spirit of vendetta through a profound reconsideration of the shared past, where nothing is forgotten but no-one remains entrapped in memory and the legitimate hatred it can so easily foment. Undoubtedly, the socialist ideals of the past were diluted, practically disappearing as South Africa prepared to take its place among the emerging nations, with a liberal-democratic regime and an economy open to foreign capital. But the wager paid off. Mandela became President in 1994, in the first free elections of the new South Africa, a year after being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize along with De Klerk.

The symbolic consummation of the miracle took place at the Rugby World Cup in 1995, when President Mandela incited the entire population to rally behind the Springboks, the South African national team detested for excluding blacks during apartheid. Mandela put on the green shirt of its captain, François Pienaar, in order to present him with the world cup. The political substance of this process, on the other hand, lay in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, set up by Mandela not to promote a generalized amnesty, as some accused him of doing, but to initiate a collective reconsidering of the past, with a view to superseding it, freeing the country of its ghosts and its coaction to perpetuate historic animosities. A kind of group therapy for a whole nation, a foundation myth for the new country, from which the spirit of the new South African ‘people’ could arise, above and beyond differences of race, gender, and class. It was the only way, according to Mandela, for a country forged during the Anglo-Boer wars, conflicts between white settlers in which the original Boer settlers were themselves ‘colonized’ by the British, but which had failed to annihilate the African peoples, despite their being been victims of violence from both sides.

During the sessions of the Commission, the victims of racist violence told their stories in detail, giving voice and articulation to their suffering. Tormentors freely confessed their crimes. The outcome was an experience of collective catharsis, brought about by facing up to memories of black suffering and white hatred, and transcending both, as it were, in a higher, richer, more comprehensive whole: namely, a reciprocal recognition of each others’ reasons and wrongs and an awareness that a new history could be built upon respect for truth. Thus truth was both the basis for reconciliation and its final outcome: it ceased to be the truth of one side and became that of all sides. This was Mandela’s wager, in which Ubuntu, the African philosophy of compassion and respect for others, merged with the practice of true listening, empathy with one’s fellow humans, and reasoning freed from the polarities of friend/foe, winners/losers, colonizers/colonized.

What remains to be seen is whether this new multiracial and postcolonial identity will really take root among the South African people. Will it survive the passing of its myth or get debased into a rather vacuous national trademark? The South Africa Mandela left behind him is not exactly what he hoped it would be. By the time he retired to private life in 1999, he had seen the voracity of the free market create new inequalities in wealth and opportunity. The South African economy is now in the hands of foreign-based multinationals and an increasingly frightened and insecure white élite, fenced in their CCTV-monitored villas. The blacks have obtained civil and political rights, but their economic status and their prospects of social advancement are still far inferior to the whites’. Nor is the emergence of a black minority of nouveaux riches by any means a solution. To compound matters, there have been worrying episodes of xenophobia among the poor blacks of the townships towards immigrant workers; an increase in instability and insecurity due to the ups-and-downs of the global market and its mobile hierarchies; and, over the last few years, scandals and corruption within Jacob Zuma’s government and the ANC itself.

Beyond truth and reconciliation, the major challenge facing post-Mandela South Africa is the battle against social and economic apartheid, because “while poverty persists, there is no true freedom.” (Nelson Mandela, Speech to the Trafalgar Square Crowd, ‘Make Poverty History’, London, February 3rd, 2005).

Text by Furio Ferraresi

Translation by Bill Dodd