LETTER FROM JOHANNESBURG:The endorsement of the ANC by Nelson Mandela, the world's symbol of reconciliation, has been met with a viciousness that is outstanding
HE SEEMED like a perfect gentleman. For all I know he was. After seeing our car take turns at least three times in the same locality, he decided to pursue us to find out if we were lost. We stopped. He asked if we were lost and wanted to help us find our way. No, we were not but listened anyway.
The conversation drifted to other things. He mourned the state of the railways. As a sheep farmer he mourned the livestock that he lost on a daily basis. He mourned just about everything. He stopped short of saying things were better under apartheid but we had no illusions about what he was thinking. And then he talked fondly of the Mandela years – an illusory period where white South Africans somehow believed that they were absolved of their sins – and how things have changed.
Clearly this conversation was going to be long. In the depths of his disappointments, he actually managed a smile when he talked about the iconic leader who probably remains the country’s and the continent’s best export. We got out of the car for a stretch. He waxed lyrical about the “old man” and how his legacy has been betrayed. The changing nature of his facial expression said it all. He was not the first, or the last person who talked of Mandela this way.
This was deep in the backwater of the Eastern Cape, one of South Africa’s nine provinces. It has possibly the worst levels of poverty and corruption. I thought of this man as I was reading comments in the various news sites on Mandela’s endorsement of the ANC.
Would he also join the chorus now calling Madiba “an old fart”? Others have gone so far as calling him corrupt, saying he is dead and a stand-in was used instead, that his Children’s Fund is nothing but a conduit for illegal cash, that the ANC held a gun to his head (not literally I hope) and promised not to bury him? Some of the comments are unprintable and should not have been allowed in the first place as they border on hate speech.
How did it come to this?
I suppose it was inevitable that the ruling party, facing its worst backlash in its 15-year-history including a splinter party called Congress of the People, had to wheel its icon Nelson Mandela out of retirement into the limelight one last time. His iconic status and near-sainthood can only be good for the party. Right? Not exactly but time will tell.
The former president, the world’s symbol of reconciliation, the very embodiment of the spirit of forgiveness could not have anticipated the barbed-wire comments that were going to greet his appearance on an ANC ticket.
The same people who mourned his retirement and the lack of the Mandela spirit in the ruling party suddenly wish he had been hanged by the apartheid state in the first place. They did not say as much but under their breaths they are saying far worse.
It is not the swiftness of the comments but the viciousness that is astounding. The same people who used to speak fondly of Madiba now vilify him with gay abandon. The very man who took a risky move and donned the number 6 jersey for the Springboks – the national rugby team – in 1996 is today being turned on by the very people who saw the messianic spirit in him back then? Madiba’s gesture was met with incredulity and anger by some sections of the black people who saw the image of apartheid being given the final stamp of approval by the man who had a moral authority to do so.
Today he will read those comments and say: Was it all in vain? Hopefully his gatekeepers will keep those comments away from him.
One of those comments said: “So, he endorses criminals who openly admit to crimes and corruption. Is this a ‘birds of a feather scenario’? If I commit a crime I will be punished to the full extent of the law and beyond – that is what the ANC preaches every day. So, are your own people Gods? Is this why little Zuma says the ANC will rule until Jesus comes?
“You make me sick to my guts. Who the hell do you think you are – calling other people dogs, snakes and so forth. Let me tell you something – I am a white South African who grew up here. BUT YOU DO NOT REPRESENT ME !!!! I hope you get oh so badly kicked in the teeth. SHYSTERS !!!!”
For his sake, I hope he never reads this. As Aubrey Matshiqi says, the viciousness of the commentary on Mandela’s endorsement is just the bursting open of a sore that many people have had since 1994. This sore has been festering since then. Madiba just did not understand that he should be a good boy and keep quiet.
He forgot his place and now the good citizens who once called him a Messiah would go as far as calling him Lucifer? I wonder what the man I met in the Eastern Cape is thinking or doing.
Madiba was in his neck of the woods this weekend and did the unthinkable. Does he still regard him as a great man or a former great man who has lost the way?
I wonder . . .