For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings:
How some have been deposed:
Some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping killed;
All murdered: for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps death his court, and there the antick sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp. . .
The tale of kings, as Shakespeare's Richard II mournfully testified, is a tale of murder, of power usurped and held by violence. Yet sometimes, if rarely, kings must have been chosen from the crowd not because of their violence but for their ability to enchant: magic lay at the command of such creatures. Bewitched, men and women were drawn to obey them, to grant them fealty, to accept them as lords of their lives.
Regal presence
No-one who had the enormous pleasure and privilege of being present for Nelson Mandela's address at TCD in the Independent Newspapers Annual Lecture the other night could have been in any doubt about the man's regal presence. He is a king; and we who had the great good fortune to be there were hard put to prevent ourselves falling on one knee and calling him our liege-lord. He is a Xhosa; yet he does not look like the Xhosa. His skin is not black but yellow-brown, his flat features are not so much Bantu as those of the aboriginal peoples of the Kalarahi, the Koi-San. Like the Koi-San - once wrongly called Bushmen - he has epicanthic eyelids, with a fold of skin on the inner corner of the eye. And though, like all incomers, the Bantu Xhosa looked down on the strange people they found in the new lands they conquered, they were mystified by them also. For these KoiSan seemed to possess magical qualities which the Xhosa themselves lacked. So too did the fir-bolgs of Ireland once enchant their new Gaelic masters; so also did the Picts of the Scottish Highlands similarly beguile their new lords, giving us, if only in folk-etymology, the word "pixie".
"Above all," observed the anthropologist Colin Turnbull of the Koi-San peoples, "having mastered the art of exploiting their desert environment so that it always provides with enough for their minimal needs and demands, and having mastered the art of living together without formal government, without law, without mutual recrimination or self-seeking, the Bushmen add something else to life, making of it something far beyond the business of survival.
"They add an incredibly rich belief, a religious belief in a kind of dream world that beautifies every insect, every leaf, every grain. . .Perhaps the very severity of their daily life leads the Bushmen to a greater awareness of the world around them. They see beauty where others would only see ugliness; kindness where others would only see cruelty, for they understand it all. The Bushman sees himself as part of one single universe. . .He is not concerned with living this life in an ideal manner so as to win for himself a better life in another world; he is concerned with living this life as effectively as possible."
Mutual dignity
Is this not all familiar? Does it not sound almost like a definition of what Nelson Mandela stands for, of tolerance, respect, mutual dignity, rich in so much and poor only in that single quality of recrimination? Yet these words were written about not a single individual but an ethnos a quarter-of-a-century ago, when he was languishing in solitary confinement in Robben Island and nobody knew he possessed these qualities. And all that aside, even if he were of KoiSan ancestry, how could he have acquired these characteristics to the point of being their very embodiment if he were raised as a Xhosa?
I haven't a clue. Maybe within his Tembu sub-group, the culture of the Kalahari lived on in covert but powerful ways. Whatever about that, I do know that there are things in this world we do not understand. How is it possible for Nelson Mandela to magnetise a room by his mere presence? How can his modesty and his self-effacement be so utterly compelling? How can his gentleness be as impenetrable as tempered steel?
Prison cell
Apartheid could not quell him; extraordinarily, invisibly, he radiated freedom from his prison cell. Logic, science, anthropology, psychiatry - all the sciences of humanity could not explain the power of this man, for he was as irresistible in confinement as he had been and would be again when at liberty. Finally, as he walked free from his prison cell, it was as if a new light shone over Africa and the lands beyond, reminding us of Colin Turnbull's words about the Koi-San: "[his] belief brings his dreams down to the world he lives in, giving it colour and shape and meaning, giving this life some special purpose and beauty, making it at the same time more liveable and infinitely more worth living."
What strange instinct of self-survival prevented the Arikaners from murdering this man in custody? It would have been so easy, and it would have been their very undoing. That South Africa managed the transition from the tyranny of apartheid to being a multicultural democracy is due to Nelson Mandela alone. By chance, wordlessly was I able to shake his hand the other night; by chance, wordlessly was I at hand to move his chair as he rose to leave the dinner-table. And I am content.