Nelson Mandela’s first goodbye

Are you looking for a hero among those faces illuminated by the last glow of the century? Well, there are quite a few of them, history-seeki...

Are you looking for a hero among those faces illuminated by the last glow of the century? Well, there are quite a few of them, history-seeking rulers trapped in the fantasy of national redemption, faded flower children with missiles of peace, revolutionaries with the newest blueprints of prisons. But there is one man who is distinctively singular, a sprightly old man in his colourful shirt and dark glasses, reaching out to Soweto slum-dwellers now, to the Spice Girls then, to his erstwhile tormentors a moment later.

But he doesn’t have to reach out to history. He is the author of a defining chapter of liberation in the history of resistance. As his authorised biographer says, ‘‘he has become a universal hero for the twentieth century. In a time of vote counters, spin doctors and focus groups, he conjures up an earlier age of liberators, war leaders and revolutionaries. To conservative traditionalists he evokes memories of great men who personified their own country; to the liberal left, battered by lost causes, he brings new hope that ‘righteous crusade can still prevail.’’ Nelson Mandela: the last action hero of the twentieth century.

President Mandela is waving goodbye to South Africa. A historic retreat in which merge the themes of struggle and sacrifice, hate and forgiveness, power and responsibility, truth and reconciliation. This century’s most famous prisoner is today leaving office as the world’s tallest president. For 27 years from the notorious 1963 Rivonia trial, Mandela remained the prisoner of an ideology that divided humanity in black and white. As the dispossessed resident of Robben Island, Mandela, immortalised in faded photographs, symbolised the trampled passion of freedom. His isolation, his loneliness, his sacrificial determination, gave the anti-apartheid struggle of the African National Congress an internationally recognisable human face.

It was the resonant symbolism of Mandela that neutralised the occasional brutal expressions of ANC’s freedom agenda. As the revolution of Lenin ended with the sabotage of Gorbachev, in South Africa too, D.F. Malan’s institution of hate got its rebel in F.W. de Klerk. The prisoner was freed, apartheid was buried, and in the first multi-racial elections, Nelson Mandela was elected president. It was a smooth transition from prisonerhood to presidentship.

Excerpted from an editorial in ‘The Indian Express’, June 4, 1999

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