Gavin Evans reflects on the qualities that made Mandela such a revered leader and symbol of reconciliation, and how, despite his flaws, he contributed immensely to making South Africa, once a world pariah, a better place.
I was one of the thousands who watched Nelson Mandela, the South African liberation struggle hero, leave prison on 11 February 1990, and then mount the podium in front of Cape Town’s City Hall, expressing the hope that the apartheid government would agree to negotiations so that there might no longer be the need for armed struggle against apartheid to continue. He said:
I fretted about what I’d seen during my decade of membership of the African National Congress , the leading liberation movement for which he was jailed: the seeping corruption, elbowing for position, the exile old guard’s insistence on primacy. And, as he left prison hand in hand with his wife, Winnie, I feared the influence of a woman who’d already been convicted of kidnapping, and accused of so much more.
Mandela’s extraordinary gifts – his integrity and self-discipline, intelligence and intellectual curiosity, depth of perception, strategic vision and tactical nous, and his steely resolve – set him apart. Towards the end of his 27 years in prison, that meant leading in a direction that felt uncomfortable to some, through conducting secret talks with the government.Throughout this period he kept Oliver Tambo’s exile leadership of the ANC informed. But there were misgivings about his role.
The four years of negotiations saw more people killed in political violence – mostly from the state and its proxies, with an estimated 14,000 people dying. Mandela could not prevent this mayhem, but his authority and gravitas kept the negotiations to end apartheid afloat. Authority and momentum seeped from De Klerk into Mandela.
There were real changes, including houses for the poor and water supplies for three million, with two million connected to the electricity grid. But job-creation programmes were abandoned and the gap between rich and poor remained even if the ranks of the rich became more racially mixed – and crime rates remained disturbingly high.
Mandela’s talent for reading the political runes was not always matched by his ability to read people. Internal political leaders who’d publicly criticised Winnie were sidelined but his patrician’s hope that he could have a benign influence on her evaporated. They separated in 1992 and divorced in 1995.Mandela’s tendency to defer to the exile leadership came at a cost.
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