South Africa's Hour

The late Nelson Mandela has been fairly universally recognized as a model for his times, possessed of a forgiving mentality, an attitude that his was only one side to the story, opening himself to the reality that there are attitudes, opinions and circumstances requiring careful consideration, to understand the dynamics that produce separation between people. With that understanding he dedicated himself to overcoming solitudes.

That knowledge did not descend upon him from birth. He cannily intuited that to settle differences one must understand the differences, interpret them, exhibit a degree of empathy even while sturdily in defence of one's own reality. He is described as the consummate politician, possessed of an intelligent acumen and a diplomat's thoughtfulness. That was his public side. And this is where he succeeded at becoming what much of the world now heralds as an extraordinary and just peacemaker.

And then there was the private Mandela, a man who was unfaithful to his first wife, and found it within himself to abandon her and their four children for another woman whom he favoured. Mandela found it necessary in his estimation to abandon his initial stance of peaceful resistance to the situation of racial apartheid in his country, and return violence for violence. He was responsible for promoting a youth wing of the ANC and a military wing as well.

And this last, and the active acts of violence which took many lives in the majority black response to minority white rule and the dreadful restrictions on black aspiration is what earned him a death sentence, commuted to life imprisonment and 27 years' incarceration before countries like Canada persuaded their counterparts to relentlessly lobby for his release and the end of apartheid.

Winnie Mandela never gave up the violence while her man was in prison. The horrible practise of necklacing as punishment for those willing to buckle under white rule, and her personal involvement in the murder of a young man, Stompie Moeketsi, by her Mandela United Football Club represented the violent phase and face of the African National Congress which had obeyed Nelson Mandela's search for peace through accommodation.

Despite Nelson Mandela's embrace of peaceful means to achieve the end of apartheid and white rule in South Africa, he made personal decisions to ally himself with leaders and heads of state whose human rights records and whose dedication to violence to achieve their goals did not reflect well on this man of peace. His friendliness with dictators and terrorists, recognizing them not for what they were but as resistors against tyranny with whom he felt a common accord belied his reputation.

His legacy as an influence on the world stage for justice and goodness is deserved in large part. But there is the dark side to the man and that too is deserved in reflection of the choices that he made. When American President Barack Obama, as the first black American to ascend to the U.S. presidency, echoing Nelson Mandela's achievement as the first black South African to take his country to black rule, spoke at the Mandela memorial South Africans feted him, loving what he represents.

Yet South Africa is no model of racial and social, economic and religious equality. Its society is fraught with crime, social inequity, lack of opportunity, poverty and misery. The freedom and prosperity that black South Africans anticipated with the ascent of the ANC and Nelson Mandela to overcome the wretchedness of the past has done nothing to cope with tribal antipathies, social inequality, labour inequities and quality of life for millions of poverty-stricken, crime-afflicted South Africans.