African National Congress - Nelson Mandela

Its impossible to make small talk with an icon

Which is why, to find my tongue,

I stare down at those crunched-up

One-time boxers knuckles.

In their flattened pudginess I find

Something partly reassuring,

Something slightly troubling,

Something, at least, not transcendent.

Jeremy Cronin, 1997

The South African cartoonist Zapiro celebrated Nelson Mandelas eightieth birthday with a scene called Nelson Mandela: The Early Years. An African primary school teacher, holding sheets of paper her tiny wards have handed in, confides to a colleague: This one cant make up his mind: he put down lawyer, activist, freedom fighter, prisoner of conscience, president, reconciler, nation-builder, visionary and 20th century icon. Zapiros homage not only provides a thumbnail sketch of a famous career but also hints at the dilemma confronting anyone writing a short biography of the man. So many aspects of Mandelas life are familiar that they challenge a biographer to find fresh meaning in them: the rural childhood, an early adulthood shaped by opposition to apartheid, a watershed decision to take up arms, a famous trial and a life sentence; and after twenty-seven years in jail, a remarkable policy of reconciliation and his election as the first president of democratic South Africa.

Consider, too, the quite extraordinary veneration and affection he won from people across the world never more obvious than in the torrent of tributes and avalanche of encomia that greeted his death. How does any observer sift the actual life of an individual from the idealised hero: a secular saint, symbol not only of his own nations rebirth but moral leader of humankind, whose death reminded a world of its hunger for hope, for a better future? How does one trace the tentative steps, mistakes and mishaps, the flaws and failures which are the lot of any human life from an air-brushed, formulaic, eulogised life-story that seems to transcend mortal measures?

There is an element of retrieval involved in a posthumous Mandela biography, however brief: an attempt to rescue the man from the myth. After all, what was the legacy of the man who died in December 2013? Those who rushed to wrap themselves in Mandelas mantle included Havana and the White House, Israelis and Palestinians, the Vatican and ayatollahs, Chinese government and Chinas dissidents and countless others across every political spectrum. Does any death so universally mourned not require a life and its achievements to have been universalised and sanitised, stripped of complexity, hallowed and hollowed, remade as an identikit icon? And if so, the challenge is to arrive at a biographical narrative that recognises Mandela as a compelling and complex political actor, but subject to the kinds of constraints and contradictions that describe any career.

So this biography locates Mandela in his time and place, indicating the social and political currents that bore him. It reminds readers of a point made frequently by Mandela himself: that his own achievements were part of broader, collective efforts and that they cannot be otherwise understood. And it shows that his political efforts and those of the African National Congress (which he served for seventy years) involved the compromises, short cuts and shortcomings that are intrinsic to any politics in a complex world.

To write a biography that eschews hagiography is not an attempt to belittle Nelson Mandela, nor to carry out some sort of hatchet job on his reputation. Mandelas stature as a giant is beyond question. As nationalist leader, his place in his countrys history is comparable to those of Atatrk, Nasser, Nehru, Nkrumah, Sukarno and Ho Chi Minh; as exemplar of moral and civic virtues, he ranks with Lincoln, Gandhi and Martin Luther King (although he did not share the last twos adherence to non-violence as a principle); as a twentieth-century public figure who inspired love and respect, he belonged to a tiny club including perhaps Pope John XXIII, Mother Teresa and the Dalai Lama. Mandela observed J.M. Coetzee was, by the time of his death, universally held to be a great man: he may well be the last of the great men, as the concept of greatness retires into the historical shadows.

Yet the conundrum persists: how much of his towering reputation derived directly from Mandela-the-man, his principles and practice, his deeds and words and how much was the product of a constructed version, Mandela-the-myth, an image deliberately burnished for political purposes? It is worth reflecting that Mandelas place in history is guaranteed by his role after his release in February 1990; the man who walked into the transfixed gaze of the global media that Sunday afternoon was already a legend. He was the worlds most famous political prisoner; he was absent, yet imminently present; his silence reverberated. He had acquired an almost posthumous eminence, showered with honorary degrees and prizes.

How does one explain so singular a renown? In order to answer this question, this biography does not begin with Mandelas childhood and then trace his life throughout ninety-five years; instead, it commences with a history of Mandela-the-myth, the making of the icon, and then resumes the more conventional form of a life history.

Cronin, J., Poem for Mandela, from Even the Dead: Poems, Parables and a Jeremiad (David Philip, 1997), p.30.

Coetzee, J.M., On Nelson Mandela (19182013), New York Review of Books , 9 January 2014.

Nixon, R., Homelands, Harlem and Hollywood: South African Culture and the World Beyond (Routledge, 1994), p. 176.