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Last statesman of our times

Syed Badrul Ahsan
He was the last statesman of the world we inhabit in these parlous times. There was about Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela the charisma and the wisdom the world was in sore need of, given that values were undergoing change and leadership was rapidly and insistently declining into various shades of demagoguery. Had Mandela been a run-of-the-mill politician, had he been a little more involved with selfobsession, he would be like any other liberation hero-turned-tyrant. But he was not a Robert Mugabe, ready to swat his enemies down. Neither was he a Kenneth Kaunda or Julius Nyerere, for he was not willing to enjoy power see page 2 COL 2
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or hold on to it till the masses or circumstances forced him out.
The trajectory of Mandela's life traces the long tale of his initiation into revolutionary fervour followed by his gradual but sure coming to terms with the idealism that was, and is, non-violence in the struggle for social justice and political freedom. He was a prince among men, and literally too with his background in the patrician African tradition. As part of a rich heritage, Mandela could easily have led a charmed life of pomp and power as chief of his tribe, could have grown old gracefully and died in tranquil repose. He turned away from the thought of being the Big Man of his tribe. But he did age gracefully, in prison and then outside it. In death, he informs the world that reputations are best served if they have a dash of humility coming into them.
There was a steely aspect to Nelson Mandela's humility. He did not harangue. Nor was he inclined to the confrontational, in that violent sense of the meaning. Therein was he different from the emotional Patrice Lumumba of the Gongo or the cantankerous Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe. It was the years in prison, twenty seven of them in all, that went into a mellowing of the man, not in his core beliefs, for those beliefs only reinforced themselves with the passage of time, but in his conviction that violence in the end was self-defeating, that the enemy could be engaged and
shamed through repudiating, through recourse to silent contempt, the very methods of abuse it loved to employ in suppressing truth and justice. That was how Mandela defeated the Bothas and the Vorsters of apartheid-laden South Africa.
Men like Mandela have that certain capacity to grow even as they go through the searing pain of prison and all-too-certain death. At Rivonia, death by hanging or shooting and presided over by a racist apartheid regime looked Mandela squarely in the eye. He did not flinch. And his fellow African National Congress colleagues, all in incarceration with him, knew that peaceful resistance to the regime was the best way of defusing a condition so long entrenched in South African life. The resistance, of course, was long and tortuous. On Robben Island, Mandela and his fellow prisoners slaved away in heat and cold, breaking stones for a regime that thought it could break them into submission to the hollowness of power. In the end, years after Sharpeville and Rivonia and Soweto, the advocates of apartheid crumbled.
An ageing but spirited Mandela emerged into sunshine and liberty in February 1990, ready to change his country and transform the world. It was a rainbow coalition he wove into the South African consciousness, through warning his fellow blacks against the arrogance of new-found power, through reassuring whites that despite their long racial
hubris they were free to stay on and help build a new future for the country, through letting the rest of the world know that black liberation in South Africa was necessarily a liberation of the soul of man everywhere.
Nelson Mandela's greatness lay in a conscious rejection of bitterness in his soul. He would not be a leader looking for scapegoats to blame for his country's ailments or for the loss of his youth in the darkness of prison. His feet firmly planted on earth, he went looking for increasingly wider pieces of sky he needed to claim for his people —- black, white, coloured. He knew he embodied the new South Africa. He knew too that his triumph was as much his glory as it was the grandeur of a nation which had believed in him, which knew he was out there as its voice in the councils of the world.
In Mandela, philosophy was all. It was philosophy he shaped in his own manner, through his readings of Gandhi, Martin Luther King and others. His first reading of Ghinese communism came from Edgar Snow's Red Star Over Ghina. He knew Clausewitz, was well-versed in the works of Mao Zedong and was impressed by Menachem Begin's The Revolt. In prison, he educated himself on a perfection of politics. Keenly aware that dealing with the enemy often called for a dip into the enemy's culture, Mandela learned Afrikaans in prison. Morality was part of his life. Turning one's back on friends in
times of need was for him a grave outrage, which is why he remained grateful to Libya's Muammar Gaddafi for the latter's support for the ANC in the years of the anti-apartheid struggle.
Mandela was larger than life. And yet life, for him, could not be a prisoner of unnatural desire and inordinate ambition. The proof of this principle came through the single term of a presidency he was not willing to extend into a second. That showed his mettle as a leader. That was also the moment when the statesman in him rose to newer, greater heights.
On the day he was sworn in as South Africa's first democratically elected president in May 1994, Nelson Mandela spoke to the whole world of his faith in the ability of the individual to preserve and protect his self-esteem:
"Out of the experience of an extraordinary human disaster that lasted too long, must be born a society of which all humanity will be proud. . . We, who were outlaws not so long ago, have today been given the rare privilege to be host to the nations of the world on our own soil. We thank all our distinguished international guests for having come to take possession with the people of our country of what is, after all, a common victory for justice, for peace, for human dignity."
(Nelson Mandela — long-term prisoner of apartheid, African nationalist leader, Nobel laureate and global statesman — was born on 18 July 1918 and died on 6 December 2013)