WORLD VIEW:HOW CAN you not love Nelson Mandela? The grandfatherly peace icon, with his twinkling eyes and sharp wit, he has - in a moral sense - risen above politics, and, in the process, become the closest thing the world has to a living saint, writes Joe Humphreys.
Who could begrudge him all the affection and plaudits as he turned 90 yesterday? The man is a treasure, one of nature's - dare one say, God's - finest creations. But enough superlatives! Much as Mandela deserves high praise, there is a danger of creating a cult around his persona. This, moreover, is being done against his expressed wishes.
The former freedom fighter, who spent 27 years in jail before becoming South Africa's first black president, has continuously warned against hero-worshipping, dampening praise of his life's work with reminders of his faults and limitations. "Rather than being an asset, I'm more of a decoration," he famously declared of his presidency. "I'm an ordinary person. I have made serious mistakes, I have serious weaknesses." There is more than false modesty to such statements. There is a plea against exceptionalism.
One of the most troubling aspects of Mandela's deification is the way in which he has been commoditised, diluted, or diminished by association.
World leaders queue up to be photographed in his presence. But they embrace a very specific - and unthreatening - version of Mandela. It is not the "terrorist" he was once categorised as by British and American governments, but the kindly figure who wears Springbok rugby jerseys and ruffles the hair of children at his feet. It is the jocose prophet seen hanging out with Bono and Charlize Theron. It is the global brand, the face which adorns countless coffee-cups, coasters and kitchen aprons (some of which, I confess, I bought myself while living in South Africa). It is, in other words, a crude pastiche of the real man.
"I have always regarded myself, in the first place, as an African patriot," Mandela told his prosecutors at the famous Rivonia Trial of 1964.
And, arguably, he has kept faithful to that description ever since. He has always shown heightened concern for the welfare of his fellow Africans. He has embodied the "proudly South African" ideal - to use that phrase now adopted as a national slogan in Pretoria. In his seminal 1953 address to the African National Congress, in which he famously declared "there is no easy walk to freedom", he told his comrades: "Teach the children that Africans are not one iota inferior to Europeans."
This side of Mandela is less well remembered; the defiant, uncompromising tribesman who refused to condemn violence and told his supporters from his prison cell: "Between the anvil of united mass action and the hammer of the armed struggle we shall crush apartheid."
Today Mandela is best remembered as a peace-broker, as someone who turned the other cheek and helped to bring South Africa back from the brink of civil war. But before he was a reconciler, Mandela was a revolutionary. And the latter is still perhaps the most accurate label for him. While his public pronouncements are less politically-charged than before, they convey a loathing of injustice, racism and poverty. If not a revolutionary in the strictest sense, he is certainly a reformer who detests complacency and wishes to see a fundamental change in the world order.
A further, troubling aspect of the cult of Mandela is the way in which it helps to propagate certain pessimistic views of Africa in the West. A popular thesis runs that Mandela is the exception that proves the rule, the rule being that African leaders are inherently corrupt and incompetent. (A more frequent refrain - uttered by many a western commentator - is that South Africa will sink in the mire of postcolonial decay as soon as Madiba, to use the clan name by which he is better known in his homeland, dies.)
Mandela's successor Thabo Mbeki is very sensitive about such claims, having noticed - in the words of Mark Gevisser, Mbeki's biographer - "the way the negative press about Mbeki seemed to accumulate in an almost inverse proportion to the adulation heaped upon his superior". Gevisser remarked: "It seemed to Mbeki that Mandela was actually colluding in the world's impression that he was 'the one good native', the consequence of which was the perception that all other blacks - Mbeki included - were incompetent." Mbeki's paranoia might be unjustified. But it is easy to understand his annoyance.
Echoing the now widely-held opinion, Barney Mthombothi, editor of the Johannesburg-based Financial Mail, wrote this week: "Mandela united the country. Mbeki has divided it . . . It's sad to see the current lot trashing his legacy." We can speculate on just what Mandela thinks about Mbeki, whose stances on Zimbabwe and HIV/Aids have been the two main black marks on a mixed report card as president. However, Madiba would not go along with the Afropessimism in much comment about the continent today.
Tellingly, Madiba chose Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf - Liberia's first female president and probably the best of a new crop of leaders in Africa - to speak at the central event to mark his birthday celebrations in Soweto this week. To Mandela's approval, Johnson-Sirleaf spoke about the "rebirth" of their continent. "A new Africa is unfolding in front of our eyes and it is within our reach," she declared.
To many, her words seemed grossly optimistic. But Mandela understood them. For this perhaps has been his greatest gift: to never give up hope.
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Joe Humphreys is an Irish Times journalist, formerly based in South Africa