Mandela: A Critical Life
by Tom Lodge
OUP, £14.99; 304pp
ON FEBRUARY 11, 1990, television pictures of Nelson Mandela’s dignified walk to freedom, after 27 years and six months as a prisoner of South Africa’s apartheid regime, were beamed round the world.
Tom Lodge, a distinguished South African academic who now lives in Ireland, looks at what characteristics and circumstances created Mandela’s global status, when the man himself was silenced and shut away for so long.
Despite its title, his book is no hatchet job, but it tries to present a more complicated narrative of the ANC leader’s life than others have done.
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Africa specialists emphasise Mandela’s aristocratic Xhosa upbringing as an important part of his later charismatic power and political confidence. Modernists see a man who decisively rejected patriarchal tribal life to fight for real democracy. Revolutionaries concentrate on his conversion to violent struggle and ignore his desire to create an African bourgeoisie. Lodge finds elements of each version true, but not sufficient, and claims that all underestimate the influence of his Anglocentric Methodist mission schooling.
Within ten years of arriving in Johannesburg in the early 1940s, Mandela had joined a tiny black elite of qualified lawyers and was a leading member of the ANC. Mentors who helped him to fund his legal studies and become an articled clerk in a white law firm, a rare privilege then for an African, recall how he impressed them as a young man of exceptional qualities and high ideals. More importantly, he had charm and a genuine empathy, which allowed him to negotiate the awkward social situations that apartheid often presented. The ANC deliberately nurtured and exploited the Mandela charisma.
He was the public face of the 1950s Defiance Campaign of civil disobedience. Mandela’s international reputation really took off during the Rivonia trial. On April 20, 1962, he delivered a four-hour statement in court, both a personal and political testimony. He set out why he had turned to violent politics, yet affirmed that his ideal remained “a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities”, an ideal for which he was prepared to die.
The worldwide movement for sanctions against South Africa that followed was personified in the Free Mandela Campaign; for three decades his youthful image adorned a thousand posters.
When he emerged, at the age of 71, he was too old and out of touch to be truly effective in executive politics. As President he delegated much of the running of affairs to his deputy, Thabo Mbeki. No one, however, could match his moral authority. He set up the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and his acts of empathy towards whites, such as appearing at the finals of the rugby World Cup wearing a Springbok jersey, were vital to peaceful acceptance of majority rule.
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Mandela’s trajectory cannot be extricated from that of his party. Lodge shows that although he was powerfully influenced by the political analysis of its communist leaders, his fight was against racism not capitalism. An African nationalist, he has always led by example — and remains the ANC’s greatest asset.