By HE, High Commissioner LL Mnguni*
Programme Director
Members of the Diplomatic Corps
Esteemed dignitaries
Comrades and friends
Ladies and Gentlemen
As we commemorate the 3rd anniversary of Nelson Mandela’s passing, we have an opportunity to pause and tap into our collective memories and reflect on the life of South Africa’s greatest son, who by virtue of his deeds was deemed the father of the nation. As we reflect, we need to spare a moment to think about the profound impact that Madiba, as he was affectionately called, has had on all of us with the special emphasis on the impact that he had on South African Literature and Creative Arts in general.
As we all know by now, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela was born on 18 July 1918 in the village of Mvezo in Umtata, then a part of South Africa’s Cape Province. Mandela’s middle name is Rolihlahla, which literally means ‘pulling the branch of a tree’. He was given the name Nelson by his white missionary school teacher. The 18th of July was declared in 2009 by the United Nations General Assembly as the International Nelson Mandela Day. This is the first time that the United Nations (UN) has designated a day dedicated to a person. The UN has also asked the people of the world to set aside 67 minutes of their day to undertake a task that would contribute to bringing joy or relief to the millions of disadvantaged and vulnerable people of the world.
The relationship between politics and culture is a subject that Mandela addresses extensively in his memoirs. And this is fitting, given his own embrace of culture and sports as a protest tool, a means of expressing his humanity while imprisoned, as a way of continuing his education when formal learning programs were closed to him in jail, and as a vehicle for his message and for national reconciliation after his release. Pop culture has loved Nelson Mandela back, too, whether musicians were using their work to call for the end of the apartheid regime and his release from prison, or after his release, various public figures were eager to dress him in the regalia of their sports teams, have him on their stages, and even cast him in their movies. In a sense, Mandela is the first figure of the mass media age to be internationally acclaimed as a great man. And among his many other accomplishments, it’s worth taking a moment to remember his engagement with culture, and his understanding that access to the arts both lets us reaffirm our humanity and gives us a powerful tool to force others to recognize it.
Programme Director,
Mandela’s concern with culture shows up early in Long Walk To Freedom in a discussion of his language skills. When confronted with the fact that he did not speak Sesotho, Mandela acknowledged that “I had unconsciously succumbed to the ethnic divisions fostered by the white government and I did not know how to speak to my own kith and kin. Without language, one cannot talk to people and understand them; one cannot share their hopes and aspirations, grasp their history, appreciate their poetry, or savour their songs.”
Songs would become important tools for him as Mandela gained prominence as an anti-apartheid speaker. At a 1953 meeting, he used music to defuse a potentially dangerous situation at a protest: “The crowd began yelling and booing, and I saw that matters could turn extremely ugly if the crowd did not control itself. I jumped to the podium and started singing a well-known protest song, and as soon as I pronounced the first few words the crowd joined in. I feared that the police might have opened fire if the crowd had become too unruly.”
Other times, music became a way for Mandela to thumb his nose at the police who monitored ANC protests. He describes one night when “I began to sing a freedom song, the lyrics of which say ‘There are the enemies, let us take their weapons and attack them.’ I sang this song and the crowd joined in, and when the song was finished, I pointed to the police and said, ‘There, there are our enemies!’ The crowd again started cheering and made aggressive gestures in the direction of the police. The police looked nervous and a number of them pointed back at me as if to say, ‘Mandela, we will get you for this.’”
And after he began to serve prison sentences, Mandela frequently discusses how culture both built solidarity between himself and his fellow prisoners, and helped them manage the psychological stresses of incarceration. After he was jailed in Johannesburg Prison, known as the Fort, in 1956, Mandela describes Reverend James Calata lecturing on African Music and activist Vuvisile Mini leading choruses of freedom songs. In one memorable instance, M.B. Yengwa, who was Zulu and the provincial secretary of the Natal African National Congress, performed a piece honouring Shaka, the Zulu king.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Mandela drew leadership lessons from theatre, too. In a prisoners’ production of Antigone, Mandela was cast as Creon. As the establishment king trying to maintain control of his city-state during a civil war, and who must deal with Antigone’s resistance to the unjust law that forbids her to bury her brother in the city walls, it was a role that gave Mandela the opportunity to put himself in the position of the government he’d worked so hard to oppose. “Creon will not listen to Antigone, nor does he listen to anyone but his own inner demons,” Mandela explained what he took from the play ”that a leader must temper justice with mercy. It was Antigone who symbolized our struggle; she was, in her own way, a freedom fighter, for she defied the law on the grounds that it was unjust.”
And in one long passage, he describes the movies that liberalization brought to Robben Island and the prisoners’ debates about everything from Elizabeth Taylor’s performance in Cleopatra to documentaries about the Hell’s Angels.
He later said “I was not interested in the Hell’s Angels, but the larger question that concerned me was whether we had, as Strini suggested, become stuck in a mind-set that was no longer revolutionary. We had been in prison for more than fifteen years; I had been in prison for nearly eighteen. The world that we left was long gone. The danger was that our ideas had become frozen in time. Prison is a still point in a turning world, and it is very easy to remain in the same place in jail while the world moves on”.
When Mandela was released from prison, music was one of the ways he judged how much South Africa had changed during his incarceration. “When I had been young, the people of Qunu were not political at all; they were unaware of the struggle for African rights. People accepted life as it was and did not dream of changing it,” Mandela noted of the area where he’d grown up. “But when I returned I heard the schoolchildren of Qunu singing songs about Oliver Tambo and Umkhonto we Sizwe, and I marvelled at how knowledge of the struggle had by then seeped into every corner of African society.”
In 1995, after he’d become the first democratically elected President of South Africa, Mandela competed for and helped his country win the right to host the Rugby World Cup in the first year of South Africa’s eligibility to compete for the title after the end of apartheid. Serious political violence had occurred in the run-up to Mandela’s 1994 election, and Mandela’s embrace of the national team was a major gesture of cultural solidarity with white South Africans.
Even before apartheid was instituted in 1948, when athletic teams travelled to South Africa, they brought all-white rosters. And when the Springboks travelled, they met with anti-apartheid protests and increased security at competitions. Mandela both acknowledged this history and stepped over it when he dressed in team gear and presented the Springboks with their World Cup trophy. His embrace by the crowd was a major show of support for Mandela by white South Africans, one that’s been recounted in ESPN’s documentary “The 16th Man” and dramatized in the feature film “Invictus”.
The celebration of Mandela Day recognizes and honours our former President’s commitment to the objective of building a National Democratic Society; that is united, non-racial, non-sexist, democratic and prosperous. It also honours his contribution to the reconstruction and development of our country and to the equally important task of building a Better Africa and a Better World.
As this is an extension of the Nelson Mandela Day commemoration, it is an opportunity for all the people in the world to set aside time to be of service to fellow human beings who are less fortunate than us and also as the theme of this gathering demands, to share with you the impact that Mr Mandela had on South African Literature and creative Arts.
Programme Director
Madiba’s love and dedication to educate the youth throughout the world needs no further elaboration. He firmly believed that to begin to make tangible change in the quality of life of any nation, you needed to educate its children. As we speak today, the world is abuzz with students from all walks of life, some in prestigious institutions, through the various Nelson Mandela Educational projects. This illustrates that Madiba was indeed a global internationalist, who not only belonged to South Africa, but the entire globe.
His way of life and beliefs has been documented by a number of authors who have written books and biographies about this global icon before and after his death. Many analysts have described Mr Nelson Mandela in different ways. However all of them believe that Mr Mandela was a practical politician, rather than an intellectual scholar or political theorist. According to biographer Tom Lodge, “for Mandela, politics has always been primarily about enacting stories, about making narratives, primarily about morally exemplary conduct, and only secondarily about ideological vision, more about means rather than ends. Mandela identified as both an African nationalist, an ideological position he held since joining the ANC, and a democratic socialist. He advocated the ultimate establishment of a classless society, with Sampson describing him as “openly opposed to capitalism, private land-ownership and the power of big money”.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Mr Mandela took political ideas from other thinkers, among them Indian independence leaders like Gandhi and Nehru, African-American activists, and African nationalists like Nkrumah, and fitted them into the South African situation. At the same time he rejected other aspects of their thought, such as the anti-white sentiment of many African nationalists. He also synthesized both counter-cultural and hegemonic views, for instance by drawing upon ideas from Afrikaner nationalism. Although he presented himself in an autocratic manner in several speeches, he was a devout believer in democracy and abided by majority decisions even when deeply disagreeing with them.
Nelson Mandela has created a rich legacy of written work, much of it biographical in nature, some leaning toward photographic record or even fictional anthology; all, of course, inspirational. Some of the books that were inspired by Mr Mandela are as follows:
1 Nelson Mandela: The Struggle Is My Life (1990)
This first book now acts as a collection of Mandela’s speeches and writings between 1944 and 1990.
2 Long Walk to Freedom (1994)
Mandela recounts the details of his life, as a child in Cape Provence, university education, and rise to presidential leadership through his fight against apartheid and time spent in prison.
3 Mandela: An Illustrated Autobiography (1996)
Nearly 200 photographs cover Mandela’s childhood, young professional career, family life, protests, courtroom battles, release and eventual electoral involvement, accompanied by an abridged text taken from “Long Walk to Freedom.”
4 Favourite African Folktales (2004, 2007; audiobooks 2009)
A fondness for Africa’s rich heritage permeates this collection, whose contents are derived from all over the vast continent. Individual stories are available in audiobook form, read by the likes of Charlize Theron, Matt Damon, Helen Mirren, Samuel L. Jackson and Alan Rickman.
5 In His Own Words (2004)
This collection of speeches spans not only Mandela’s pre-imprisonment days, but also his election as Nobel Laureate and South African President, ably illustrating his character as an articulate, assured, intelligent and persuasive peacemaker. With a foreword written by Bill Clinton and Kofi Annan.
6 A Prisoner in the Garden by The Nelson Mandela Foundation (2006)
A second photo book, but one in which the passages lifted from “Long Walk to Freedom” are supplemented by images of original handwritten letters, diary entries and memoirs, official documents, and release forms.
7 Conversations with Myself (2011)
The most recent anthology of Nelson Mandela’s writings also includes transcripts of interviews, speeches and friendly discussions, letters to both loved ones and governmental authorities, drafts, doodles, and other illuminating materials extracted from the archives. With a foreword supplied by Barack Obama.
8 For Nelson Mandela (1987) edited by Jacques Derrida
Published while Mandela was still in Pollsmoor, this tribute contains contributions from luminaries of world literature: Susan Sontag, William Burroughs, Allan Ginsberg, John Irving, Ntozake Shange and Joyce Carol Oates, Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo, Tunisia’s Mustapha Tlili, Beninois Olympe Bhely-Quenum, Brazilian poet Jorge Amado and South African writer Nadine Gordimer — who, like Mandela, is a Nobel Laureate herself.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Though we no longer feel his physical presence, his spirit continues to inspire us. It continues to fortify us. It enjoins us to continue to strive for peace, freedom and justice. It motivates us to fight discrimination, oppression and exploitation wherever they may manifest. It helps illuminate our way as we navigate the path we must necessarily travel towards a united non-racial, non-sexist, democratic and prosperous society.
Now that Mandela’s life is over, the attempts to capture Mandela and his legacy in fiction, and to use it for any number of ends, will inevitably accelerate. Whether they display the sensitivity to art’s political power that Mandela showed so clearly in his own life and writing is a separate question.
Ladies and Gentleman;
Madiba believed in unity. This is what he preached. That is what he worked for, to unite people, not only in South Africa but throughout the continent and the globe. For such, he was revered all over.
Programme Director;
He has led us to the top of a great hill. But there are many more hills to climb. And we dare not linger, for our long walk is not yet ended. With Madiba’s spirit as our lodestar we dare not fail. We thank the Mandela family for giving Madiba to the people of South Africa and the world.
I thank you.
This speech was delivered by HE, High Commissioner LL Mnguni, High Commissioner of the Republic of South Africa to Nigeria, on the occasion of Abuja’s Writers Forum commemoration of Nelson Mandela, Abuja, July 30, 2016.
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