Saying
goodbye to Nelson Mandela, beloved fighter, visionary, and king
by Breyten
Breytenbach
A little
more than a century ago, when Paul Krüger, the last president of the Transvaal
died, a South African poet wrote: “Be quiet, people — a great man is passing by
. . .” Krüger met his death in exile. His country, one of the two Boer
Republics burnt and beaten to its knees by British imperialism after the second
Anglo–Boer War, no longer existed. (Afrikaners refer to it as the Second
Liberation War.)
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| Nelson Mandela in 2007 © Denis Farrell/AP Photo |
Madiba is
leaving us. As he enters the timelessness of exile, he leaves behind him a
country that he had helped forge. But the country had deserted him a long time
ago.
Madiba has
gone. What remains now of our dreams of freedom, of the struggle for human
dignity for all and particularly for the poor who had always been deprived of
it? What is left of the new nation that was to arise through processes of a
reconciliation of bloody histories to finally live together in peace and
prosperity? What happened to our ethical imagination? Where did our revolution
go?
But let us
not forget that it is a human being taking leave. A boxer. A man who loved
women. And children — certainly all children, but first of all his own, those
he could neither defend nor accompany during his long years of absence in
prison. Exile already! A fighter and a troublemaker. A lawyer. A strategist,
for sure, but a man of principle. A charmer. A man with a sense of humour who
could tell stories like no other. A humanist. A chief. A visionary. A king.
We need,
first of all, to bow our heads and be silent. To be proud that we could be part
of those who lived at a time when Nelson Rolihlahla (“he who shakes the
branches”) Mandela still walked the earth. And to cry then, as he certainly
would also have wept at what was done to the South Africa he had dreamt and for
which he had sacrificed so much. To weep over the feeding frenzy of the small
foxes, this sanctuary for mediocre thieves that his beloved Congress, the ANC
had become. The saddest and most telling cry that was going up more and more
was — luckily he was too old and weak to realize what his party had been turned
into!
Of course,
he had been a politician as well. He had tasted power, he allowed himself to be
manipulated, he looked the other way when his comrades started indulging in an
orgy of greed, he could be arrogant, he lied at times. But let time do the
sorting out . . .
Let the
cortège of crocodiles first have their way and their say. The professional
weepers, the ‘people’, and the starlets. Let us try and maintain a privileged
moment of decency and respect as we make as if we don’t notice the vultures
tearing one another apart for the strips of moral authority still to be torn
from the deceased one, for the money to be made from one man’s long life of
struggle on behalf of all of us.
And let us
spare a thought for this old warrior who made us believe, however briefly, that
we are capable of living up to the good in us, and who finally now belongs to
the epic and tragic trajectory of humankind. But first of all to the humblest
ones, to those in their shacks and their holes and their prison camps who never
knew him but who will murmur his name like a talisman against cruelty. As
a word of inspiration. He honoured us.
Hamba kahle, Nkos’ . . .
[from Harper's, December 6, 2013]
