Everywhere I look there’s another article about the passing of Nelson Mandela. Most articles laud him, a few villify him. And any criticism of his legacy is being labeled racist.
The fact is that the legacy of Nelson Mandela —or, as he was affectionately known by his clan name “Madiba” or, intimately, by “Tata” (father), by his people who are streaming to his memorial to say goodbye, who are at once mourning his loss and celebrating his life — is a complex one.
Different qualities can coexist within one person, and depending on the arc of a person’s life — if it is positive, such a person can indeed be a hero, yet still be seen with his flaws.
Certainly Mandela is a hero to his people as well as an inspiration to humankind. Specifically, he is his people’s liberator from apartheid. To them, he a modern day Moses, of sorts. For this role alone he will go down in history as a hero.
It is easy to reduce people to binary roles of hero or villain. People are more complex than that. Especially people of greatness who overcome odds, as Nelson Mandela did. Flawed humans, and greatness, can go hand in hand. And as courageous as Nelson Mandela was, he was at one point violent, provocative and controversial as well.
His path was one of transformation, and therein lay his greatness. Over his life, he changed course. Starting out as a violent objector, protesting his government with bombs and killings, over time — 27 years in prison — through the intimate contact he had with the humanity of his captors, plus the time to reflect and think things through, he deepened his observations and changed course.
Upon his release from jail, he began advocating not for revenge, but for reconciliation; for a path of non-violence, of dialogue and of forgiveness. He was adaptable. He adjusted and shifted his views.
He evolved within the life that unfolded around him.
Mandela was not Ghandi or Martin Luther King, Jr., heads of movements who advocated non-violence from the very beginning. Mandela was an angry terrorist who, after personal pain and experience, changed.
He could have led with bitterness and authoritarianism, but he came to understand the futility of trying to achieve his goals through violence. Although initially incarcerated for crime, over time he became the African symbol of a prisoner of conscience.
No doubt his is a storied life of a struggle against injustice. As the first black president of a democratic South Africa, his role is iconic. Yet, there is no denying that the economy, the poverty, the crime, the illiteracy and the carnage in South Africa today are problematic. Today, South Africa is a wounded country. This too, is part of Mandela’s legacy in leading the African National Congress (ANC).
Ghandi and King did not go on to lead a country after they were heads of their movements for human rights. Mandela did. He was a part of not only the revolution but its subsequent government, of the building of the new South Africa.
Within the Jewish community, Mandela’s relationship with Israel was not necessarily warm or comfortable. Among his closest of friends were dictators such as Yasir Arafat, Muammar Gaddafi and Fidel Castro.
They supported him while he was in jail, and he returned the friendship upon his release.
He felt he needed all the support he could get for his cause, and took what he could get.
In that same spirit, he understood and didn’t hold a grudge against Israel or the Jewish people when Israel supported one of the few governments that didn’t boycott Israel — his oppressors in apartheid South Africa.
So indeed there was tension in the relationship, yet a pragmatic submission as well.
Mandela spoke axiomatically about Israel relinquishing Gaza, the West Bank and the Golan Heights, as if this were Arab land. He did not subject his view to any moral, historic or legal evaluation. And this, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a time when the idea of a two-state solution was not on the table. So Mandela’s relationship with Israel, despite his insistence that he supported its existence with secure borders, was questioned by many.
It will take time to asses Mandela’s full legacy.
What is certain is that this one man will always be the one person who took South Africa from a once apartheid country to a free one, merging it into one nation where every human being is equal.
In this respect, for one person to make a difference on that scale, Mandela, a Nobel Peace laureate, indeed leaves a powerful legacy for which he is loved and admired by many.
Copyright © 2013 by the Intermountain Jewish News
