The sophistication and skills of modern medicine are such that the very frail Nelson Mandela survived to the age of 95. Yet his death on 5 December 2013 certainly marks a historical landmark in South Africa's history.
Mandela was the son of a deposed minor chief and partly brought up at the Thembu court in the Eastern Cape against whose control he eventually revolted. Part of a new and still very small generation of educated Africans, he was attracted to the Witwatersrand, where he arrived in 1941, and to politics. He became one of the leaders of the African National Congress (ANC) Youth League, a new formation, in the 1940s. This was a time when South Africa was industrialising rapidly, a very diverse African population was settling in and around Johannesburg while the dominant white minority voted overwhelmingly and confidently for a politics of exclusion and segregation.
In this setting, the black elite, long assembled in the ANC and moribund during the 1930s, begot agitators who fitfully roused and were sustained by mass actions in the locations and the workplaces. Sometimes these agitators were Communists rather than ANC, sometimes they were both, although only occasionally neither. Gradually the ANC was transformed from an organisation trying to defend older existing African rights into a political movement that rejected segregation, later separate development. It began to demand a complete reversal of national policy. During the years of legality, the ANC became more militant but was also tied down by peaceful protest strategies that had little impact on the government, non-violence with Indian inflections that attracted a widening following in bursts but met with impervious hostility by the state. Its energies were taken up for years by the defence strategies employed in the Treason Trial of 1956–61.
Dr A. Xuma, the American-trained party leader of the 1940s with social reform ideas, created the basis for the ANC to function as a structured organisation but he was opposed and eventually replaced in 1949. His successor, Dr Moroka from the Orange Free State, was a weaker figure who eventually supported the government's Bantustan plans. Albert Luthuli, another educated leader but a chief by virtue of the requirements of the dominant segregationist system, had integrity and prestige but was based in rural Natal far from the urban maelstrom. The increasingly powerful Youth League generation, Mandela included, was first inclined towards a racialised nationalist position and helped to depose Xuma but its leaders moved in time and through much conflict towards an alliance with the now illegal Communists.
Communists were the key actors who put together the 1955 Freedom Charter for the ANC, which was a typical if eloquent statement of Popular Front ideals of the previous two decades; their devoted members provided strategic and tactical ideas, international connections, venues and other facilities that the ANC, which remained a racially exclusive organisation until 1969, lacked. The Communists held no racial barriers and had been reformed illegally after dissolving themselves before the state could get to them. Mandela was converted; he became a party member and joined the party Central Committee for a time, according to Davidson and Filatova's recent thorough study of the Soviet records, although the development of his own feelings on the subject remain unclear. He also seems to have been consequently shopped, once the ANC also became illegal, by the CIA while passing through Natal, according to many rumours. The truth behind these stories with which the Internet is rife was not a subject on which Barack Obama chose to perorate in his recent Mandela funeral oration.
In 1962 Mandela had returned to South Africa from a successful clandestine trip through nationalist-controlled, newly independent Africa with resources and enthusiasm about the possibilities of armed insurrection supported by his new (and rather anti-Communist) African acquaintances. Yet his willingness to help organise Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the liberation army, was joined to a conviction, so eloquently expressed in his famous trial defence, that an ANC-run South Africa would be ‘non-racial’, a term whose exact meaning has wisely been left thereafter very open. It was also Russia which was able and willing to back MK systematically in coming decades, in contrast to a hostile or indifferent West.
Mandela was and would remain respectful of white power and prejudice. This was a time when whites still formed one in five of the entire population and a much larger share in the cities, including a big working class component. Afrikaner nationalism was a formidable organising force, which to some extent he respected in an identitarian way and much of the transracial relationships he forged in much later days were conspicuously with conventional Afrikaner figures whom he hoped to cultivate, disarm and charm, a role for which he developed the perfect personality.
Mandela had also internalised the ANC experience of learning how to reach out to quite different segments of African opinion, educated and uneducated, rural and urban, conservative and radical. In later years, the enragés sometimes disliked what he said (I can recall personally the hostile reaction amongst the comrades to his advice in 1990 in Durban for enemies of Buthelezi's Inkatha Freedom Party to throw their arms into the sea) but they never entirely turned their back on him; he retained their respect.
From 1962 Mandela had to hone his skills in gaol for 27 years. A harsh prison regime on Robben Island close to Cape Town, nonetheless set amidst the opportunity to commune with many fellow-inmates, largely also ANC members, gave way gradually to one, as the outlook of the regime changed, where he was perceived as a potential political figure of importance with whom negotiations might be possible. These negotiations took place in a number of contexts in which Mandela, with his excellent strategic sense, was one important actor. Transferred from the island and the eyes of his comrades, Mandela did in fact during the turbulent 1980s live in increasing comfort. He negotiated independently and actively with his gaolers and, not long before his release, was taken to a remarkable meeting with P.W. Botha, F.W. de Klerk's strongman-predecessor.
From the perspective of the ANC cadres, the negotiations were kept completely secret and ran dramatically against their faith in a totalising revolution backed by allies and sympathisers especially in Africa and in the Soviet bloc. They were primed to march to Pretoria in victory, there to entirely remake the country. However, Mandela was on the same wavelength as the ANC leader deputed to head the exile movement long ago, Oliver Tambo, who also promoted negotiations, and his trusted deputy Thabo Mbeki. Tambo was no Communist and Mandela had lost any such moorings such as he may have had well before his final release in 1990 as no doubt the South African government knew well. He also understood that the armed struggle was never going to succeed in a direct confrontation with the military force of the state. To the extent that the MK armed militants depended on Soviet aid, that was unlikely to be forthcoming for much longer, as Russia experienced ever-deeper political convulsions and had largely lost faith in an ANC-led revolution succeeding.
Broadly speaking, negotiations, mainly behind closed doors, would lead to, in Patrick Bond's memorable phrase, an “elite pact” transition under Mandela's guidance from 1994 as President. Bond and Hein Marais were excellent early guides from a Left perspective to this process in their classic studies. The deal offered a genuine democratisation of political life and the formation of an inclusive, elected government representing all of the population. But it also would offer safeguards for property and individual rights as a guarantee of stability to what were now to be the racial minorities and tacitly ruled out any expropriation of wealth or wreaking of revenge against former oppressors. It would also embrace liberal ideas on homosexual rights, capital punishment and abortion foreign to most black (and white) South Africans. Thus the open window created by lengthy negotiations (1990–93) could offer the ANC real power but limited capacity to make deeper structural changes. The first holiday Mandela took in freedom was at the expense of the genial Harry Oppenheimer, the head of the giant Anglo-American empire with who he was thereafter in regular friendly contact. Very soon Mandela was persuaded to search for a deal with which South African and foreign business could live.
Within these constraints, the ANC's negotiators proved very effective and prevented F.W. de Klerk from being able to institute some kind of shared sovereignty based on racial blocs. No coup attempt after 1994 got anywhere. South Africa missed out on both the economic disaster caused by white flight in neighbouring Mozambique after independence, for example, or the almost entire alienation from power of the remaining white elite in neighbouring Rhodesia where stability turned out to be fragile. The creation of independent Namibia out of South African-administered South-West Africa which reached fruition in 1989 was a perfect trial run for this kind of deal and its terms would not strike an observer of decolonisation elsewhere in Africa as too unusual.
Sources have suggested that Mandela would have been comfortable with a more social democratic thrust to the new dispensation but in 1990 this was not available given the international conjuncture and the lack of stronger economic or social leadership in the movement. He settled for a slight variation of the economic plans of the old regime as they were bruited in the early 1990s – full of enthusiasm for the free market, privatisation and rejection of ‘macro-economic populism’, as it was termed. This was counterbalanced against the promoted extension of social welfare provisions associated with the union- and NGO-generated Reconstruction and Development Programme which Mandela supported but did not know how to institutionalise, and thoroughgoing institutional and bureaucratic deracialisation, including liberal trade union legislation, relatively progressive taxation provision and a complete juridical extinction of the Bantustan systems. A largely new class of men and women, previously confined to the Bantustan administrations and the periphery of the separate development system in power terms, now took over the effective reins of government. Key supporters and lieutenants in the exile movement, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) federation and the United Democratic Front and its successor organisation were rewarded with top positions. The prosperity that would eventually accrue early in the new century for a few years through excellent primary product export prices, especially for platinum, would give more body to welfare provisions, notably the new child benefit system that polls consistently show as the most popular single ANC reform.
Mandela was pleased at the formation of an all-party government with the former State President, F. W. de Klerk, as one of two deputy presidents but this quickly proved unsustainable. In his one term as President, Mandela found a way forward that dismantled the old power structure, notably in the police and the army, which strengthened enormously the ability of the ANC actually to rule. This stabilised the new regime which gradually solidified. It was a triumph for a significant new power elite, for a rapidly growing black middle class and a satisfactory result for the major players in the South African business world who had had so much to do with bringing about this transition, bloody in its formative phase but thereafter astonishingly peaceful. The ANC proved unable however to address the massive rise in unemployment or the continued prevalence of very low wage jobs for those without acknowledged skills in an economy where the informal sector was relatively residual and impoverished. The economy remains dominated to date by the big corporates, now more than before likely to be foreign-owned, while the biggest South African businesses have gone global. Even SASOL, the coal to oil state corporation which is the country's number one taxpayer, is today in large part investing overseas, notably in the USA. Nor did the ANC figure out a way to transform the health or education sectors, dominated as they still are by private business and/or the interests of the middle class. South African society remained visibly harshly bifurcated; crime and violence levels reached very high levels for a country at peace and better-off South Africans got used to living behind walls with alarm systems to hand.
Mandela retired in 1999, replaced by his remaining deputy, Thabo Mbeki, whom he apparently did not at first favour as a successor. Although trucked out by the ANC now and then as a ceremonial figure to plump for South Africa as the venue of one or another prestige sports event, Mbeki rarely if ever consulted him and he genuinely disappeared from active political life. Mbeki is probably the most important individual in terms of setting forth the institutional life of post-apartheid South Africa. Mandela benefited personally from a very satisfactory marriage at age 80 to the widow of the former Mozambican president, Graça Machel, as the South African public is forcibly reminded by the glaring publicity offered in recent weeks to his descendants interested in the more material aspects of his “legacy”.
Men and women can make a great difference in the course of events. The significance of Mandela can be considered in two related ways. First, he has provided through his personal presence as a benign and honest conviction politician, skilled at exerting power but not obsessed with it to the point of view of excluding principles, a man who struggled to display respect to all. As such, his presence papered over the very contradictory facets of the compromise which he played a central role in shaping, and with it the so-called new South Africa. Second, in so doing he was able to be a hero and a symbol to an array of otherwise unlikely mates through his ability, like all brilliant nationalist politicians, to speak to very different audiences effectively at once. Here was the man who was prepared as president to go to court to defend himself as not being absent-minded in adjudicating against the coarse fertiliser magnate Louis Luyt, who was willing to brave another embarrassing court appearance in order to divorce his problematic wife, the struggle leader Winnie, and who was able to paper together different factions within the ANC which sometimes involved accepting being overruled on decisions. Here was somebody who did not grossly enrich his family and who emphasised his total respect for the Constitution as the law of the land. He would sometimes speak his mind as would-be statesmen rarely do when he denounced Israeli behaviour to Palestinians and acknowledged the PLO as old comrades or harshly attacked the US-mounted invasion of Iraq as outside acceptable moral conduct. Here came an outlook that long preceded the comfortable precepts of the “Third Way”.
His years in power were years in which South Africans could flatter themselves as being “the flavour of the month”; it appeared to be a malleable, liminal moment when anything could happen. And this is of course the second point, as is now so apparent. People are nostalgic for this magic historic phase when anything (whatever their wishes were) seemed possible. The white middle class (and at least those of lighter hue generally) fantasise an ANC friendly to their ideas about South Africa with a “level playing field” and a far more restrained brand of affirmative action. The black middle class misses Mbeki and dreams of a leader who conducts himself respectfully and honourably, symbolising their desire to belie the prejudices of whites towards what a black government would inevitably be like. The black masses dream of the honourable leader who suffered martyrdom on the Island and was a plausibly consistent and militant man who helped to deliver them, like Moses, out of the apartheid system. All this gets aired surprisingly openly in the context of a political marriage based on much convenience and little love.
Of course, this transitional phase is now well over. South Africa's third ANC president Jacob Zuma was booed at Mandela's funeral. A new regime, as I have argued in these pages, is in place relatively stably with advances but also serious disappointments for all of the above categories and many other sub-variants. Will the reified memory of Mandela contribute to any significant further shifts emerging in the way a South African government rules? This at present is very hard to say, but Mandela's death will initiate the end of a dramatic and memorable act on the South African historical stage.