We are all nearly unanimous that Nelson Mandela, alias Madiba, who departed this world on 05 December 2013, at age 95, was a great and noble person whose life holds many positive lessons for humanity. I say ‘nearly unanimous’ because the unanimity is not empirically verifiable, let alone verified, and there are certain categories of persons, such for instance as dictators, extremists, racists, supremacists, who cannot be expected honestly to join in the chorus of Mandela praise-singing. Although some of those who belong to these categories have possibly, for putative pragmatic reasons, also rushed to South Africa and are shedding crocodile tears around Madiba’s coffin, their descriptive qualifications clearly exclude them from the very possibility of appreciating what Mandela is all about and why he generates so much excitement around the globe. Since Mandela died we have heard several dictators, some who have stubbornly clung on to power for decades, others who inherited ‘democratic’ power from their biological parents, singing Mandela’s praises and claiming to have been greatly inspired by him. Well, let them tell us what they have done lately or ever done at all that remotely resembles Mandela. We are all so nearly unanimous about Mandela because our common humanity and its positive possibilities shine brilliantly through him. The remarkable thing about Mandela is not just that he kept a positive and optimistic spirit in prison for 27 years, but that he realized that a human being is a human being and that, at bottom, the good ones are not so good and bad ones not so bad. No human being is irremediably evil and even the best (holiest) of human beings suffers from important limitations and makes mistakes from time to time. Apartheid as an ideology and a system was as evil and as mistaken as anyone could imagine; its secret biological and chemical weapons projects (secretly supported and funded by the most powerful nations of the industrialized Western world) was calculated to make it formidable and invincible. But Mandela came out of prison determined and ready to negotiate with Apartheid in the interests of all South Africans, both white and black. The idea of TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION, with deep roots in traditional African cultures, momentarily caught the spirit of all South Africans and permitted a breakthrough in their situation that appeared genuinely miraculous. Then Mandela, conscious of his own human limitations, and anxious to give the young new nation of South Africa the best of chances for a future in his eventual inevitable absence, performed the greatest miracle of all: he quit the summit of political power at his most glorious moment, to the utter consternation of all and sundry and against the tearful cries and entreaties of his closest collaborators. In a nutshell, this is what makes Madiba different from most of the rest of us and why we are so nearly unanimous about him. As we bury him in South Africa today, we know that, in Africa, an elder does not die but simply mutates and transforms and transits from the visible world into the invisible but ever present world of the ancestors, to be constantly consulted, propitiated, entreated, reprimanded, through libations, sacrifices, prayers and incantations. All over Africa, the burial of an elder of Mandela’s stature and caliber is always accompanied by celebration, music, dance, feasting and rejoicing. Taata Madiba (as we would say in Lamnso’, the language of the Nso’ of the grassy highlands of Bamenda) has now joined the company of other global living secular saints such Mahatma Ghandi, Mother Teresa, John Paul II, etc.
Gobata, 15/12/2013
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