Since his death, Nelson Mandela has been the subject of a slough of memoriams, odes, and general remembrances--as it should be. But as he himself acknowledged, we ought to acknowledge his accomplishments without deifying him. Which apparently is kind of hard.
Being just about the youngest person on this blog, Mandela has perhaps evoked different feelings for my generation than for older ones, perhaps. We look at him basically the same way we look at Gandhi--both were kind, saintly guys who stood up to the oppressive, racist and all-around mean government, got put in prison for it, and then late in life were vindicated and became international symbols of peace and equality. Seriously, if you asked most teens and 20-somethings to name three people who are for sure in heaven (besides Grandma), most would name Mandela, Gandhi, and probably Mother Teresa.
Despite (or because of) this, most of those same people also have little grasp of who Mandela was, or what he did to become famous. Heck, until recently I didn't know why he was in prison in the first place. So, for the sake of understanding him fully, a balanced and completely accurate analysis is in order. But instead you get my hackery.
First things first: No one can take away from the fact that after he got out of prison, Mandela was an inspirational figure, and did far better as a political leader than he might have. Especially compared with some nearby thugs like Zimbabwe's Mugabe, Mandela had a fairly good record--he didn't starve the country in some bizarre redistribution scheme, and he didn't inaugurate official racial retaliation or anything like that. And just as importantly, he relinquished power legally and peacefully, which again is more than can be said for a lot of post-colonial rulers. So yeah, post-apartheid South Africa was definitely not the worst place to live, and Mandela deserves a good deal of the credit for that.
At the same time, it would be wrong to deny that during the past twenty years or so, the country has seen a real decline in some quarters. One of the most obvious has been the AIDS epidemic, which, clearly, neither he nor anyone else was responsible for; but he has since been criticized for denying it was a problem even when it clearly was. Given that, by some estimates, a third of South Africa had the disease by the turn of the century, this seems rather odd. More glaringly, he pushed for what he called a "deracialization" of the economy, which in practice meant aggressive affirmative action and a transfer of wealth that did improve the position of many blacks, but at the expense of impoverishing many whites.
Another thing--a lot of people seem to be under the impression (again, this included me) that Mandela was just like Gandhi or MLK in his consistent advocacy of nonviolence. Granted, it's hard to find specific evidence of that advocacy, but he's famous for being peaceful and was played by Morgan Freeman, so he must have at some point.
Well...not so much. Ever heard of "necklacing"? I hadn't. It refers to some ANC terrorists' practice of hanging a tire around white captives' necks and setting it on fire. That's the sort of thing for which ANC leaders such as Mandela (who did not carry out such acts himself but founded the party faction that did) got put in prison for in the first place. Granted, Mandela rejected anything resembling a "race war" when he became president--for which we should all be grateful--but many radicals continued to carry out barbaric murders against whites, many of whom, it should be said, retaliated in kind. This violence, combined with AIDS and the economic disruption, has caused a mass exodus of white South Africans--perhaps a million since the early '90s. Not that they've been the only victims, by a long shot. Black-on-black crime has been even more endemic, including some of the world's highest rates of rape and murder.
How much of this post-apartheid atmosphere was by design? Well, I guess that depends on whether you think Mandela was, as many on the far Right (and some not on the far Right) have been arguing since his death, an out-and-out Communist out for racial vengeance. "Madiba"s record with the officially Marxist African National Congress has been...well, complicated. He was definitely not a Communist ideologue when he joined the ANC back in the late '40s, but became one for a while thereafter. He seems not to have been by the time he left prison, but for an extended period of time, he was happy to make common cause with all sorts of international left-wing goons. As much of a scandal as Obama shaking hands with Raul Castro at the memorial service was, the fact is the latter wouldn't have been there at all if Mandela hadn't been very friendly with the Castros, regarding them as comrades in the fight for racial liberation and such.
***
What's the ultimate takeaway here? I suppose most people would say Mandela was the "father of his country," in a way, just as Washington was over here, so let's compare. (That's probably not very fair, but shut up.) Lots of similarities could be drawn--wanting to appear above the partisan fray, for example--but the chief difference, I think, is that Washington, like all the Founding Fathers, was a great believer in the rule of law and keenly aware of the dangers of extra-legal, retaliatory violence, especially when committed in the name of an abstract cause. Mandela appears to have learned this lesson late, and only partially.
That's not to say he bears the blame for all South Africa's ills; far from it. You can't lay those problems on one person, and again, he did far better than those aware of his early career might have feared. But movements which use violent means, even in pursuit of good ends (and not all the ANC's goals were good), tend to be corrupted by them over time; and if those movements gain power, the country will tend to reflect that corruption. So, broadly speaking, I think it's clear that South Africa today reveals the good and the bad of Nelson Mandela's impact. And hopefully it reveals some lessons in what to do and not do if you're the leader of such a movement.
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