Reflections on Mandela's Legacy
- By Kathryn Lachman
I learned of Mandela's death while waiting in Boston's Logan Airport to board a flight to London and Cape Town. As my two young boys hovered on the window ledge watching airplanes maneuver in the night, a text arrived from a close friend: “What a momentous time to be traveling to South Africa.” As I puzzled out the sense of her words, the news came in that Madiba had passed away. The man who embodied reconciliation, dignity, and tolerance—not only to South Africans, but to people everywhere—was no longer of this world. It was hard to weigh the significance of the moment amidst the hustle and bustle of the terminal. Several days later, however, as we drove through the Eastern Cape, the province where Mandela was born, with our radio tuned to Radio South Africa's coverage of Mandela's memorial service, I felt both loss and a sense of privilege to have shared in some way in his extraordinary life.
Although I was raised in a suburb of Hartford, Connecticut, South Africa's freedom struggle never felt far away. As chance had it, my family's emigration from Johannesburg to the United States coincided with the Soweto Uprising of June 16, 1976, when thousands of black schoolchildren flooded the streets to protest the imposition of Afrikaans in their schools and met with a brutal police response. My parents, newly trained physicians, had worked in Baragwanath Hospital and conducted studies on rheumatic heart disease in Soweto, where they witnessed firsthand the physical devastation wrought by apartheid and became convinced that South Africa was no place to bring up their three small children. They filled our Connecticut home with the politics, fiction, divestment campaigns, art, candy, and freedom songs of South Africa. It was through the songs that I came most powerfully to appreciate Mandela's significance: the voices of Hugh Masekela, Johnny Clegg, Brenda Fassie, Miriam Makeba, Vusi Mahlesahla, and so many others, who illuminated the hope and promise that Mandela represented for a different future for South Africa.
Mandela fulfilled this promise in many respects. As the nation's first black president, he extended a bridge of healing and understanding to all sectors of South African society, taking critical steps towards a non-racial, multilingual South Africa. By subsequently refusing to stand for a second term in office, he nurtured the democratic transfer of power, breaking with the pattern so prevalent in Africa where a liberation leader governs in perpetuity. He remained true to the values he laid out at the Rivonia trial in 1963, when he declared, “I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.” And yet, despite all that he did achieve, the dream of equal opportunities and integrated harmony remains elusive.
I last visited South Africa in 2006 to present my aging grandfather with his first great-grandson, my son Noah who was then just three months old. During my stay, I was based in Johannesburg and the suburbs of Melville and Yeoville, where I thought I caught a glimpse of the “new” South Africa. There was a joyful diversity in the jazz clubs and cafés we frequented—a diversity that highlighted the monochrome dullness of life back home in Princeton, New Jersey, whose very whiteness the Nigerian author Chimamanda Adichie has documented in her novel, Americanah (2013).
This past December, I expected to encounter more of the same vibe in Cape Town, especially so soon after Mandela's passing, which seemed to mark each South African I met in such a personal way. Instead, the vast net of townships surrounding Cape Town display the staggering poverty and inequality which continue to plague South Africa. In restaurants throughout the Cape, the service staff was almost uniformly black, patrons white. We stopped in several quaint towns on the famed Garden Route, Swellendam and Montague, which still remain starkly segregated, with white and colored neighborhoods clearly delineated.
And on a more subtle level, South African friends cautioned us to stay away from the beaches on Christmas and Boxing Day because they tend to become very “hectic.” The word "hectic" is ubiquitous in South African lingo, and can signify anything from crowded to chaotic. On Christmas afternoon, however, after inflicting on the children a grueling if gorgeous climb up Table Mountain, we gave into their clamors for the sea, where I came up against another more troubling meaning of the word “hectic.” The beaches were indeed crowded, but largely with families from the Cape Flats who had packed into trains, taxis, and buses to enjoy the holiday. This led me to wonder if "hectic,” in fact, wasn't another way of implying black. This reminded me again of Adichie's blunt analysis of race in America, as her protagonist points out that “diversity means different things to different folks. If a white person is saying a neighborhood is diverse, they mean nine percent black people. (The minute it gets to ten percent black people, the white folk move out.) If a black person says diverse neighborhood, they are thinking forty percent black.”
All this is not to say that South Africa has regressed since 2006, although strikingly little progress has been made in addressing income inequality and land distribution. Cape Town has always had a different demographic to that of Johannesburg, and, in recent years, this has been compounded by what is known as the “white flight” to Cape Town in response to the crime prevalent in and around Johannesburg. To be sure, many of the attitudes (and elaborate security systems) I encountered in the Cape drove home novelist Patrick Flanery's depiction of white Cape Townians in Absolution (2012) as anxious and insular. Yet, I also met people who have initiated inspiring and transformational projects: these include Jeremy Barty, the Kalk Bay baker who founded BREAD rev, an organization that teaches baking skills to people in the townships and equips them with low cost, portable wood-fired ovens, facilitating local entrepreneurship and challenging the national monopoly over bread production. I met others who volunteer in township schools, or who, like my younger brother, provide support to AIDS stricken families who are struggling to meet the social and emotional needs of their children.
Mandela upheld education as the engine that drives development; education may indeed help to level the disparities that abound in today's South Africa. Engagement and trust will have to follow as well. A constant refrain I heard in Cape Town whenever the subject of segregation was broached among white South Africans was that they had lived through an extremely traumatic period of violence and uncertainty during the 1990s and that they (unlike many others) had elected not to emigrate—they maintained that, even if their experience paled in comparison to the precariousness and oppression Black South Africans faced during apartheid, it made it difficult for them to extend trust.
Reflecting on Mandela's legacy and its immense international resonance, and newly touched by South Africa's beauty and the sobering challenges that lie ahead, I am reminded of a conversation with Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé. At the time, she had recently completed a crime novel (Story of the Cannibal Woman) set in Cape Town which focuses on the city's many Francophone African immigrants and exposes the xenophobia and racial divides that persist in post-apartheid South Africa. She asked me why I did not want to go and be part of change in South Africa. I answered that I had elected to fight other battles; or rather, when I married an Israeli, other battles ineluctably became mine (not to mention the challenging transatlantic commute between the United States and Israel, which my husband and I have taken on). While I do not support a one-to-one parallel between Israel and apartheid South Africa—equating the two contexts ignores significant differences between the two situations—it is plain to see that trauma, insularity, and anxiety similar to that of white South Africans affect many Israelis. Mandela's exemplary leadership thus holds lessons not only for Palestinians, but perhaps even more significantly, for Israelis as well. It was Madiba's ability to trust the other despite immense risks, and his recognition that his own dignity and humanity were inseparably connected to the dignity and humanity of the other, that made him such a remarkable and visionary leader, not only for South Africa, but for all of us.
Kathryn Lachman is Assistant Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She has co-edited a volume of essays on Maryse Condé: Feasting on Words: Maryse Condé, Cannibalism and the Caribbean Text (Princeton UP, 2006) and her Borrowed Forms: the Music and Ethics of Transnational Fiction will be published this year by Liverpool University Press.
