MANDELA, MESSIANISM, AND MEDIA

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                   MANDELA, MESSIANISM,
                   AND            THE            MEDIA
                   For some, Mandelamay be a figure in a biblicalredemptionstory.

                   Rob Nixon
                   From the outset, the South African state seemed to fear that Mandela possessed a talent
                   for immortality. On trial for sabotage in 1964, and clearly aimed toward the gallows,
                   Mandela had, through the force of his own defense, turned accuser into accused and
                   successfully skipped the grave. The state countered by treating him as someone who
                   threatened to become not just larger, but longer than life. The prison identity card
                   pinned, until recently, to his person read: "Nelson Mandela. Crime-sabotage.
                   Sentence-life plus five years," as if those posthumous five years, like the stone rolled
                   against the gospel tomb, could secure apartheid against the prospect of his resurrection.
                      Mandela first won his reputation for uncanny powers of survival in I96I, when he
                   vanished from public life and taunted the state by organizing bold underground actions.
                   He traveled inside South Africa disguised as a chauffeur and popped up abroad under
                   the name David Motsamayi on an Ethiopian passport granted him by Emperor Haile
                   Selassie. For his elusiveness, the press dubbed Mandela the Black Pimpernel. After
                   seventeen months underground, however, he was finally captured and put on trial.
                      At this time, I was a child growing up in Port Elizabeth, a coastal South African city
                   and an ANC stronghold. I recall how within days of Mandela's arrest, the walls of the
                   public library, government offices, and township shacks were daubed with the words
                   FREE MANDELA, the first signs of what would become, across the globe, the most
                   durable of political graffiti. Nearly three decades later, on I I February I990, the world's
                   newspapers would reverse that slogan in a gesture of momentous simplicity: MAN-
                   DELA FREE.
                      Nadine Gordimer once observed of Mandela that "his people have never revered him
                   as a figure of the past, but as the personification of the future." His relation to time,
                   however, is more ambiguous than that. Between 1964 and I990 he was absented from
                   the political present, yet remained a preeminent inhabitant of South Africa's past and
© I990 Capital Cities/ABC, Inc. Photo courtesy Allan Aannenbaum/ABC News

future. He lived on the cusp of time, em-      If these conditions have indeed generated               His sentence was

bodying a people's hope, yet monumen-          a redemptive vision of Mandela, it is car-              "life plus five
talized on a scale ordinarily reserved for     dinally important to keep in view his ef-               years"-as if those
the dead.                                      forts to repudiate the idolatry that accom-             posthumous five
During his 27I/2 years of imprisoned fame,     panies Messianic politics and can                       years, like the stone
Mandela accrued a reputation of near-          ultimately invite autocracy. From the in-               rolled against the
Messianic dimensions. There are several        stant of his release, Mandela has striven to            gospel tomb, could
reasons for this: the redoubtable convic-      dismantle the cult of personality con-                  secure apartheid
tions of the man himself; the scale and in-    structed by the media and to subordinate                against his resur-
ventiveness of the international tributes      his prestige to that of the ANC. We should              rection.
enacted in his name; the peculiar progress     concern ourselves therefore both with the
of his relation to the media; and the sweep-   cultural production of the Messianic Man-
ing power, in South African history, of        dela and with the limitations of redemp-
the idiom and psychology of redemptive         tive politics.
politics--deliverance from bondage, cov-       By the time he gained his liberty, Mandela
enants, chosen people, divine election,        had acquired an almost posthumous em-
promised lands, eschatologies, chiliasm,       inence. In 1973, when nuclear physicists
and apocalypse.                                made a scientific breakthrough at the

                                MANDELA,       MESSIANISM,         AND THE MEDIA                 43
University of Leeds, they christened their      took the Verwoerd government by sur-
 discovery the Mandela Particle. In Lagos        prise; the New York Times, for instance,
last December, a Sudanese and a Nigerian         hailed Mandela and his fellow accused as
 club tussled in the final of Africa's premier   the new George Washingtons and Ben
soccer competition, the Nelson Mandela           Franklins. Mandela's jailers assumed that
Cup. When Roxbury and other mainly               if media visibility opened the door to
African-American neighborhoods sought            fame, invisibility would shut it. So they
to secede from Boston, the proposed              decreed that the man's words, as well as
breakaway city was to have been known as         photos and even sketches of him, be
Mandela. On the occasion of his seventieth       whited out. Having acted against the past,
birthday two years ago, 170,000 letters          they sought to shut down the future,
and cards poured in from the Netherlands         hiding him (for life plus five years) from
alone.                                           all cameras and keeping him mute, confi-
    Expelled as an undergraduate from            dent that he would wither from public
South Africa's Fort Hare College for             memory.
mounting a student protest, Mandela has              Instead, the South African authorities
since assembled, as if in fabulous compen-       had guaranteed the kind of scarcity that
sation, honorary degrees from universities       provokes media fascination by setting up
in New York, Lesotho, Havana, Zimba-             a gigantic photo opportunity in reverse.
bwe, Brussels, Michigan, and Lancaster,          Mandela became an off-camera phenom-
and human rights awards from India, Ven-         enon, and his silence grew more eloquent
ezuela, Malaysia, Austria, the GDR, West         than words. By January I990, interna-
Germany, Spain, Libya, Sweden, and the           tional agencies were offering $300,000 for
NAACP.                                           the first shots of him. At that very mo-
    While locked up and disenfranchised in       ment, Mandela, chuckling to himself,
his native land, he acquired keys and hon-       found he could saunter anonymously past
orary citizenship in Florence, Sydney,           the rows of zealous photographers who
Islwyn, Glasgow, Rome, Olympia, Wij-             scanned the prison gardens for a long-gone
negen, Aberdeen and myriad other places.         man bearing his name. Once his guards
Mandela statues have sprung up around            took him shopping in the malls of Cape
the world. By the time he left prison, the       Town, a city pulsating with rumors of his
man had become a monumental leader in            release, yet he proved as invisible as Bruno
more than the usual dead metaphoric              of Ganz on his angelic tour of Berlin in
sense.                                           Wim Wenders' Wingsof Desire.
   The protracted Rivonia trial of I963-            So the South African state helped sta-
64, which saw nine ANC leaders sen-              tion the idea of Nelson Mandela on the
tenced to life for "sabotage," enabled           threshold between the dead and the living,
black South Africans to stage their griev-       between commemoration and expecta-
ances under the spotlights of the interna-       tion. They also unwittingly sheltered his
tional press. The pitch of the world outcry      image from the erosions of time and di-

44   TRANSITION        NUMBER      51
versity. The ban on photographing Man-               In the myriad American interviews
dela allowed the same few images to keep         during those first weeks of freedom,
circulating in a heraldic fashion perfect for    Rather, Koppel, Brokaw, Donahue, and
the needs of an international political          all the others could not decide whether
movement. By the late seventies, the im-         Mandela was more intriguing as a maker
age of Mandela on Robben Island had be-          or a misser of history. His bearing, his dic-
come such a unifying resource for apart-         tion warped time. He would pluck care-
heid's opponents that the regime sought to       fully at the creases of his trousers before
disencumber itself of its burdensome cap-        taking his seat; "Quite so," was his
tive. The state's efforts to wash its hands      standard form of agreement. Asked what
of Mandela took place in the conditional:        films he watched, he spoke movingly of
if he agreed to live abroad, they would          Carmen Miranda and Cesar Romero as if
                                                 their movies had premiered last Saturday
       Here was an                               at the Odeon.
   international media                               Here was an international media colos-
                                                 sus who, by I990 and age 71, had given
  colossus who, by age
                                                just one TV interview. Of the same vin-
  71, had given just one                        tage as Reagan, he emerged as a Great
       TVinterview                              Communicator of the opposite sort-a
                                                statesman, not a media bite; stirring, in de-
release him . . . if he renounced violence      meanor and rhetoric, riemories of the
 .. if he retired to a Bantustan . .. if they   high era of anticolonialism, of the early
could swap him for two Soviet dissidents.       Nkrumah and Kenyatta, of Nyerere,
Mandela waited. He foresaw that his un-         Nasser, Gandhi, Nehru, and King. His so-
conditional moment would arrive. He             cial manner brought together, in disarm-
must have gathered strength from know-          ing union, the militancy of the populist
ing that the patience of captivity-             hero with the civility of his mission school
quarrying stone, sewing mailbags, har-          training. He proved brilliantly informed
vesting seaweed, shadowboxing with              about world events, if evidently ignorant
solitary time -was slowly turning into the      of the Reaganite dicta that facts impede
patience of power.                              communication and that one should meet
    A few days before Mandela's fifty-yard      a media question with a media answer,
walk to freedom, President de Klerk is-         never with a conviction backed by ideas.
sued the first recent photograph of the         Mandela spoke thoughtfully, unashamed
prisoner. He was conspicuously not alone        of the pauses, the silences, that escort re-
but stood alongside the South African           flection. All this had the effect of reintro-
president- a last-ditch effort at image con-    ducing him to the world as someone who
trol that only succeeded in making de           had jumped boldly across history instead
Klerk appear a provisional custodian be-        of living through it, giving him a discon-
side the country's de facto leader.             nected, postmodern, time-machine aura.

                                MANDELA,        MESSIANISM,       AND    THE   MEDIA       45
There had been an American twist to        sentative of Inkatha's young wing, the
Mandela's capture twenty-seven years, six      UDF's Allan Boesak, and, beamed in by
months, and six days before his release: a     satellite from Lusaka, the ANC's Thabo
CIA agent had apparently alerted the           Mbeki. Koppel allowed the first hour to
South Africans as to the whereabouts of        become wholly dominated by banter and
their most wanted fugitive. There was an       polite needling between himself and the
American involvement of a different sort       two van der Merwes. It was only during
in the days leading up to 4:16 P.M., Sun-      the second half, broadcast between I2:30
day, February i , for the networks were        and I:30 A.M. Eastern time (by which hour
out in force. If the individual, spectacular   many viewers would have switched off),
image of Mandela walking free threatened       that probing questions from the audience
to usurp the gains of less telegenic collec-   finally put the Nationalist regime's repre-
tive processes of social transformation, the   sentative on the spot. That initial show-
American coverage of the occasion some-        down between the Far Right and the right-
times jostled to make itself the primary       wing government might have been
story.                                         choreographed by President de Klerk him-
   During the countdown to the release,        self, so perfectly did it accord with his ef-
ABC promoted Ted Koppel's series from          forts to abandon the growling, finger-
Johannesburg as "Nightline Makes               wagging, menacing public demeanors of
History"-a description not without its         his two predecessors, P. W. (Crocodile)
possibilities, but, coming from ABC's          Botha and John Vorster, in favor of a pol-
mouth, little more than an ambush on           icy of conscientious charm. Alongside the
                                               uncompromising Koos (who, after a pro-
 "Weneed a Messiah to                          tracted bout of circusry, left for breakfast
                                               to protest the ANC presence on the pro-
   lead us out of the
                                               gram), the Nationalist van der Merwe was
wilderness,"an unnamed                         able to project himself as a beacon of rea-
   Afrikanertold Ted                           sonableness and moderation. This new
                                               readiness of the Nationalist leaders to jet-
Koppel. "Maybe Mandela                         tison the body language of "total on-
           is that man"                        slaught," as they strove instead to mimic
                                               the media manners of American politi-
historical agency. The Koppel series cul-      cians, exerted extra pressure on the emer-
minated in a "Town Hall Meeting" which         gent Mandela. For Koppel's Town Hall
brought together a spectrum of leading         Meeting and allied coverage enabled the
South Africans ranging from the far right      regime to showcase itself as fairly bursting
Conservative party's Koos van der Merwe        with liberalish goodwill, asking for little
and the Nationalists' Stoffel van der          more than the ANC's renunciation of vi-
Merwe to Helen Suzman (doyenne of              olence and a bill of minority rights, rec-
white parliamentary liberalism), a repre-      ognizable American-style issues, which,

46   TRANSITION       NUMBER     51
In the glare of the
                                                                                                  media, Mandela's
                                                                                                  very identity has be-
                                                                                                  come contested
                                                                                                  ground.
                                                                © i990 Capital Cities/ABC, Inc.

of course, figure quite differently in the   ognize the deep traditionalism in the cast
two societies.                               of thought.
                                                During the countdown to February II,
                                             "Waiting for Mandela" became a routine
                                             headline, reinforcing a very South African
   The week before Mandela's release, an     preoccupation with imminent time. In
unnamed Afrikaner told Ted Koppel on         their distinctive ways, the nation's black
"Nightline": "We need a Messiah to lead      and white cultures seek obsessively to
us out of the wilderness. Maybe Nelson       command the future through metaphors
Mandela is that man." In the object of his   of dawn, birth, revolutionary redemption,
admiration, this may be startling icono-     or apocalypse and historical closure. For
clasm for an Afrikaner, but we should rec-   confirmation, one has only to scan the

                              MANDELA,       MESSIANISM,      AND THE MEDIA                 47
titles of prominent works of South African      roamed the wilderness, and signed a divine
literature: To Every Birth Its Blood, Prom-     covenant that brought them victory over
isedLand, The Late BourgeoisWorld,In the        the Zulu Canaanites. To press the contra-
Fog at the Season'sEnd, Time of the Butch-      dictions, one need only recall that this trek
erbird,Waitingforthe Barbarians,ParadiseIs      to freedom was spurred by Afrikaans out-
Closing Down.                                   rage at the British abolition, in 1833, of
    It is a psychopolitical climate that nur-
                                            slavery.
tures Messianism. The Exodus narrative          The principal exegetical tension be-
                                            tween South African readings of the bib-
The Exodus narrativeand                     lical redemption myths lies in the sense,

   its New Testament                        widespread among Afrikaners, that their
                                            deliverance occurred in the past, while
 analogues have a hold                      blacks have invested the same story lines
  on the imaginings of                      with a future force. If, for most South
                                            Africans, the sight of Mandela gaining his
 Afrikaans and African                      liberty flung open the gates of the future,
    nationalism alike                       the same event prompted far-right-
                                            wingers to gather in Pretoria's Church
and its New Testament analogues have Square and lament a betrayal of history. In
achieved a hold on the imaginings of their midst, they placed a small white cof-
Afrikaans and African nationalism alike. fin (for the Afrikaans children killed in the
We are talking about a society in which a civil war). They draped the coffin in a neo-
former ANC president, Albert Luthuli, Nazi flag, then scattered, on top, thirty
could call his autobiography Let My People pieces of silver.
Go and an influential Afrikaans novel bears     The black nationalist rendition of the
the title Gelofte Land-Promised Land.       Exodus story is more accommodating of
    A few years back, in the pages of Grand democratic aspirations. Revived in recent
Street, Edward Said offered a Canaanite years by Desmond Tutu among others, it
reading of Michael Walzer's Exodus and stresses how Moses will triumph over
Revolution. Where Walzer gleaned from pharaoh and free blacks from the yoke of
Exodus an uplifting narrative of radical slavery, foregrounding liberation while
hope, Said found a more tormented story avoiding the bigotry of divine election.
entangled in conquest, exclusion, national Nor is this version populated with
self-righteousness, and what he called Canaanites waiting to be vanquished.
"moral triumphalism." Relations between However, even this more benign applica-
apartheidand Exodus bear out Said's skep- tion of the redemption myth builds on a
ticism. Afrikaners became decisively in- disturbing prototype for nationalist lead-
vested in Exodus politics with the Great ership: that of the autocratic, solitary, pro-
Trek inland that began in the I83os: they phetic figure who commands from on
fled the British (aka Egyptian) tyrants, high, in short, precisely the kind of one-

48   TRANSITION       NUMBER      51
nation, one-leader model that Mandela has     Mandela had been the trump card for the
 cited as a hindrance to democracy.           forces of remembrance. For the ANC, his
     The allure of redemption myths in sit-   reemergence was to be an exhilarating yet
uations of advanced tyranny has been          testing moment. The unbanning of the or-
heightened in South Africa by the ruling      ganization on February 2 and the release of
Nationalists' relentless Antichristing of     Sisulu et al. had produced a convergence of
the Mandela name and the ANC. He was,         three branches of leadership with quite
they broadcasted, a "known" terrorist and     dissimilar experience and credentials: the
a minion of the godless Muscovites. At
one point, the Special Branch burst into       At one point, the Special
the house of his wife, Winnie, to arrest a
                                                   Branch burst into
bedspread quilted in the ANC's black,
green, and gold. As recently as I985, for-     Winnie's house to arrest
eign minister Pik Botha (who is now fea-        a bedspread quilted in
tured on American TV as the telegenic face
of the Nationalist regime) explained that
                                               the ANC'sblack, green,
his government continued to detain                     and gold
Mandela for the very reason that the Allied
powers held Rudolf Hess. The Nobel            exiled   members (headed by Oliver
Prize winner Wole Soyinka, for one, drew      Tambo), the ex-prisoners, and the leaders
inspiration from Botha's remark. A poem       of sympathetic organizations prominent in
in his volume Mandela'sEarth opens this       the internal struggle, especially the United
way:                                          Democratic Front, the Congress of South
    Got you! Trust the Israelis               African Trade Unions, and the Mass
    I bet they flushed him out, raced him     Democratic Movement. Matters might be
    down                                      further complicated by the ANC's ideo-
    From Auschwitz to Durban, and             logical inclusiveness: it is a coalition em-
    Robben Island.                            bracing African nationalists, socialists,
 Mandela?                                     communists, and social democrats.
       Mandel . . . Mendel ... Mengel         Clearly, in releasing Mandela, the govern-
       ... Mengele!                           ment sought, among other things, to try
    It's he! Nazi superman in sneaky          the ANC's community of purpose.
    blackface!                                    At that point, Mandela's legendary re-
                                              pute remained the ANC's best resource.
                                              Yet if, after February I I, the cult of per-
                                              sonality grew unchecked, it might equally
   The major document of ANC princi-          turn into a liability. Ironically, Frantz
ples, the 1955 Freedom Charter, declares      Fanon's The Wretchedof theEarthoffers the
that "our struggle is a struggle of memory    best gloss on the dangers of Mandelama-
against forgetting." All these years,         nia. (The book first appeared in I96I, just

                               MANDELA,       MESSIANISM,      AND    THE   MEDIA      49
months before Mandela would embark on            would help reaffirm his democratic com-
his clandestine tour of newly and immi-         mitments and check the surging expecta-
nently independent African nations,             tions coming from an impatient, overex-
where he was hosted by Ben Bella,               tended people. However, in forswearing
Senghor, Kaunda, Nyerere, Selassie, and         demiurgic powers, Mandela had nonethe-
Nkrumah, among others.) Fanon saw               less to preserve enough prominence to
with great prescience the pitfalls of em-       keep South Africa in the media's eye and
blematic leadership in Africa's postcolo-       to maintain pressure on de Klerk, who
                                                clearly hoped the prisoner's mystique
  Mandela'sfirst public                         would tarnish in the open air. Mandela's
                                                first speech, therefore, would be a delicate
  speech made it clear                          affair to manage.
   that he, betterthan                              For the international media, February

 anyone, understoodthe                           I   developed into a day of waiting.
                                                Mandela's emergence from Victor Verster
  strategic necessity of                        Prison had been delayed an hour-and-a-
 deconsecratinghimself                          quarter, and he arrived several hours late
                                                for the speech on Cape Town's Grand Pa-
nial era. He observed how under white           rade. These expanses of waiting tried the
domination the people had internalized an       readiness of TV commentators-both
impoverished sense of their own potential.      South African and American in their dis-
By investing hope and power in a single         tinctive ways-to transcend their unease
exceptional figure, a postcolonial order        about the ANC. South Africa's state-
risked not only erecting an autocratic fu-      controlled network, accustomed to the
ture, but extending, among the general          certainties of stiff censorship, betrayed
populace, the stagnant attitude that they       some initial difficulty feeling out the limits
were bereft of political influence. The         to its suddenly expanded license. The
fledgling state ought rather, Fanon             quandary of SATV's commentator was
averred, to convince its citizens "that there   unenviable: he had to ensure that the event
is no such thing as a demiurge, that there      of Mandela's release redounded to the
is no famous man who will take the re-          government's credit, while avoiding di-
sponsibility for everything, but that the       rect reflection on the person of Mandela,
demiurge is the people themselves and the       his qualities, or the injustice of his suffer-
magic hands are finally only the hands of       ing. At one point, not fully able to keep the
the people."                                    superlatives at bay, he resorted to praising
    During Mandela's first public speech,       Victor Verster as "the most beautiful
before a Cape Town crowd of perhaps             prison in the world"- a serious case of dis-
I00,000, it became evident that he, better      placed eulogy. Nonetheless, SATV cov-
than anyone, intuited the strategic neces-      erage inadvertently paid homage to Man-
sity of deconsecrating himself. To do so        dela's stubborn foresight when it had a

50   TRANSITION        NUMBER      51
young anchorman, one Hendrik Ver-                 un-American political event. Rather than
woerd, break the news of his release.             using the crowd as a decoy for an address,
Twenty-six years earlier another Hendrik          via satellite, to the world, Mandela ap-
Verwoerd, the anchor's grandfather and            peared indifferent to the cameras while
the mastermind of apartheid, had vilified         speaking directly to those bodily present,
Mandela as a bloodthirsty communist and           as if spellbound, just hours out of solitude,
secured his imprisonment.                         by such physical evidence of his reunion
    During the same drawn-out wait on the         with the mass of humanity. His oratorical
Parade, one American channel's commen-            style and the crowd's spirit brought to
tary team flew the colors of a distinctively
national paranoia. To fill in the hours, they      Mandela's public manner
had been discussing activities on the City
Hall balcony, which was to be Mandela's
                                                    had been shaped by the
podium and from whence the anti-                   live politics of the fifties,
apartheid clerics, Rev. Frank Chicane and             two decades before
Rev. Allan Boesak, had been urging pa-
tience on a sweltering, raucous crowd. At
                                                        South Africa got
one point, the consolingly familiar figure                 television
of Boesak descended into the gathering to
persist in his efforts; in his absence, a group   mind a rally from a pretech era. Mandela's
unrecognizable to the Americans ascended          public manner had been shaped by the live
to the balcony and proceeded to bedeck it         politics of the fifties, two decades before
in a South African Communist Party flag.          South Africa got television, and in an era
Panic broke out in the commentary box.            when his prodemocracy speeches were too
To judge from the blur of eruptions-like          radical for the state-run radio. If their
"This is getting out of control, the balcony      leader seemed above the pressures of me-
has been taken over by the radicals"-the          dia packaging, a sizable proportion of his
quite predictable prominence of the SACP          audience, even in I990, would not have
had startled the commentators, who                possessed TVs. And the minority who did
sounded persuaded that a godless Red              would have mistrusted its fierce censor-
coup had intervened between the disap-            ship of the news.
pearance of Boesak and Mandela's arrival.            Mandela launched his first live speech
Only when it became apparent that this            in almost three decades by taking direct
was merely one among an array of sym-             issue withl the redemptive conception of
bolic gestures did the commentators repair        him. "I stand before you," he declared,
their damaged equanimity and continue             "not as a prophet, but as a humble servant
the job of rendering events accessible to         of you, the people." In casting off the
their American viewers.                           lonely mantle of the prophet, he democ-
   When Mandela finally arrived, the oc-          ratized responsibility for the future and
casion turned into an oddly unmediated,           subordinated his powers to popular au-

                                  MANDELA,        MESSIANISM,       AND   THE    MEDIA      51
thority. For much of that benchmark             politics. In those ten minutes of greetings,
speech he was at pains to remind his au-        Mandela walked away from the media
dience that he was not an elected leader of     trope of him as a one-man shadow gov-
the ANC and that, in any case, only "dis-       ernment running the show from his fax
ciplined mass action," not individual ge-       machine in Victor Verster.
nius, could assume the task of unifying the        Any prisoner fashioned into marble
country. It is typical of the man that his      and granite must face, on release, the ex-
appeal for collective responsibility harmo-     cessive strain of reconciling the epic self
nized the idiom of parliamentary democ-         with the person who reenters public life.
racy with the more radical register of         Yet this could not, in Mandela's case, in-
Comrade Mandela, "loyal and disciplined        volve a pristine transition from public
member of the African National Con-            myth to private man. In the glare of the
      "
gress, as he repeatedly portrayed himself.     media, control over his identity would re-
   But the surest index of his deference to    main contested ground. "Dignified" be-
grass-roots power was edited out of the        came, on the American networks, the
press transcripts the next day. Early in his   most overtaxed and abused adjective of the
speech, Mandela launched into a roll of        week. Some of it can be put down to sigh-
honor, commending by name the many             of-relief syndrome (no revolutionary
organizations-- women's groups, trade          fangs were showing). The rest arises, in a
unions,   community groups, guerrilla          twisted kind of way, from racial bigotry.
wings, popular fronts, the alternative         Would reporters have fussed with such
press, anticonscription organizations and      boundless amazement over the dignity of
so forth-that had brought the struggle to      a European or American politician-
his pass. Few of them were known out-          Mitterrand, say, or Bush-as if they had
                                               been expecting, all along, Idi Amin to

 "Dignified"became, on                         come crashing in?
                                                   Mandela's American interviewers
 the American networks,                        clung to the spectacle of his heroism as a
   the most overtaxed                          martyr for the cause. Dan Rather: "What
                                               was the worst thing that happened to you
  adjective-as if they'd                       in prison?"; "Did they beat you?"; "Real
 been expecting Idi Amin                       bad?"; "What was the best thing that hap-
                                               pened to you in prison?" Koppel, less
side South Africa. It was a very African       clunkily, but to similar effect, asked:
moment-full of the measured salutations        "How does it feel to know you are one of
and respect that reanimate community be-       the most admired men in the world?"
longing. If the litany of thanks made for          Mandela answered civilly, though
opaque international TV, it was a moment       sometimes with discomfort at the call to
of constructive parochialism, a vital move     strut with talk-show egotism. More than
toward promoting an alternative to the         humility was at stake. He comes from a
one-nation, one-leader brand of Messianic      society whose rulers have detained, over

52   TRANSITION       NUMBER     51
the past five years, some 50,000 activists.     need to redress inequality while reviving
Organization after organization has had its     economic growth. As I write, the question
leadership skimmed. Under such condi-           of how to integrate the diverse command
tions, to concentrate power, talent, and        structures of the struggle -the exiled lead-
hope in a prestigious few was simply to         ers, the Robben Islanders, key UDF and
invite beheading. Over the past five years,     COSATU figures, and, most recently,
unions have grown faster in South Africa        Bantustan leaders who have converted to
than anywhere on earth, and the recent          the ANC-remains remote from resolu-
successes of the Mass Democratic Move-          tion. The team compiled by the ANC to
ment and trade unions have depended on          enter the May "talks about talks" with the
lateral styles of organization that allow re-   government was unevenly weighted: nine
sistance to regenerate itself, phoenixlike,     of its eleven delegates were over sixty
ad infinitum. This tactic is not without        years old. Its composition held little reas-
South African precedent: in 1953 a belea-       surance for the youth and trade unionists,
guered ANC adopted a proposal to re-            constituencies widely yet guardedly sup-
group into a complex lattice of street-         portive of the ANC and reluctant to see
based cells. The strategy was code-named        their militant legacies bartered cheaply
the M (for Mandela) Plan. It is thus con-       away. The organization faces the unenvi-
sistent with the genesis of his democratic      able task of weaving its way through the
vision that Mandela would use his media         impacted language of resistance, negotia-
prominence to augment the struggle, but         tion, participation, compromise, collabo-
recoil, on principle, from glamor politics,     ration, co-option, and plain selling out.
an ill-starred approach, if ever there was
one, to the pursuit of democracy under
                                                  The ANChas launched
apartheid.
    Pretoriastroika-the thawing of apart-          a massive campaign
heid -has begun its by-now-irreversible           of T-shirts and bumper
course, but the process remains beset by
traumatic uncertainties. Already, how-               stickers declaring
ever, it is clear that many of the rhetorical       NEGOTIATIONS    ARE
verities of the struggle have come to feel
the pressure of the expectation of power.
                                                         STRUGGLE
While scarcely straightforward, the end-
lessly oppositional task of rendering the       Each term in this spectrum possesses its
country ungovernable was less taxing than       own bloody history. A resilient UDF slo-
the current need to produce the kind of         gan, after all, has been "Long Live the
practical policy minutiae necessary for the     Spirit of No Compromise," which the
ANC to govern. Its routine position on          NC has sought of late to revise (without
the nationalization of key mines and in-        quite reversing) through its massive cam-
dustries, for instance, has been subject to     paign of T-shirts and bumper stickers de-
unprecedentedly animated debate over the        claring "Negotiations Are Struggle."

                                MANDELA,        MESSIANISM,      AND    THE   MEDIA      53
The risk remains that a gulf may widen      greater respect for the man than for the
 between a spectacularsphere of media pol-       organization he represents. Apartheid's
 itics, where Mandela and de Klerk loom          success, however incomplete, in fostering
 large, and an obscured Lilliputian realm of     a reactionary stripe of Zulu ethnonation-
 mass politics. As the euphoria of release       alism has left a divisive force at least as
 dissipates and the loosening of oppression      fearful as the Afrikanar nationalism which
 allows long-buried differences within           helped nurture it in the first place. Indeed,
 anti-apartheid opposition to surface in de-     the timing, tone, and outcome of Man-
bate and violent feuding, Mandela will be        dela's rapprochement with Inkatha's
hard pressed to sustain his ascendancy as a      Buthelezi should prove his most nerve-
national politician on a par with his global     wracking challenge, given the pitch of
prestige as elder statesman. It is beyond        popular loathing that Buthelezi elicits, es-
dispute that, of the two, his internal au-       pecially from the radicalyouth and unions,
thority will come under greater pressure as      who have suffered most at his hands. In
South Africa enters the tunnel at the end of     these matters, so much depends on how
the light.                                       the ANC deploys the time which Man-
     Despite these threats, however, I           dela's lingering allure has bought them. In
would hesitate to join those purists who         the months immediately following the un-
reduce the media concentration on Man-           bannings and his release, the organization
dela to an unambiguous betrayal of grass-        too often seemed caught off guard, retreat-
roots social processes. Mandela's plan-          ing into reactive or rhetorical stances, poor
etary visibility continues to engage people      substitutes for new initiatives.
who would otherwise struggle to identify
with and involve themselves in a far-off,        Any organization wedded
faceless cause, however estimable. For in-
                                                  to one of the century's
stance, the crucial call to the European par-
liament to preserve sanctions gathered               most commanding
unique credibility from having Mandela            figures risks vanishing
issue it in prison.
     While Mandela's tremendous media
                                                 behind the long shadow
presence has cemented ANC support in-                of his apostrophe
ternationally, the congress's considerable
domestic authority may prove more dif-              The prospect remains that Mandela
ficult to stabilize, not least because any or-   may be saddled with inhuman expecta-
ganization banned for three decades needs        tions which, being mortal in a deeply riven
time to establish itself, root and branch, at    country, he cannot be asked to fulfill.
the local level. Even here, Mandela's pres-      There were shades of this in his effort,
tige improves the chances of easing grim         soon after his emergence, to stay the
divisions, for the PAC and Inkatha, bitter       bloodshed in Natal-ranked this year as
rivals of the ANC, have both shown               the most violent spot in the world. Man-

54   TRANSITION        NUMBER      51
dela urged all parties to hurl their pangas   Mandela as a one-man Burkean buffer
into the sea. Nothing happened-a re-          standing between the awfulness of the
sponse that exposed the limitations of in-    massing blackJacobins and the destruction
dividual appeals, no matter how charis-       of all prospects for democracy. O'Brien
matic, unsupported by resourceful             would have us believe that Mandela is
 policies.                                    hated and feared by the grass-roots Left,
    Winnie Mandela once recalled how liv-     which is peopled by "instinctively totali-
ing with Nelson she had to shelter her "ex-   tarian minds." One need neither trivialize
tinct ego" from his towering authority:       the difficulties of ushering in democracy
 "You just fizzled into being his append-     nor deny the tinderbox atmosphere in
age, with no name and no individuality        South Africa to recognize O'Brien's ex-
except Mandela's; Mandela's wife,             travagant opposition between Mandela
Mandela's child, Mandela's niece." As         and the rank and file as profoundly false.
with Winnie so, too, in a sense, with the     More to the point is whether the returning
ANC, for whom appendage politics has          ANC exiles build on or bypass--and
sometimes proved a debilitating side effect   thereby risk both squandering and
of the net asset of Mandela's gifted pres-    frustrating-the structures of local demo-
ence. Any organization wedded to one of       cratic experience erected during the recent
the century's most commanding figures         years of embattled resistance. Against con-
risks vanishing behind the long shadow of     ceptions of the postapartheid order as a
his apostrophe.                               prefabricated edifice to be imposed from
    The most remarkable development in        above or crated in from abroad, such in-
South Africa during the past decade has       digenous traditions remain the country's
been the deepening of the country's tra-      principal, if vulnerable, resource of hope.
ditions of radical democratic process         With them, too, lies the hope that the an-
through the organizing efforts of bodies      tiapartheid resistance will gain fortitude
supportive of the ANC: the UDF, the           and publicity from Mandela's fame while
Congress of South African Trade Unions,       warding off the alternative disposition,
and the Mass Democratic Movement. It          prevalent in the society and heightened by
is therefore quite wrongheaded to cast,       the media, toward visions of the man as
as Conor Cruise O'Brien did recently,         South Africa's anointed redeemer.

                               MANDELA,       MESSIANISM,      AND   THE   MEDIA      55
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