MANDELA, MESSIANISM, AND MEDIA
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T R A NSITIO N § Position
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 43University 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 51versity. 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 45There 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 51In 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 47titles 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 51nation, 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 49months 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 51young 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 51thority. 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 51the 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 53The 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 51dela 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 55You can also read
