Mandela and Mbeki: Whiteman's Lapdogs? March 17, 2008 |  Taju Tijani (Archives)

MANDELA AND MBEKI: WHITEMAN’S LAPDOGS?

 

BY TAJU TIJANI

 

 

     The only remaining truly totemic figure we have in our modern world is arguably Nelson Mandela. This former boxer, lawyer, womaniser and Robben Island rock-breaker has remained the hardest act to follow since Martin Luther King Jr. Ever since his celestial appearance into the world stage in the Palace of Justice on 20 April 1964, we are yet to find a replacement for this maverick figure. Mandela has been discussed, analysed, revered and iconised all over the world.

In his days as a political firebrand and a real thorn in the flesh of white racists in South Africa, Mandela was seen as the devil incarnate and a man solely designed to disturb the limitless comforts of white Afrikaners. Promptly he was arrested and hauled before an assemblage of blue-eyed, white, racist judges. In that famous Palace of Justice, Mandela denounced apartheid system and rolled out ANC future objectives: “Our struggle is a struggle of the African people…it is a struggle for the right to live. I have dedicated my life to this struggle. 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 for which I hope to live and to see realised. But, my Lord, if it needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”

     By April 1994, after a clear 30 years in the struggle, Mandela snatched victory from the jaws of death. He became an elected president of a multiracial, rainbow nation of a post-apartheid South Africa. From the moment the sun sets on Mandela’s star, his dream for South Africa had been flawed!

     In his 1964 declaration, he envisioned a future South Africa where blacks and white will live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. Winnie, his then wife, who was in court with him, would have pinched herself to watch Mandela consumed by such awesome naivety. Mandela was too idealistic to plumb the depths of the ocean of hate and loathing the whites reserved for blacks. This conflict of vision will be something Winnie would pay for later in their relationship.

     In his May 1994 inaugural speech, rather than offer his defeated white oppressors cyanide, Mandela decided to offer yet another saccharin. He thundered: “We enter into a covenant that we shall build the society in which all South Africans, both black and white, will be able to walk tall, without any fear in their hearts…a rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world.”

    

Within his universe and as a man of destiny, Mandela had a grand, yet opaque vision of racial integration, even if forced. But the white South Africans are clever enough to extricate themselves from the emotional unreality of racial integration and the perceived reality of their superiority.

     In reaching out to the whites, Mandela went too far. He forgot too soon the unforgivable humiliation and degradation of his years in the gulag of Robben Island. And he overlooked the continuing problems of inequality, injustice, poverty and disease that afflicted his people. As president of South Africa and with his famous toi-toi dance steps, Mandela danced his way into every dinner gatherings of the white man from the table mountain to table Buckingham Palace and table White House. During his memorable fete by the queen at Buckingham Palace, he was enthralled and infamously declared the joy of having fulfilled a ‘boyhood dream’. Like the ‘happy nigger’, he danced to the tunes of his white masters who were only too willing to cleanse themselves of the 350 years of violent racism and genocide committed against black South Africans. The white race needs to pay homage and discharge its buried catharsis on the liberal lap of a frail, modern day martyr blinded by amnesia.

    

In the name of forgiveness and reconciliation between old enemies, Mandela lapped up all sugary citations and praises heaped on him by the western media. Once the memory of Robben Island faded, he befriended the Queen of England. He dined with Margaret Thatcher, an unrepentant supporter of apartheid in its violent form. And to add insult to an injury, Thatcher bundled his wayward son, Mark, to Cape Town, a new world, free from apartheid, which she championed with iron zeal!

     Mandela’s clarion call for justice and equality between the races has exploded in his face. Architects, propagators, collaborators and perpetrators of the worst apartheid atrocities against blacks are still sitting pretty on the hills of Sandton, Johannesburg and Cape Town sipping chilled champagne and caviar. Mandela’s greatness has been reduced to nothing by this brazen lapse in natural justice for victims of apartheid. His political judgment through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was a monumental error. His acceptance of enslaving agreement not to prosecute apartheid criminals was the greatest betrayal in the history of any race of human beings.

     His forgiveness of genocidal crime has no parallel in the history of humanity. Even, Rwanda managed to jail perpetrators of Hutu/Tutsi massacre. Nelson Mandela, the great Mandiba, would rather reconcile

 

with great enemies and live with a wounded conscience than see the likes of Botha humiliated. Even among liberal white it is hard to allow such a monumental crime go unpunished. Thankfully, the naïve aspirations of Mandela for a rainbow nation has created a nation still divided on racial lines. His dream to heal the sins of the past through condescending patronage found little converts among whites who have remained shockingly unrepentant for their racial crimes on the black majority.

     All through our history, we are the only race of people who consistently forgive and forget mass brutality, slavery, oppression and genocide committed against us by whites. Our readiness to forgive and forget white injustice has been interpreted as stupidity. Appropriately, the whites have developed confidence and arrogance against accusation of blaxploitation. This conceit is the wall thrown around the issue of apology over slavery. Whites tend to believe that blacks and brutal exploitation are the same. Mandela who should have lived and died for ‘an eye for an eye’ failed miserably in offering whites an undeserved escape route. He neither saw reason nor enlightenment in the Jewish ideology of retributive justice for all known perpetrators of the Holocaust, dead or alive. Mandela’s South Africa favoured the

mass immigration of whites to blacks. Nigeria, which played admirable role in the darkest period of South Africa’s struggle for emancipation, had a raw deal under Mandela. We were not accorded any special relationship. Indeed, Nigerians were labeled and caricatured as dope dealers and 419ers, while Mark Thatcher and other scions of apartheid lovers were welcomed with golden carpet!

     Enter Thabo Mbeki. Since his inception, he has made it known that he is not interested in being a martyr at the pain of patronising whites. As a true Africanist who understands the pathological hatred the whites harbour for blacks, he has made it plain that he would play his own brand of political correctness without necessarily being Mandela’s coat-tail. Mbeki represents a new breed of leader Africa sorely needs. A leader who would stand up to the west and point out the errors of their racism, prejudice and stereotype.

     As an African living in the west, I do understand the extreme sensitivity of Thabo Mbeki. Beyond the despised rainbow nation, most whites in South Africa still harbour stereotype of the indigenous blacks as savages, immoral, rapists, thieves and unrefined. They still see black South Africans as slaves to sex, alcohol and drugs. They still see them as lazy, beasts and corrupt and impossible to civilize through education.

These are what Mandela refused to challenge. These are the main deconstruction issues engaging Mbeki apart from other important issues of statecraft. Mbeki has promised to focus on transformations and right the wrong inflicted on the “previously disadvantaged”. He is more interested in African renaissance, rebirth and regeneration. Mbeki’s dream of an African renaissance is to engineer the rebirth of black pride and confidence so heartlessly stained by racism worldwide. He is on a do or die mission of Mayibuye i Africa (come back Africa!) 

     Dreamer or not, all black Africans must support Mbeki in his lone crusade against the lies-damn lies- peddled about Africans for centuries by the western world and their xenophobic media. They have always seen African people and their leaders as minions who will always toe their received orthodoxy, even if flawed, and behave like Mandelas of this world.

     And anybody who goes against the grain is torn apart limb by limb by the ravenous wolf called western press. Ask Robert Mugabe, who has been appropriately dubbed Bobodan Mugabe, an African hate figure comparable to Slobadan Milosevic.

     Mbeki’s war for African renewal must succeed. However, that renewal to succeed, he must lead Africa through more commitment to the initiatives represented by the new African Union and its

development programme, NEPAD. Also, he must control his enthusiasm for Nigeria’s leadership of Africa.  The legacy of corruption and bad leadership disqualify Nigeria from this role regardless of Obasanjo’s hollow pretension to be seen as a great statesman.

The dream of African pride carved in the beautiful form of renaissance should not be imperiled by the narrow vision of the western world against the black race. We need to assert our beauty, confidence, ability and independence and reject the timidity and patronising pretensions of Mandelian ideology of harmony and racial integration in a world of disharmony and violent xenophobia.

Tijani lives in London.