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At least one generation of intellectuals had stood against apartheid and reflected on Mandela as a political figure of freedom and liberation. Mandela never produced anything equivalent to the political writings of a Gramsci, Fanon, or Césaire. Because of the media and the global support for the struggles he led, Mandela acquired a resonance with effects across the globe. His career, with all its changes, posed challenges for thinking about politics.

  • Mandela's Reflections: Mandela, Charisma, and Compromise

    As the cases of Ireland, Algeria, Palestine, and South Africa will suggest, settler colonies vary widely in history and circumstance, but the problems of decolonization in such formations are invariably obdurate. In Ireland, neither the moderate parliamentary Home Rule Party, which led the campaign for devolved independence within the British Empire before World War I, nor the republican separatists, who led the guerrilla war for Irish independence after Easter 1916, had any strategy adequate to deal with the resistance of the Ulster unionists, descendants of the original sixteenth- and seventeenth-century plantation settlers, to a united Ireland. Thus, nationalists would prove more or less helpless to respond when the British government established the partitioned state of Northern Ireland in 1921. The grievances of the Irish nationalist minority within that new polity were thereafter allowed to fester untreated for half a century until, in the late 1960s, “Ulster” erupted in a war that would lacerate it for nearly thirty years.

    In Palestine, the Palestinian national movement, faced by an inflow of Jewish settlers from Europe demanding their own state, was ultimately confounded by this challenge. A US-imposed UN General Assembly Resolution of 1947 set the terms for a grossly unequal partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states; in the war that followed, somewhere between 700,000 and 1 million Palestinians were dispossessed as the new State of Israel was formed. This Palestinian exodus into the Arab states bordering Israel created nearly intractable problems for all the parties involved and has made the consequent Palestinian plight one of the scandals of Israeli history and of the American world order. After the National Liberation Front (FLN), under Ahmed Ben Bella, came to power in Algeria in 1962, it is estimated that over 800,000 settlers of European origin fled Algeria for France, some 200,000 other pieds noirs also leaving over the next decade. Pariahs of a disgraced French imperialism, the plight of the pieds noirs elicited little sympathy anywhere, but their fate served as a warning to any minorities that might resist the creation of an Arabized Algeria.

    Of the situations cited above, only Mandela and the ANC managed to wrest a new state from the clutches of a dying colonialism without either expelling the settler population or conceding to ethno-territorial partitions. The enormity of that achievement, torn from a situation in which the circumstances of much of the black African population were infinitely worse than that of nationalists in Northern Ireland, and at least as bad as those of Palestinians in Gaza, must be wholly acknowledged. Mandela’s charisma and humane vision for a multiracial South Africa may have been significant to this success, but the conditions that enabled that outcome were historical, not personal. Unlike the Northern Irish unionists or the Zionists in Palestine, neither the white South Africans nor the Inkatha movement had any external great imperial power to hand to act as guarantor for any contemplated partitioned state. The implosion of the Soviet Union after 1989 incentivized all parties in South Africa to negotiation and reduced the risk that any secessionist state would find a Cold War–style backer. Likewise, the fact that the ANC was able to achieve its aims by largely nonviolent protest and pressure owes less to Mandela’s restraint than it does to the fact that despite the infamous “colour bars,” black labor had always remained crucial to the South African settler economy. As Mouna Younis has argued in Liberation and Democratization: The South African and Palestinian National Movements (2000), black proletarianization in apartheid South Africa created modes of organization more effective than older “traditional” ethnic formations and allowed black workers some scope for economic leverage and political pressure. The contrast with Palestine, where the Zionist movement’s commitment to a “Jewish labor only” policy succeeded in eliminating Palestinians almost wholly from the developing settler economy, is instructive. The Palestinians who remained within Israel after 1948 were reduced to a minority, while those in the West Bank and Gaza or beyond have always lacked any real capacity to exercise economic leverage on Israel. Thus, the Palestinians were never positioned to look to a democratization-from-below of the oppressor state to solve their problems in the way black South Africans could do, and while some might have proposed a binational state, they were in no position to advance it without an unforthcoming Israeli assent.

    Finally, while Mandela’s and the ANC’s capacity to articulate the vision for an ethnically plural South Africa must be saluted, the bargain necessary to secure the consent of the white settler community clearly had its Faustian dimension. Territorial fissure and civil war were successfully averted, but the social compact that eased the ANC’s transition to hegemony preserved so much of the country’s wealth in the hands of the white elite that the social fissures between rich and poor may well prove a disaster in historical storage. Many Americans now revere Mandela as a kind of sunnier-tempered Abraham Lincoln, a national savior who preserved the South African union as Lincoln did the American. The tragedy of the post-Civil War United States and of South Africa today is that history seemed to decree to statesmen in both cases that any determined attempt to advance equality between the black and white populations and to secure a well-integrated state were incompatible goals. Thus, in the postbellum United States, saving the union dictated that the reconciliation of the Northern and Southern elites took precedence over redress of the plight of the black poor, who had to wait. In South Africa, today, the white and black elites have also agreed to share power, and the black poor are again compelled to wait. As the cases of Northern Ireland, Israel-Palestine, Algeria, and the United States all in their distinct ways demonstrate, the waiting of those excluded from history’s grand bargains may last a long time but rarely lasts forever.

    -Joe Cleary

  • Mandela's Reflections: The Mandela Enigma

    Nelson_Mandela_1998Nelson Mandela has been an enigma to me. I have read his autobiography and many of his speeches, listened to him on tape, and watched him on television, all the time wondering how someone becomes Nelson Mandela. Jean-Paul Sartre explained how Gustave became Flaubert because of his early identification as “the idiot in the family,” but it took him three volumes and thousands of pages, and he still left the job unfinished. Most accounts of the great figures of history focus on their sense of self and their sense of mission. Mahatma Ghandi, who is often invoked in discussions of Mandela, provides the best example of such an account: the epiphany on the train in South Africa, when he understands the nature of racial and political oppression and his growing sense of being endowed with a spiritual mission to carry out political liberation. The lives of these figures seem to fit preexisting narratives and allow us to consider them with equanimity since they comfort our expectations, exceeding them only in magnitude but not in nature or scope.

    This is not the case with Mandela. To be sure, he starts out with a pretty good pedigree as a member of a royal family, but he is the product of a morganatic union and thus cannot inherit any titles, privileges, or honors. There is no evidence that he resented this status, or rather the lack of it, and it would be unwarranted speculation to suggest that he derived a sense of justice or an ambition to affirm his value from it. If anything, the evidence points to the fact that he was comfortable with his standing in the family, retaining his links to it and returning to it even in death.

    So what made him tick? And even more important, what made him the outstanding figure he became? Determinists who assert that the actor matters far less than the agent, and that the latter’s agency derives from a conjunction of forces, would find it difficult to maintain their clever distinction. Their approach is based on the assumption that anyone else thrust in the same situation would do as well differing only in idiosyncratic ways. Even the most stubborn of them would find it impossible to equate Mandela with the featureless “anyone” of their equations.

    This leaves us with the oldest differentiating factor of all in discussions of exceptional figures: character. Character evokes notions of honor, will, integrity, moral rectitude, strength, resolve, steadfastness, courage, fidelity, and so on. It would not be too difficult to sketch a portrait of Mandela by combining these traits and adding a few more personal ones, such as his sense of humor or his patience. Other aspects would be more difficult to include: his undeniable spirituality devoid of any appeal to Providence or any other transcendental.

    The invocation of character may be satisfying, but it may also mask a deeper problem. Mandela at no time displayed two features associated with character: amour propre, self-interest and self-possession. He was not selfless; he was indifferent to the notion of the self. A telling exchange occurred between him and a journalist who charged him with inconsistency when he failed to publicly condemn the Burmese junta whom he had earlier excoriated for its treatment of political prisoners and specifically Aung San Suu Kyi: “That was prisoner Mandela,” he replied. “But this is President Mandela. And President Mandela is a prisoner of the Office of the President.” What is remarkable about this reply is that the author of The Long Walk to Freedom continues to consider himself a prisoner. His actions and statements are constrained now as they were then, in fact perhaps even more now than they were then. Mandela is not engaging in casuistry here; he is telling us about his relationship to history.

    There is no reference to self, or its current political sound-bite version, “core values.” The constant prisoner status is a contingent condition, and the possibilities inherent in it, though limited, are further constrained by other contingencies. Mandela was giving the journalist a lesson in reading: read your circumstances, and if you apply some intelligence to this action, you will be capable of the type of discernment that makes action possible.

    Intelligence, reading, and discernment are, in my view, the keys to Mandela’s enigma, and to his uniqueness.

    -Wlad Godzich

  • Mandela's Reflections: Discomforts

    Mahatma Gandhi on The Salt March, India, 1930Some things rest uneasy on the mind: In a pinch, how prepared would I be, for instance, to live by the protocols of nonviolence? And if you extirpate the pinch, how would a commitment to such principles alter my behavior from what it is right now? At the rebirth of the South African state, Nelson Mandela’s determination to pursue a course of peace rather than vengeance stunned the world as forcefully as the violence that maimed it had kept him imprisoned on Robben Island for over two decades. The new South Africans called apartheid terror’s aftermath “truth and reconciliation,” as had occurred among former Yugoslavic political actors a few short years before. At the death of Nelson Mandela on December 5, 2013, three of the twentieth century’s exemplary figures converged on our collective memorial sense of what remains, apparently, difficult to achieve, and that is to say, the daily mobilization of Gandhian Satyagraha—and at the commencement of our terrible winter this year and always, everywhere, the threat of war, there they were—Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Nelson Mandela, reminding us across cultures of that unease on the mind. No pabulum here; no straight down the middle; no squirreling away from the point.

    To get more firmly to the matter for some future interrogation, we might juxtapose a few impression points:

         1. In Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954–63 (1988), Taylor Branch opens the fifth chapter, “The Montgomery Bus Boycott,” with a story set in Nagpur, India, December 1955: James Lawson, a young black American theologian, is teaching at a Methodist missionary school near the town and had gone to India to study Gandhian nonviolence. The Nagpur Times, soon after the historic meeting at the Holt Street Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, reported that “thousands of Negroes were refusing to ride segregated buses in a small American city” (143). Lawson read the news, rejoiced in it, as Branch tells the story, and would soon meet MLK at Oberlin when he (Lawson) returned to the United States to participate in the fledgling movement and become one of King’s most creative “lieutenants” in the application and adoption of nonviolence to the US scene.

         2. In an early biographical study of Gandhi’s life (The Life of Mahatma Gandhi), Louis Fischer points out that Gandhi, in 1906, amends his cousin’s Sadagraha (“firmness in a good cause” [84]) to Satyagraha in founding a term to name the Indian movement against the South African government’s unfairness to Indian citizens of the Transvaal. Apparently a neologism, Gandhi’s term combines satya, or “truth,” “which equals love,” and agraha, or “firmness or force.” “‘Satyagraha,’ therefore, means truth-force or love-force” (84).

    Nearly a century later and, ironically, in a proximate theater of action, truth and reconciliation appear to make possible the rebirth of a nation-state once devoted to racial and racist hierarchy. Are truth and reconciliation a distant and mimetic response to Satyagraha, and how related are both iterations of praxis to what we know as nonviolent action in the United States? In its robust insistence, this complex of ideas, unlike the usual commemorative gesture, confronts us with the possibility of transformative action—an opening in the chain of necessity?—and to act, according to James Baldwin, is to be in danger. In this case, one might well want a way out.

    -Hortense Spillers

  • Mandela's Reflections: Mbu ya Ũrambu: Mbaara ya Cuito Cuanavale

    Rĩrĩa meetaga Mandela na ndundu yake imaramari
    Meetaga Verwoerd na Vorster na Botha arũĩri wĩyathi

    Rĩrĩa mendagĩria abathendi matharaita ma kũratha andũ airũ
    Kiumba yaheyaga arũĩri wĩyathi matharaita ma kwĩgitĩra

    Rĩrĩa Obama ageithia Castro mathikoinĩ ma Mandela
    O arĩa maheyaga abatheindi mĩcinga makoiga mbu

    Kaĩ mariganĩirwo atĩ Mbaarainĩ ya Cuita Cuanavale
    Reagan na Thatcher maanyitĩte Abathendi mbaru?

    Atĩ tiga nĩ ũhootani mũnyite mbaru nĩ Kiumba kĩhaaroinĩ kĩa Cuito Cuanavale
    Mandela angĩathikirwo njeera gacigĩrĩra ka Robben, tene?

    cuito-cuanavale-cuba-580x419





    The Cry of Hypocrisy: The Battle of Cuito Cuanavale
    (translated from Gĩkũyũ)

    While they hated Mandela as a commie and terrorist
    They hailed Verwoerd Vorster and Botha as freedom fighters

    While they armed apartheid to defeat the struggle
    Cuba armed the real freedom fighters to defend the struggle

    And when at Mandela’s funeral Obama shook hands with Castro
    They who used to arm apartheid cried foul

    Have they forgotten that at the battle of Cuito Cuanavale
    Reagan and Thatcher sided with Apartheid?

    That but for the Cuba backed victory at Cuito Cuanavale Mandela’s funeral would have been on Robben Island years earlier?

    -Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

  • Mandela's Reflections: Preface

    Very few political figures in the late twentieth century evoked hope in the way that Nelson Mandela did. In conventional representative politics, figures fleetingly emerge who inspire the possibility of the new and then flicker before adjusting to the “real world.” It is not that Mandela did not adjust. (For example, after his trip in the 1990s to Davos and the world economic conference, he proposed changing the ANC’s economic transformation program to a market-based one.) Rather, it is that no matter what adjustments were made, one got the sense his reasons were tactical, not overarching and strategic. Moreover, it is clear that as a political figure he embodied the possibility that justice could be done differently. Whether that is so is still an open question. Mandela faced several conundrums: Would power yield itself without radical confrontation? What would be the consequences of such confrontations? How to create profound social and political change and usher in the new order, and on what grounds of politics could this occur within the complex logic of making attempts to effect change by acting in humane ways? For historical and contingent political reasons, he may have acted in a way that made an attempt to find a novel way, but his commitment of using force of a different kind to make a new society resonated with many in a world where the mythos of the unencumbered self and market fundamentalism is the common sense of our times.

    No other figure of the last twenty years of the twentieth century drew to his cause and commitments so many people across the world.

    The personal and political vignettes represented in this dossier are a very modest attempt to think about the man and his time. They range from poetry to explicit political reflections on this figure. The collection ends with a poignant piece from a young person who, told about our efforts, was moved to write and send us her pages. While this dossier does not cover everything, two things are clear. First, that Mandela was an iconic figure in the world. We are aware how power re-creates and attempts to absorb such figures, gutting them of their radical meaning. This has happened, and continues to happen, with Mandela. But, second, in our contemporary moment, current struggles are still deeply linked to the struggle for which he spent twenty-odd years in prison—the struggle to be treated with dignity and equality as a human being. It is the latter which will shape the complex legacy he left behind.

    -Anthony Bogues

  • Mandela's Reflections: Editor's Note

    Nelson Mandela died on December 5, 2013. Tony Bogues, a member of the boundary 2 Collective, was in South Africa, watching the endless coverage of the news and of Mandela’s life. Bogues had met Mandela during his time with the Jamaican government of Michael Manley, and he has spent considerable time working in South Africa, especially in Cape Town, on questions of freedom, archives, African and African Diaspora intellectual history, and political thought.

    At least one generation of intellectuals had stood against apartheid and reflected on Mandela as a political figure of freedom and liberation. Mandela never produced anything equivalent to the political writings of a Gramsci, Fanon, or Césaire. Because of the media and the global support for the struggles he led, Mandela acquired a resonance with effects across the globe. His career, with all its changes, posed challenges for thinking about politics.

    It seemed right that boundary 2 should take notice of Mandela and his influence. We decided to gather responses to Mandela as a political figure. b2 issued a call for very brief papers from several spots on the globe and from different generations. Our contributors have given us reason to feel this attempt was a success.

    -Paul Bové