Death has always stalked Nelson Mandela, University of Witwatersrand professor says

Nelson Mandela at a past event. A South African scholar says death always stalked the legend since he was sentenced to life imprisonment and was ready to pay the ultimate price. [PHOTO:FILE/STANDARD]

By PATRICK MATHANGANI

Johannesburg; South Africa: Prof Sarah Nutall, director at the University of Witwatersrand is an expert on Nelson Mandela’s legacy.

The director of the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the university has written extensively on the icon’s life as well as his mortality.

As Mandela remains in hospital for more than a month now, she spoke to The Standard on Sunday about the meaning of life and death for Mandela, as well as the legacy he will leave behind.

“Nelson Mandela always faced the prospect of the death penalty at the trial and came very close to the shadow of death.

As we know he was given a life sentence but he was fully prepared to die. It points to this interesting relationship in his life as in the life of many anti-colonial thinkers and activists that the question of freedom comes very close to the question of death.

There is a sense that you have to give your death as a public gift in order to win the possibility for the future.

In some ways he came closer to his own feelings about his death through the death of other people. He reflected a lot about that.

Family

When his mother died, he was not even allowed to attend her funeral. His letter of request was not even acknowledged by the authorities.

Three of his children died; one of them was a nine-month old baby.

The other very painful death was that of his son Thembi who died when he was 23 and Mandela was in Robben Island. Later other children in his family died.

We see that each time this happened, he would return to his cell during his prison years, which was the worst place to return when dealing with that kind of sorrow and death.

Really, that cell was not much bigger than a grave. He had to confront the death of others in a very stark way.

I think we are reminded of how much pain he has gone through, and people tend to forget that he is an extraordinary man with a very public face.

I think he has thought about the question of death and lived it. That has sort of enriched his life in some ways.

One of the things I like about what is happening now is his refusal to die; his longevity. Just when we thought he was going to be defeated by a machine, he has not died. He is still with us.

Marriage

Obviously we know that his death is coming very soon and his life is a very powerful symbol in relation to death and life itself.

His marriage to Graca Machel at the age of 80 was a wonderful thing. It does make his death more complicated because he has so many wives and grandchildren and the question is who owns his death? Is it the ANC, is it his children, or is it Graca Machel?

 The thing about Mandela is that he often addressed his mistakes later on.

He always felt he had a debt to pay to his family because he somehow neglected them. But he never tried to turn it into a monetary debt.

It was a moral debt. What is disturbing about what has happened in the last few weeks is an attempt by his family to turn the moral debt into a monetary debt. I think that is difficult.

There is some ugliness happening around his death in terms of money. But I don’t think that is where the main drama is in South Africa.

I have spent the last few weeks watching ordinary South Africans speaking on television. It is extraordinary seeing seven-year-old children being able to articulate something about him.

I would say there is much drama going on around his family, but the real drama is an extraordinary process of South Africans across race trying to come to terms with a man of extraordinary vision who did renew this country’s capacity to be more than a geographic accident.

Racial lines

When we imagine his coming death, we see South Africans coming together. At this time, we cannot really say there are divisions along racial lines in relation to people’s feelings about Mandela. He is a very unifying figure.

Of course there are factions who are opposed to each other. One of the greatest things about 1994 (when Mandela was elected the first black President in multi-racial polls) is that it almost destroyed the right wing.

The South African right wing has no power, but you see these websites saying there will be an apocalypse when he dies. I think that is absolute rubbish.

You see people on the left who are worried about his vision. You also see a broad sense of understanding that the real fight in Mandela’s name going forward is against poverty.

Obviously poverty is still racialised because it is largely black people who are poor.  The way to beat poverty is to build a coalition across race and class.

We cannot get a way from the fact that Mandela has a particular kind of charisma. People respond to the fact that he went through a very deep process of self-transformation through the prison years and beyond.

He examined him self very closely and his genius was to pull together that understanding of self with the understanding of a nation.

There is something about the way he came to embody for whatever reason this complicated relationship between freedom and death.

He placed his life into conversations with people like Martin Luther King and Mahtama Gandhi.

There is something about this man that produces in people a response to what they perceive as his extraordinary humanity.

This has come from this very deep capacity he has for self-regeneration.

There is this moment when he was in Robben Island when Mac Maharaj who was in prison with him says the angrier he got, the less he showed it.

This capacity to separate what is going on inside himself from his public face has enabled him to produce a political vision, which produces radical transformation.

 It places him at the centre of the 20th century as an African.

 His vision was radical and broad, very outward looking.

When we place his life against that of, say, Martin Luther King, we see that both these men have a very deep sense of understanding of themselves in the context of the world and of the century they inhabited.