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Mandela Day does not honour the real wish of our national icon. Instead, it is a gradual bastardisation of Madiba’s legacy
It makes one sick to one’s stomach.
Every year on July 18, one has to endure grown-ups of all hues painting houses, preparing sandwiches to feed the poor, sweeping government buildings gratis – all ostensibly in honour of South Africa’s first democratic president, Nelson Mandela.
One has observed with increasing disgust the gradual bastardisation of Madiba’s legacy, his ultimate portrayal as a Mother Teresa with a soft spot especially for racist thugs who have looted the South African economy.
Now, they – abetted by people who either don’t know any better or heaven knows what their motivation is – profess to honour him by performing monkey tricks for 67 minutes once a year.
In the meantime, Madiba’s real wish – “the complete eradication of apartheid” – is being disrespected with such reckless abandon that one wonders when it all began to unravel.
That his wish was the eradication of apartheid and its nefarious effects was demonstrated not only by his actions throughout his life and his February 1990 speech when he emerged from prison, but also by his speech from the dock as long ago as April 1964, during his treason trial, when he said:
“The complaint of Africans, however, is not only that they are poor and whites are rich, but that the laws which are made by the whites are designed to preserve this situation. There are two ways to break out of poverty. The first is by formal education, and the second is by the worker acquiring a greater skill at his work and thus higher wages. As far as Africans are concerned, both these avenues of advancement are deliberately curtailed by legislation...
...The [current] Prime Minister [Hendrik Verwoerd] said during the debate [on] the Bantu Education Bill in 1953: ‘When I have control of Native education, I will reform it so that Natives are taught from childhood to realise that equality with Europeans is not for them ... People who believe in equality are not desirable teachers for Natives...’
The other obstacle to the economic advancement of the Africans is the industrial colour bar by which all the better jobs of industry are reserved for whites only...”
Yet today, the dominant narrative of Mandela’s legacy in South Africa and elsewhere is one of our first democratically elected president traipsing around – Gandhi-like – singing Kumbaya and dishing out olive branches to those who raped and pillaged our country and her resources, kissing babies of all sorts, and making a difference in people’s lives “in a small way”.
There was nothing small about Mandela’s ways. So, why would you honour him by doing things “in a small way”?
This is a false narrative, deliberately intended to blunt the man’s true wish: the complete eradication of apartheid. That legacy can only be realised by an ambitious, radical economic transformation programme; one whose central focus must of necessity be primarily the two factors that Mandela identified in 1964: quality formal education for the black child, and high and varied skills acquisition for black men and women of working age.
Equipped with such skills and education, black people will rightly reclaim the economy of the country. This should already have happened. It is scandalous that the current government persists in this failed education system and keeps trotting out dubious matric-result statistics every year that mean absolutely nothing for the advancement of the black child’s fortunes.
It is equally scandalous that this government keeps making up employment figures, in the process mischaracterising temporary construction labour projects as permanent jobs making massive inroads into the country’s unemployment figures.
Most egregiously, it is scandalous that this government has the power of expropriation, both in the Constitution and in empowering legislation, yet economic transformation – and the true and sustainable economic empowerment of black people – in this country remains elusive.
All these are pursuits of which Mandela would have approved as a fitting tribute to his indefatigable determination to achieve the complete eradication of apartheid. The 67 minutes of monkey tricks that characterise Mandela Day so-called contributions in honour of the great man’s legacy are a crying shame.
In fact, they dishonour it, masking deep fissures of systemic inequality defined by race. Mandela’s true legacy is not as characterised around the world every July 18. Whether analysts and mainstream media owners like it or not, Mandela’s legacy is now reflected in the rhetoric of one Julius Malema of the Economic Freedom Fighters.
Time and Malema’s ascendance will tell whether his is merely populist rhetoric, or a genuine determination to finally realise Mandela’s wish to dispose of apartheid. But South Africans should be ashamed of undermining Mandela’s legacy by paying lip service to it every July 18.
Ngalwana SC is an advocate with the Duma Nokwe Group and a member of the Johannesburg Society of Advocates
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