NELSON'S COLUMNS
Every age, it seems, needs its saints, its living icons. The resultant hagiography is not very informative about its subject matter, yet can certainly be most revealing of the preoccupations of the age in which it is produced.
What will future generations make of our current obsession with Nelson Mande- la? Of local councils that, unable to collect the rubbish in their streets, rename them after him? Of birthday concerts that are broadcast to hundreds of millions of people throughout the world, who feel the warm glow of righteousness merely by watching? Of bookshops that contain more books about him than about India and China combined, half of humanity? Of innumer- able demonstrations for his release by people who would be hard-presSed to find another African country on a map, to describe conditions there, or to name its dictator?
Nelson Mandela is a brave man who has long struggled for his ideals. For many years he spoke up in defence of sweetness and light in a country where they were banned as subversive. But he is not a prisoner of conscience in the Amnesty International sense since he espoused, and espouses still, violence as a means of bringing about change in South Africa. He is a founder of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the Spear of the Nation, the sabotage and terrorism wing of the African National Congress; and he himself underwent milit- arY training as a guerrilla, on his own admission. None of this is, of course, surprising, since for decades all other avenues to black political advancement were contemptuously and definitively closed.
Nevertheless, the widespread use of violent tactics in the townships has led to precisely the situation that Mandela him- self described in his statement at the Rivonia trial; It [violence] was increasingly taking the form, not of struggle against the government — though this is what prompted it — but of civil strife amongst [Africans], conducted in such a way that it could not hope to achieve anything other than a loss of life and bitterness.. .
And if those who like to think of South Africa as a Manichaean contest between Good and Evil were a little more attentive to reality than to their own mental state, the recent burning down of one of Mrs Mandela's houses, not by white but by black youths, together with her construc- tion of an ostentatious mansion and the internecine battles of her American legal and public relations advisers over the franchise of the family name, might alert them to the complexity of the situation.
Oppression and injustice are so wide- spread in the world that they cannot be fought equally on all fronts at once. Never- theless, when the attack is so concentrated that the existence of comparable or worse injustice elsewhere is neglected or even denied, one may suspect special pleading.
It is not difficult to demonstrate that horrors equal to or exceeding those of apartheid have been regrettably frequent in Africa over the last two decades. A quarter to half a million people have been killed in Uganda; a hundred thousand each in Rwanda and Burundi; a third of the population in Equatorial Guinea; five to twenty thousand in Zanzibar. In Tanzania half the population was forcibly removed from its home (and the instigator declared a saint); of the unspeakable criminal nasti- ness of Ethiopia it is unnecessary to write; political freedom of any recognisable kind scarcely exists on the continent; imprison- ment of opponents without trial, or worse, is the norm; and the press is odiously obsequious to whatever dictator is in pow- er. As for corruption, it is so all-embracing that it would be comic were it not tragic. This is only the beginning of the catalogue, yet none of it has called forth twenty-four hour vigils outside embassies, rock con- certs or demands for outside intervention.
The enormous, almost ludicrous, dispar- ity in the public response to the problem of South Africa and those of the rest of the continent is not the result only of years of mealy-mouthed misinformation in the press about Africa (the average person would learn more about it by ten minutes in Lagos or Kinshasa airports than by 20 years of reading the Guardian), or of communist manipulation of the anti- apartheid movement, though this exists: it is rather the result of an imperative need to exorcise inner demons. And it scarcely requires a Freud to imagine what those inner demons might be.
As usual, the marketplace provides a more honest, though not necessarily an entirely reassuring, assessment of national sentiment. A company called Princely Homes has taken out an injunction against the council in Newport, Gwent, to prevent it from naming a group of newly-built houses after Nelson Mandela. Since their name was changed from the slightly less contentious North Street Mews, their value has fallen by £5,000 each.
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