Nelson Mandela can take the heat
And so can other historical figures questioned by later generations.
Nelson Mandela, who led South Africa away from racial segregation and became the president of the country that once had imprisoned him, died ten years ago. And on the anniversary of his death, December 5, a correspondent in Johannesburg reported that some South Africans question his legacy.
“By most people, I’d say he’s still generally revered,” Kate Bartlett reported on NPR.
But there is a small vocal group, mainly people on university campuses, young people who call him a sellout. Hard to believe after he spent 27 years of his life in jail for a cause, Black liberation, and achieved that cause. But they say he should have done more after the end of apartheid to increase Black economic clout in South Africa and say he was too concerned with being conciliatory. Of course, his supporters point out that he did this to avoid a civil war.
Bartlett said some South Africans also question a major part of Mandela’s legacy, the African National Congress, the political party he once led. Since his death it’s been associated with corruption as much as liberation.
This revisionism didn’t take long! But it’s not that unusual or surprising. South Africa’s median age is 27, which means that a large majority of the country was not alive when Mandela walked free from prison in 1990, an event that marked the death knell of apartheid, South Africa’s race-based caste system. Nor can many recall the years when Mandela won the presidency at the head of a multiracial coalition.
People who didn’t experience those years may be more inclined to ask what Nelson Mandela left undone, while taking as a given what he did.
Something like this has happened to giants of American history. Some, like Woodrow Wilson or Andrew Jackson, have been knocked down from the heights they once occupied. Others, like Thomas Jefferson, are seen in a more complicated light. Here and there Americans have even taken down problematic statues of Lincoln, and a few years ago San Francisco officials took his name off a school.
It can be frustrating, even enraging, when modern-day critics go after the heroes of the past. But that’s part of democracy: we have an argument. We take a second or third look. We question our assumptions and look at things afresh.
Sometimes this argument brings better clarity and better understanding of our past. For example, we have a more definite understanding of Confederate heroes, who went to war in 1861 to defend slavery. Later generations of their supporters blurred this fact by saying the Union caused the war or that it was fought over abstract principles such as state rights; but more recent times have clarified the facts. Rebels said at the time that they were fighting to preserve slavery.
Other times the argument may bring criticism we feel is overblown or unfair, applying present-day standards to people of the past. But the strongest figures tend to weather it. Jefferson, a slaveowner, is taught in greater complexity than in the past—and should be!—but his statue remains inside his recently renovated memorial in Washington, D.C. His words in the Declaration of Independence remain the national creed, and his character is at the center of the action in the musical Hamilton.
After a public outcry, Lincoln’s name went back on the school. It was restored even though Lincoln said and did things we would not approve. We can understand him as a pragmatic political figure who believed in Jefferson’s line “that all men are created equal,” but did not expect it to be “perfectly attained.” He went for all the equality he could get away with, leaving the rest for later generations.
Frederick Douglass, a pragmatist himself, allied with Lincoln even as he criticized Lincoln’s shortcomings. (Other antislavery figures excoriated Douglass for working with a man and a party they saw as less than perfect.)
If we see such figures with more complexity than past generations did—if we see them not as giants but as human beings, surrounded by a diverse group of their fellow Americans—that may just make them more relevant and interesting.
In the same way, we can expect Nelson Mandela to endure. And if people debate the pragmatic moves he made on the way to freedom for millions, then that is true to the story—and keeps the story alive.
Thanks for reading Differ We Must, a companion to my book of the same name. Differ We Must tells Lincoln’s life story through his meetings with people who disagreed with him; and it’s for sale this holiday season at your bookstore or at this link.