219 - After the Ball is Over... Page 1

SA is a dangerously self-deluding country, one in sore need of a sharp dose of reality. Much as he may enjoy public affection, the sooner Nelson Mandela bows out, allowing us at last to bury all the fantasy and fairy tales, the better for all concerned. That is the hardnosed market reaction to the hugely pretentious, Hollywood glitz extravaganza staged this month in celebration of Nelson’s 80^th birthday and synchronised marriage to Graca Machel. The different approaches of the SA media reflected the fantasy and the reality.

The Johannesburg Star, a publication where sound judgement has never been king, devoted no less than 23 mind-numbing pages, including a 20-page commemorative issue, to Mandela, his life and times. The glorification was excruciating, the rapturous adulation and soggy sentimentality ominously reminiscent of the superhuman status conferred on "Uncle Joe" Stalin, Ceausescu, Castro and Kim Il-sung (not to mention Bokassa and Idi Amin).

Opposed to that, The Financial Mail, in a single short leader, deplored the overkill,

describing this latest bout of Mandela mania as "embarrassing." Unquestionably, the ANC’s sharp-suited PR people did go overboard. What’s worse, we’ve been here a good many times before.

Who will forget when our martyr-hero was released from Victor Verster Prison on February 11, 1990? Though some of us White troglodytes had grave reservations, for most South Africans the freeing of Mandela was an intensely exciting, long-sought historic event. Measured against the gigantic global furore, the exultation created almost equated with the Second Coming, with Mandela himself about to descend from the Pearly Gates like some unscheduled fourth member of the Holy Trinity.

For a while, SA was a nation delirious with joy and relief. Arising from his many and earlier private discussions with De Klerk and other Nat cabinet ministers, it was predicted that Mandela would be a decisive force in promoting reconciliation and constructive dialogue. Then, as now, he was universally delineated as a man of peace.

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THE hoopla surrounding Mandela says more about the tragedy of modern SA than is comfortable. Had things gone the way so many hoped in 1994, this sentimental orgy would not have been necessary. As things stand, Mandela is all that is left of the many illusions generated during the heady days of the transition to full democracy.

Gone is the belief that post-apartheid SA would be peaceful, strong and prosperous. Gone is the belief that the new government would be honest and wise. Gone is the illusion that the race issue would vanish forever and that race quotas would be finally buried.

Gone is the hope that the killings would stop in KwaZulu-Natal; that Black-on-Black violence would abate and that ordinary South Africans would experience that sense of deliverance that comes from the absence of fear.

Gone, too, are some of the other illusions that helped to father the settlement:

That De Klerk’s morals were as pure as he claimed his motives to be.

That the ANC alliance would honour it’s promises to the IFP, promises that drew the IFP into the election unprepared and at short notice.
That the ANC would seriously consider the proposal for an Afrikaner homeland.
That the ethos of the Freedom Charter would be exchanged for a programme of action more in keeping with the spirit of the times, both domestically and globally.

All gone except the myth of Mandela’s magic, which could never have dissolved in the harsh light of dawn because it was never really there. In heaping such mountains of undeserved praise on Mandela, both SA and the world are whistling in the dark, straining to keep up the vain pretence that the miracle is holding its own against the depredations of the multitude of evil impulses inherent in the SA predicament.

The praise songs for Mandela are, in truth, a lament for what might have been.



Issue No. 219	Research: Estelle Lombard	July, 1998