Nelson Mandela is a South African through and through. He has lived in all the worlds that make up his diverse country with its eleven official languages, many ethnic and tribal groups, and disparate regions and communities. Some who grow up in South Africa still live in rural areas as their ancestors did hundreds of years ago. Others are packed into overcrowded black townships known for their shacks and poverty while still others live affluent lifestyles in plush leafy suburbs.
Mandela has lived as South Africans do, but he is also known globally as a man who belongs to the world. Everyone knows his name, and most value his story. In a country rightfully angry with corruption and self-serving political leaders, his image is untarnished and has only grown in stature over the years. He led South Africa to freedom and equality against impossible odds. His journey personifies the country’s journey.
Producer David Thompson, formerly head of BBC Films, has said that Mandela’s international status gives them a special responsibility in telling the story:
“Mandela is, rightly, an absolute icon. He is probably the only world leader who has remained completely untarnished, particularly at a time of so much political upheaval across the world. When the changes happen and people get disillusioned, I mean Mandela is the only one whose legacy remains completely intact.
“He is an extraordinary role model for people and he is probably the most famous brand name, after Coca Cola, around the world, and rightly so. He is an incredible inspiration to people—the idea you can actually have radical change and transformation in a country without violence, without revenge, makes him an extraordinary role model and a hero to so many people.”
Long Walk to Freedom director Justin Chadwick and I talked about how to free Mandela’s story from the mythology. To Chadwick, the story is about a real person struggling for change, and struggling within himself. He said that studying Mandela, the man, not just the icon, has taught him a lot: “It’s got to be about the people or the things that you don’t know, the things that were happening behind the scenes. It’s got to surprise you. You know, there’s got to be a humanity to it. Particularly, with a film. You know we can’t just polish the veneer of Mandela and what Mandela is. . . . Speaking with the family members was very liberating for me because they said, you know, please treat him as a man.”
What is it about Mandela that sets him apart?
It’s not any one thing—his political achievements, Nobel Prize, outspokenness, humility, courage, AIDS advocacy—but goes deeper. How many who admire him would have made the choices he made, or taken the risks he did—especially when as a lawyer who had “made it,” he didn’t have to?
And yet, in poll after poll, Mandela is recognized as one of the most popular men in the world, a Man of the Century, afforded the kind of treatment reserved for winners, especially good-looking ones with wide smiles.
The news media coverage worldwide has been largely positive and Mandela has been showered with accolades. His globe trotting, college appearances, and tours have also been widely covered. The Mandela story is one of the few feel-good news stories that keeps giving.
Not everyone is happy with what’s been called the global “iconography” that surrounds Mandela.
Frances Lukhele of the University of Swaziland blamed Hollywood for deifying Mandela, in the Canadian Journal of African Studies: “Nelson Mandela’s global iconography is accompanied by a respectful reluctance to countenance any skepticism with his saintly stature. However, a reading of the 2009 film, Invictus, directed by Clint Eastwood, invites an exploration of a dimensionality that has received scant attention, namely, the demonstrable role of the American film industry in the crafting of Mandela’s global image.”
This article ventured where angels fear to tread in advancing the view that Hollywood has played an inordinate role in the “making” of, or transformation of, post-prison Nelson Mandela into a global hero and secular saint; this process has not been a boon to the average South African Mandela spent nearly three decades to liberate. Indeed, the article argued that the beneficiaries of Mandela’s appropriation are the architects of the same, namely, Wall Street, which instrumentalized Mandela to script a jaundiced narrative of South African culture and history.
Critics seem to both admire and sneer at Mandela’s fame. A group that keeps track of the net worth of celebrities places Mandela’s at fifteen million dollars. (He had nothing in the bank when he was released from prison in 2000.)
Celebrities seem to love being in his presence, perhaps a symbol of the seriousness and sense of mission missing in their own lives.
I spoke with one of South Africa’s best-known writers, Njabulo Ndebele, about this phenomenon. He said, “I think the danger of a celebrity culture in a society that still has so much to do is that it can quickly lapse into simplification and a lack of depth, in a sense that you can solve the deep problems of life through slogans and statements that seem to contain a lot of truth, but in fact don’t express the reality that we see out there.
“And I think Madiba tried not to be seen as a celebrity in that sense. I think he always tried to put across the other view, that there is more to me than what you wish to see, and that that is what is important. I think certain societies can play around with celebrities and enjoy it, but they can enjoy it precisely because there is no vulnerability to a sudden collapse, because institutions have been put in place over decades, and sometimes centuries.
“We’re struggling to put our feet into the ground, to develop roots. And it is dangerous to pretend that there are roots in the face of notions of perfection that are encapsulated in a celebrity culture.”
And yet Mandela is regularly seen, by many, as a saint. So I asked Ndebele, “Do you consider Madiba sanctified?”
And he replied, “I think it is understandable to see him as a saint, because in an imperfect world many of us like to see some models of perfection. But he himself acknowledges that he is not a perfect person. And one can see that when you read about his life—that he has doubts, has experienced pain and suffering, and a good example is when he received the news of the death of his son. It was devastating. And so he reacted as a father, not as a mythical figure. And that made us see him as an ordinary human being.”
ANC veteran Pallo Jordan was in charge of the ANC’s outreach to the press over many years in exile and then on his return to South Africa.
He explained to me why much of the media places Mandela as a global celebrity in a world that is often seen in terms of black and white, good and bad:
“Well the temptation, I think, on the part of the media is always to make someone like that into a celebrity, which I suppose is inevitable, given the environment one lives in. And twentieth-century figures have almost always been transformed, especially by the electronic media, into celebrity figures.
“The temptation is great, but I think that to do so strips Mandela of a lot of what he has going for him, which is that he was in the main a political activist and leader who had a legal profession, not a celebrity.
“He became an iconic figure as a result of his nearly twenty-eight years of imprisonment and that the campaign for the release of South African political prisoners was anchored around his name, which probably contributed to the casting of the person as a celebrity at a certain point.
“Now whether the world needs a figure like that is something we can debate. To make Mandela into that does strip him I think of many dimensions of what he was and what he could be—which is a freedom fighter in the tradition of your Gandhi, of King and earlier freedom fighters.
“Now we might celebrate him, because of his achievements and his deeds, but to reduce him to a celebrity—sort of to make him like Madonna; well that isn’t what he is.”
Director Justin Chadwick worked hard at not treating Mandela as a celebrity in Long Walk to Freedom. He said, “It doesn’t feel too reverential or “worthy.” We were very, very aware of that in the prep. Anant, Dave, the producers, and Bill [Nicholson, the writer], and I were very, very aware. How do we, how do we get the audience in? And it was through the characters. Through understanding them as three-dimensional, living, breathing characters. Flaws and all.”