In his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Mandela thanked “these countless human beings, both inside and outside our country [who] had the nobility of spirit to stand in the path of tyranny and injustice, without seeking selfish gain. They recognized that an injury to one is an injury to all and therefore acted together in defense of justice and a common human decency.”
When he is honored, Mandela invariably says he believes that the honor is really intended for all who fought for and achieved freedom in South Africa. After a ticker-tape parade in New York, he told me all the adulation was really for the African National Congress. But if the ANC held a parade in Lower Manhattan without Mandela, would anyone come?
Mandela’s is among the most recognized faces and names in the world. A nuclear particle has been named after him, as well as a plant. The number of awards he has won, and streets, schools, and even towns named after him are legion. And yet, as his lifelong friend and lawyer George Bizos has told me, Mandela doesn’t want statutes erected in his memory, or streets named after him. The legacy he would like most of all is in the changed circumstances of people, in improved lives, in freedom and the ability of people everywhere to enjoy the freedom they have gained. Bizos added that if someone has money and wants to honor Madiba, he should build a school or a clinic, something that will directly improve people’s lives.
If I must choose one quality in Mandela that has outshone all the others, it is indeed his ability to recognize the moment in which he finds himself and then to outfit himself accordingly.
Speaking of the Defiance Campaign, biographer Anthony Sampson told an interviewer that Mandela “had quite a strong touch of the showman, of course, which made some people, including myself, a bit skeptical [at first] about what really lay behind the show. . . . He was always a master of imagery. He always looked right for the part. That’s true of most great politicians, incidentally, but it was most striking in his case. I remember when he launched the Defiance Campaign. He was the volunteer in chief, and there he was in a long military overcoat, supervising, looking every inch the . . . paramilitary man. Very imposing. The fact that he always looked right and that his smile, which was almost too good to be true, that wide, wide, smile.”
Richard Stengel spoke of Mandela’s ability to recognize and put into perspective the larger meaning of a situation, with reference to Mandela’s recognition of what it was going to take to make the most of the Robben Island prison experience. Speaking to an interviewer for American public television, Stengel said the following:
One side of [his] maturity, one thing that he learned in prison, was you set your sights in the far distance, and he did. I am not sure that he was conscious of it in the very beginning. But fairly soon he was, when he decided to learn Afrikaans, when he decided that he needed to have some kind of relationship with those guards. In a strange way, he realized, and it may be [that he did so] unconsciously that the relationship between him and his Afrikaans guards was a microcosm for the whole South African experience. . . .
What we’ve been talking about . . . [is] the kind of lover’s quarrel that he had with the world. The genius, in a strange way, of Nelson Mandela, is that he was able to transfer the personal to the political. We ordinary folk might feel personally angry, aggrieved if somebody does something to us, don’t think about it in a larger context. He managed to, at some point, think about it all in a larger context, not take it personally.
And so, in a way, his greatest challenges came after his release, when he was recognized the world over for his achievements, yet was also in some ways most alone, especially after the heartbreaking separation and divorce from Winnie. He faced a completely new set of circumstances.
Mandela’s longtime comrade Mac Maharaj, who most recently was the person who released medical updates on Mandela’s health to the press, remembers how at the time of Mandela’s release from prison, it wasn’t Mandela’s release that came as a surprise—since it was by then already anticipated—but the unbanning of the various banned organizations.
“There was only one element of surprise,” Maharaj said, “and that was how the unbanning extended even to the Communist Party and Umkhonto we Sizwe. Now, how the hell does a liberation army operate when it is unbanned, when until that very moment your task was to wage war?”