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Mandela’s legacy
HARSH MANDER
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While his personal ethical legacy is undisputed, Mandela’s political legacy has far less sheen today.
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Reconciliation is necessarily egalitarian, and cannot be founded on a surrender of one’s rights, dignity and aspirations from a position of weakness.
Photo: AFP
Presiding over a troubled transition: At Mandela’s 90th birthday celebrations last month.
There is no taller political leader in the world in the second half of the 20th century than Nelson Mandela. As we celebrate his 90th birthday, we reflect on his legacy to the people of the world. His ethical legacy is undisputed: it would be hard to
find a man so free from rancour against his tormentors, despite suffering brutal discrimination and hate under apartheid, and 27 years of brutal incarceration. His belief in the essential goodness of human nature is luminous. He writes for each of us to take to heart, in today’s world of violent hate and divides: “Deep down in every human heart, there is mercy and generosity. No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his (or her) skin, or his (or her) background, or his (or her) religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite”.
Cost of blanket amnesty
Yet, his political legacy, as distinct from his personal one, today has far less sheen. There can be little doubt that the statespersonship and magnanimity of the ANC leadership, embodied in the towering and charismatic personality of Mandela and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, helped avert runaway bloodletting of the kind that literally tore the Indian nation apart in 1947 (and subsequently the Pakistani nation in 1971). This in itself is an enormous historic achievement. But one cost of this was that victims of apartheid were denied by the democratic leadership of new South Africa the right to bring their oppressors to legal justice. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission assured legal amnesty (or freedom from trial and punishment) to all perpetrators of atrocities, as long as they admitted their crimes before the Commission in the glare of a watchful media.
I observed in South Africa strong disagreement and dissatisfaction among many Black South Africans with Mandela’s claim of collective forgiveness for the brutal crimes of the recent past. Forgiveness, to be authentic and genuinely healing, must be the voluntary, informed and empowered choice of the survivors, and cannot be forced on them. If it is, the wounds of apartheid will continue to fester.
This indeed has been the experience also of other amnesty legislation in other countries as well, that “legal forgetting”, which is politically imposed from above, rankles the survivor and does not bring about any real closure for her, nor for the divided societies of which she is a part. To free offenders from the legal consequences of their actions amounts to trading away justice in return for a kind of unequal peace. This was also the experience of post- World War II amnesty laws passed in France and Holland for people who had collaborated with the Germans, and also in many Latin American countries in the 1980s.
To my mind, reconciliation is a process of building or restoring mutual trust, understanding, respect and goodwill between estranged members of different racial, ethnic or religious groups. It is necessarily egalitarian, and cannot be founded on a surrender of one’s rights, dignity and aspirations from a position of weakness. This is the problem with Bandukwala’s heartbreaking (and personally generous) plea for unilateral forgiveness by the victim-survivor Muslim community in Gujarat. True forgiveness requires a prior establishment of a situation of sufficient equality of power to enable persons who suffered not to forgive if they so choose, and for their choice to have consequences on those whom they elect not to forgive. The oppressed Black African people never achieved the power to choose if they wished to forgive their oppressors or seek legal justice: their leaders like Mandela chose on their behalf, in their name.
Fractured society
In my short days in South Africa, I repeatedly encountered a country that remains very deeply fractured on racial and overlapping class lines, as well as gender, between Black African, coloured, Indian and White, men and women. Within these there are further divisions, of ethnic groups within the Blacks, the Indians, and Afrikaaner and British White people. The colour of one’s skin remains in South Africa the overwhelming defining feature of one’s identify, opportunities and social relations, although there is, over the last decade, a small but growing Black middle class who are seeking to escape the centuries-old confines of race. The incredibly luxurious suburbs are still populated almost exclusively by White people, whereas in the crowded and deprived shanties, it is rare to encounter anyone other than Black men and women, boys and girls. And within each and between each of these are chilling narratives of rape and sexual violence. It is estimated that 95 per cent of the economy continues to be controlled by the White settlers. Data also shows that 47.8 per cent of Africans were unemployed in 2003 compared with only 9.9 percent of Whites. South Africa remains hopelessly divided on racial lines, with the privileges or deprivations of class mostly reinforcing those of race and gender. Oppression and injustice not only of the past but also the present are engines of dangerous anger among young people, reflected in the murky sub-culture of brutalised street violence and crime.
The dangers of “reconciliation” imposed on unequal contenders are further highlighted by Sumanta Banerjee who asks the difficult question whether the advance assurance of amnesty for apartheid crimes was only a fig-leaf to disguise the surrender imposed on the weak to give up their rights forever to secure justice from their powerful oppressors. Banerjee points out the telling paradox of Winnie Mandela, former wife of Mandela, being jailed for fraud and theft during the apartheid regime. Whereas “the Truth and Reconciliation Commission cannot punish even a single white gangster, even if it finds him guilty of murders and other crimes against blacks, during the apartheid era…. Winnie Mandela gets imprisoned on charges of fraud, (while) the white racists can get away even with the killing of the famous South African radical leader Steven Biko. Biko’s murderers, when brought before the Commission, confessed to the killing in all its gory detail. But when his family tried to institute a case against them, it was denied” because if perpetrators of human rights abuses fully disclosed all the crimes that they had committed, they were granted amnesty. Banerjee describes this bitterly as a “novel method indeed to bring about reconciliation between the oppressor and the oppressed — at the cost of justice”.
For a true healing
Official or non-official efforts for reconciliation should never be even a well-intentioned apology for impunity for crimes, especially by State authorities, and others who enjoy power. Legal accountability for atrocities and crimes, especially by authorities alone paves the way for the possibilities of genuine reconciliation. This is a lesson of history that Mandela should have heeded, if the people of South Africa were truly to heal. It is a lesson indeed for all societies in these troubled times: that authentic and enduring peace and reconciliation can never be bought cheaply, at the expense of justice.
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