In this fascinating essay, Elleke Boehmer traces the Nobel line of inheritance passed from Mandela to Obama, demonstrating how 'Madiba' emerged as a skilled orator and master of political theatre, characteristics which Obama would later adopt to great success. Looking beyond Mandela the symbol, it reveals the sophistication of his self-awareness, rhetorical style, political astuteness and strategic willingness to perform the roles required of him to achieve his political aim: freedom and equality in South Africa.
A unique insight into a man who became a giant of the international stage, and his enduring legacy.
In this fascinating essay, Elleke Boehmer traces the Nobel line of inheritance passed from Mandela to Obama, demonstrating how 'Madiba' emerged as a skilled orator and master of political theatre, characteristics which Obama would later adopt to great success. Looking beyond Mandela the symbol, it reveals the sophistication of his self-awareness, rhetorical style, political astuteness and strategic willingness to perform the roles required of him to achieve his political aim: freedom and equality in South Africa.
A unique insight into a man who became a giant of the international stage, and his enduring legacy.
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Overview
In this fascinating essay, Elleke Boehmer traces the Nobel line of inheritance passed from Mandela to Obama, demonstrating how 'Madiba' emerged as a skilled orator and master of political theatre, characteristics which Obama would later adopt to great success. Looking beyond Mandela the symbol, it reveals the sophistication of his self-awareness, rhetorical style, political astuteness and strategic willingness to perform the roles required of him to achieve his political aim: freedom and equality in South Africa.
A unique insight into a man who became a giant of the international stage, and his enduring legacy.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783601967 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury Publishing |
| Publication date: | 12/09/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 17 |
| File size: | 113 KB |
About the Author
Elleke Boehmer is professor of world literature in English at the University of Oxford, and Governing Body Fellow at Wolfson College. Internationally renowned for her research in post-colonial theory and the literature of empire, Professor Boehmer currently works on questions of migration, identity, and resistance in both colonial and post-colonial literature (sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia). She has published over eighteen books, including four novels; her best-selling biography of Nelson Mandela has been translated into Arabic, Portuguese, and Thai. She obtained her doctorate from Oxford University, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar.
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Nelson Mandela: The Black Pimpernel
By Elleke Boehmer, Adekeye Adebajo
Centre for Conflict Resolution and Zed Books Ltd
Copyright © 2013 Centre for Conflict ResolutionAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78360-196-7
CHAPTER 1
Nelson Mandela: The Black Pimpernel
Among US president Barack Obama's African Nobel ancestors, Nelson Mandela, South Africa's first democratic president following his election in 1994, stands close to the first black American president for the historic impact of his speeches. Like Obama, Mandela is acclaimed for the power of his words in seeking to change the world. If Obama is widely recognised to be a born orator and a gifted rhetorician – though also a highly practised one – Mandela's oratorical performances are known to have been carefully honed and choreographed over decades of training. His speeches have moved law courts, national fortunes and world opinion through the special combination of his magnetism as a leader, his appeal to the great human constants of socio-economic freedom and justice, and the ethical force arising from his life experience and invested in his words.
As African-American author Alice Walker recognised during Obama's 2008 election campaign, the South African president's template could be discerned within the American leader's authoritative and crusading self-representation. In Obama, both the American people and the wider world could recognise a worthy heir to Mandela. It is possible to say that Mandela – as well as Martin Luther King Jr – showed Obama a way to moral power and political authority (see Mazrui, Chapter 2, Robinson, Chapter 3, and Daniels, Chapter 5, in this volume). Obama stands on the shoulders of both men. In this essay, the dynamics and semantics of this Nobel line of inheritance will be more carefully unravelled, with particular focus, at the end, on Mandela's own Nobel Prize acceptance speech.
Any comparison between Nelson Mandela and Barack Obama must of course recognise that they emerge out of very different historical eras, family backgrounds and national geographies. To begin with, Obama is American, though partly of African (Kenyan) descent; Mandela stems from a minor branch of a Xhosa royal family. Yet because of this very difference, the parallels between the two men in terms of leadership style and approach are the more striking, as are the connections that can be drawn between their political reputations and historical legacies, including the remarkable charisma that unites them. It can justly be said that Mandela and Obama embody that quality of 'individual personality ... set apart from ordinary men' defined by social theorist Max Weber as the charisma of the great leader. Keenly aware from the beginning that their leadership could help found, consolidate and safeguard traditions of democracy in their countries, both men saw, too, that they represented important sources of inspiration and legitimation for their national communities.
In many ways, Nelson Mandela, whose name and face are internationally famous, needs no introduction. He is widely perceived and celebrated as a symbol of social justice, an exemplary figure connoting non-racialism and democracy, a moral giant. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, not long after he stepped down as the first democratic president of South Africa (1994–99), it was said that his face was second only to the golden arches of McDonald's in terms of its international 'name-brand' recognition. When the statue of 'Madiba' (Mandela's clan name) was unveiled in Parliament Square in London in 2007, he was hailed as 'President of the World', and his ninetieth birthday celebrations in July 2008 were marked by well-attended concerts in major cities on several continents. Beginning in the 1960s, when Mandela's famous court addresses first drew the world's attention (at his 1962 sabotage trial and the 1964 Rivonia trial), and resuming in 1988 with his televised seventieth 'birthday party' at England's Wembley Stadium (while he was still in prison), Mandela was established by his advisers and supporters as the pre-eminent symbol of the ongoing struggle against exploitation within, but not confined to, South Africa. Indeed, if across the 1970s and 1980s apartheid was internationally seen as a timeless force of iniquity, then 'Madiba' – the figure who led the struggle against that iniquity – was seen to have absorbed something of that iconic timelessness.
From the beginning, too, Mandela's personal charisma was described as palpable and is itself now famous. Many who have met him remark on the charm, the 'Madiba magic', that radiates from him: a combination of his fame, height and good looks (again not unlike Obama), his encyclopedic memory for faces, and a 'something else' that is undefinable. Central to his character, writes his admirer South African Nobel literature laureate Nadine Gordimer, is a 'remove from self-centredness, the capacity to live for others'.
Yet precisely because Mandela is perhaps now better known as a global icon of freedom and justice around the world than for his actual life-story and achievements, it is important to recollect some of the key events that have defined his long career. 'Madiba' is on record as one of the world's longest-detained political prisoners, having endured twenty-seven years of imprisonment on Robben Island, and later in Pollsmoor and Victor Verster prisons. He walked to freedom in February 1990. Before his imprisonment, Mandela was, during the 1950s, president of his movement (and later party) the African National Congress's (ANC) Youth League, one of the leaders of the peaceful ANC-led Defiance Campaign (from 1952), and then, when that was suppressed by the apartheid regime, the underground leader of the newly formed armed wing of the ANC, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK, from 1961). For over four decades, while his country was vilified the world over for its apartheid policies of state-sanctioned racism, Mandela symbolically, and to some extent practically, led the movement of resistance to that injustice. He and then-president of South Africa Frederik Willem de Klerk (see Houston, Chapter 9 in this volume) jointly received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993. After South Africa's first democratic elections in April 1994, Mandela was inaugurated as president of the country a month later. He served one term as president, graciously handing over power to his deputy, Thabo Mbeki, in 1999.
The Struggle against Apartheid
Although it is often assumed that Nelson Mandela was the chief architect of the new South Africa, and fought an almost single-handed battle for the rights of the black masses, in fact, as he himself repeated many times, South Africa's liberation was effectively struggled for and won while Mandela languished in jail. Already at his 1962 trial, 'Madiba' emphasised: 'I have been only one in a large army of people.' Like Obama, Mandela has always been quick to acknowledge the support of those who sustained his career. As Mandela put it in an interview with African-American television host Oprah Winfrey:
If there is any significant role that I played it was that of being a vessel through which the struggle was presented to the nation and the world. The struggle had to have a symbol for it to be effective. The great men and women of the struggle chose that I be that symbol.
Although it is true that Mandela's good guidance and charisma represented important sources of inspiration for the making of post-apartheid South Africa, he was right to forswear authorship of the new South African democracy in this way. It was not merely the modesty of the loyal party man that motivated such statements, but his keen insight into the business of politics as well. With Mandela, it is manifestly the case that his leadership alone cannot explain the historical development in South Africa from apartheid to freedom. Inner radiance alone cannot account for why his icon should loom so large in the world's imagination.
The true picture – the real-life 'Madiba magic' – is more complicated than the story of individual specialness suggests, even though that radiance remains an important ingredient. Mandela's leadership is based in a quality of character certainly, but this is combined with other key traits, not least his fine talents for negotiation and arbitration, his insights into his political opponents, and his career-long proximity to several outstanding colleagues and friends, themselves astute political minds, particularly Oliver Tambo, Walter Sisulu and Ahmed Kathrada. Then there is Mandela's talent as a performer – his facility for finding the words and the attire to draw out, appeal to and convince an audience. As his previously quoted comment to Oprah Winfrey suggests, Mandela has always been acutely aware of, and able to mould, his own iconicity. He is able to play to the way in which the unfolding of his life can be seen to underpin South Africa's long road to freedom, just as Obama's presidential triumph in 2008 can be viewed as representing the fulfilment of Martin Luther King's dream – as Obama himself signalled in his acceptance and inaugural speeches as president of the United States in 2008 and 2009. Both Mandela and Obama were trained as lawyers, and share a keen sense of the powers of verbal advocacy and defence.
In any memoir involving Mandela – the ANC's most famous leader – the key note that is repeatedly struck relates to his chameleon-like talent for donning different guises, his theatrical flair for costume and gesture, and his shrewd awareness of the power of his own image. Across his career, as he played such diverse and varied roles as counsellor, lawyer, showman, guerrilla leader and statesman, he allowed himself to be widely photographed in these guises. He delighted in acting the shape-shifter, assuming a range of contrasting 'masks' and convincing others of their authenticity. On the run in 1961–62, before his long imprisonment, he positively thrived in the costumes that his life-in-hiding necessitated, as well as in the sense of theatre and risk of exposure involved in wearing them. It was for good reason that he was called the 'Black Pimpernel', after the protagonist of Baroness Emmuska Orczy's well-loved 1905 novel The Scarlet Pimpernel, an aristocratic English master of ingenious disguises who was active at the time of the French Terror of 1792. Mandela is said not to have resented the appellation. It appealed to his sense of himself as able to establish rapport with a variety of different audiences – 'with Muslims in the Cape ... sugar-workers in Natal ... factory workers in Port Elizabeth', as he writes in his 1995 autobiography Long Walk to Freedom. It appealed also to Mandela's desire for mastery of any situation in which he might find himself.
Up until 1990, for an exiled movement in need of messianic leadership, as the ANC was, Nelson Mandela perfectly fitted the bill and indeed was happy to style his image so as to advance the nationalist cause. It is this factor that accounts for the choreographed quality that any account of his life and self-presentation inevitably carries: his performances were composed with a remarkable degree of self-knowledge. Mandela was never unaware of the power of making a physical statement, of the efficacy whether in public or private of masks, of how his life might be read as a model for African upward mobility and political success. Even on the 1994 presidential campaign trail, when his reputation was relatively secure, 'Madiba' was famous for addressing several People's Forums in a single day, while changing clothes as needed to suit his different audiences (a woolly jumper for a talk to older people, an open shirt for a village crowd). As fellow ANC activist Raymond Mhlaba once remarked, Mandela was groomed from the late 1950s to be the internal ANC leader (the counterpart to Oliver Tambo in exile), and 'he himself of course conducted himself to attain that status'.
But Mandela's mastery of performance, though often taken as a given, is rarely analysed in any depth. Until recently, this was probably due to the association of such theatricality with charges of change-ability. Yet Mandela's capacity for working his image as if it were itself an expression of his politics tells us a great deal – and not only about his shrewd ability to manipulate his own myth. It also reflects on his proverbial dynamism: how he transformed his style of activism into a credo for action. It relays his understanding, which he shares with the Indian political-spiritual leader Mahatma Gandhi (who lived in South Africa for twenty-one years until 1914), and more recently again with Barack Obama, that method and medium are central to politics, that principle is most effectively conveyed through display. Political success, to a great extent, means transmitting a more humanly convincing message than does one's rival, and Mandela shows that he keenly embraces this precept.
Mandela's awareness of his iconic status can appear cynical, almost cunningly post-modern, and seems to cut across his otherwise apparently genuine asseverations of modesty. At the time, however, his astute manipulations of his image could most accurately have been described as expedient. He saw, as did the first prime minister of independent India, Jawaharlal Nehru, that it was important to stand as an 'idealized personification' of the ideals and ambitions of his people: he understood that embattled anti-colonial nationalist movements require compelling and unifying images. A reader of Nehru's life-writing, Mandela, in his own autobiography fifty years later, constructed his life on the assumption that the national leader's narrative is indeed interlocked with the nation's story. In the case of South Africa, this was the story of anti-apartheid resistance. In Mandela's view, the leader, the first democratic president-to-be, embodies the nation. Significantly, during his later years in office, 'Madiba' often came across in ways that suggested a self entirely bound up in a public mask, as his co-biographer Richard Stengel in fact commented.
But Mandela's talent for performance and styling his body language was always accompanied by finely pitched and modulated speeches. In fact, his performances are so deeply plaited with his spoken words and rhetorical stance that the one is hardly conceivable without the other. What more might be said about the first black South African president's winning way with words?
Mandela's big speeches under apartheid tended to track, generate and justify significant changes or new initiatives in the liberation struggle. Post-1990, his talks and speeches again marked important occasions and were used to declaim and to persuade, as well as to castigate and cajole. Yet no matter how many different objectives these verbal performances may have had, virtually all were notable once again both for their quality as performances and for their performativeness. Mandela was always particularly talented at using a speech to call a certain historical moment or mode of political awareness into being. For example, in his famous statement from the dock at the end of the Rivonia trial in April 1964, as Mandela declared the ANC to be implacably opposed to racialism in all its manifestations, he thereby powerfully committed his movement, in the eyes of the world, to resisting white and black domination. That is to say, he launched the South African struggle internationally under a non-racial banner. And also at his trial in 1962, Mandela had chosen, after consultation, to represent himself from the dock, rightly thinking that the direct form of address this afforded him would create an ideal opportunity for broadcasting the political vision of the already-banned ANC.
Several of Mandela's most famous early speeches were in their different ways preoccupied with explaining the ANC's graduated turn to armed resistance, both to the movement as a whole and more widely. A particularly vivid example is his 'A Land Ruled by the Gun' speech, delivered at one of the 1962 precursor meetings to the founding of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU). In this speech, Mandela uncompromisingly transmitted the ANC's new militant message to Africa, that there were only two choices left facing South Africa: to submit or to fight. But Mandela's speech from the dock in April 1964 at the end of the Rivonia trial was also illuminating regarding his views on militancy and democracy. Realising how important the forum of this particular trial was (the outcome of which could have been the death sentence), Mandela had decided to forfeit the debating forum provided by the witness box, and to present directly from the dock, while at the same time playing upon the heroic image that his time underground had created. As a lawyer himself, Mandela was more aware than most that the space of the court could be used as a political theatre. It was a place unconstrained like no other in the country by the discriminatory restrictions imposed on the black South African majority.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Nelson Mandela: The Black Pimpernel by Elleke Boehmer, Adekeye Adebajo. Copyright © 2013 Centre for Conflict Resolution. Excerpted by permission of Centre for Conflict Resolution and Zed Books Ltd.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Nelson Mandela: The Black Pimpernel,The Struggle against Apartheid,
The March to Freedom,
The Nobel Speech,
Concluding Reflections,
Notes,
Bibliography,