Mandela by Bob Crew

Author:Bob Crew
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2013-12-10T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Four

Nelson Mandela’s Miserables

We have now seen, in the first three chapters, how it was that Nelson Mandela was the real deal, but not, alas, for the millions of South Africa’s unemployed and extremely poor. Given the limited hand of cards that Lady Fortune had dealt to Mandela, we can also see that he knew how to play his cards to the best advantage in more ways than one on a needs basis, and that he knew what his priorities were.

First came his moral leadership, the avoidance of a bloodbath, the resultant economic and foreign investment success in the absence of a bloodbath, and then came the turning of a very superior freedom movement into a successful government.

But his freedom movement has turned out to be like no other because, for two decades now, it has been gradually turning itself into a proper government, rather than the mere freedom movement that it was, and it is currently maturing as such. The reason why he managed to achieve such a superior freedom movement is because he converted the ANC and other black South Africans to his amazing culture of patient compromise—a rare thing in Africa to be sure—to go with his moral superiority and business leadership already discussed in this book.

The ANC is, as it always has been, a very different and infinitely better kind of freedom movement from the bottom up, which is why it is currently able to be successfully converting itself, slowly but surely, into a proper government that is—thus far and fingers crossed!—no longer merely a freedom movement as before, which is more than other freedom movements have succeeded in doing. They have either fallen apart or turned themselves into tyrannical dictatorships in order not to fall apart.

In case anyone doubts that the freedom movement that he bequeathed was in any way extraordinary or superior to others, just look at the others in question. One does not need to be a professor, graduate, or student of political science to know this. Just look at what went wrong in Zimbabwe under President Mugabe, Ghana under President Nkrumah, and Cuba under President Castro (to mention but a few), as well as what is going wrong in most of the Arab Spring and pre–Arab Spring countries under their various dictators or newly elected leaders that have arisen from their respective freedom movements.

But for some two decades now, no such thing has gone wrong with or happened to the ANC, which is a tremendous achievement not to be underestimated. And let us repeat that Nelson Mandela brought this about by reason of his famous and highly intelligent aforesaid culture of patient compromise, the liberal-humanist virtues and values of which he managed to convince most of his followers.

Even so, it cannot be denied that the one thing that he did fail to do was to achieve an urgently required new deal for the desperately needy and hungry underclass, for the improvement of which he has prepared the ground, certainly, but without, as yet, a new deal sealed on their behalf, even after some two decades of ANC government.

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