Mandela: still present, still political

People were shouting, dancing, whooping, singing, crying. Something wonderful had happened, or was happening. The party lasted all day and into the night. My only reference point for this madness was the New Year's festivities of the previous month: the sense of a new era, the uncertainty over what it meant. The people who towered over us cajoled us to celebrate, and we did, but we didn't really understand why.

That was my first exposure to Nelson Mandela as a mystical figure, and I've charted his presence in my life as such ever since. My liberal Western generation is suspicious of icons, and I later became uncomfortable holding Mandela up as a personal idol, even as he came the closest of anyone to being one. But this never felt like cynical resistance so much as a fitting embrace. Mandela always kept his lawyer's analytical mind, and assessed his own legacy temperately in his autobiography.

I moved on from that childhood stint in Apartheid-era Swaziland (a country then awash with both South Africa's elite vacation set and its fugitive exiles) and studied South African literature and history in university, then grad school, grappling in the 2000s with the widely lamented fall from grace of the “New South Africa.” Our insistence upon the Fall narrative forced a false and ugly trajectory on the country, taking as its premise a supposed Edenic apex in 1994.

But this was false, as false as idolizing Mandela. South Africa had deep structural economic inequalities in 1994 and a race problem that together were not going to be mystically vanished via the benevolent aura of an idol. The new republic's trajectory was one of striving, failure, complications, successes and the notorious social justice setbacks that came with integrating into the global economy. But no “Fall.” South Africa is a country, not a testing ground for our myths.

Years ago, still affected by this narrative of doom, I shared the common anxiety over what would happen to South Africa after Mandela's death. It seemed his presence was a talisman holding the country back from greater violence and conflict.

Today, upon hearing of his death, I felt calm.

This is what happens when you jettison the false subscription to Mandela-as-idol and focus instead on his life and impact in all its complicated beauty. When you refuse to depoliticize or canonize him.

He was a man, a lawyer, a visionary leader, not a saint. He was a figure in history, not above it. And history continues. We continue, with him.