The Decolonial Mandela

Introduction

How can the world be saved from the paradigm of war and difference in place since the dawn of a racially hierarchized Euro-North American-centric modernity? Is it possible to transcend the post-1945 Nuremberg template of transitional justice that privileges criminal justice rather than restorative justice? Using the example of Mandela’s life of struggle and legacy, this article delves deeper into these questions from a critical decolonial ethics of liberation. It reads Mandela’s life of struggle and legacy as an embodiment of paradigm of peace and pluriversal humanism. Decolonial ethics of liberation are opposed to the paradigm of war and paradigm of difference. It is predicated on the advancement of the unfinished project of decolonization as a precondition for the paradigm of peace and post-racial pluriversal humanism. Therefore, this article grapples with the broader questions of the meaning and essence of being human (subject, subjection, and subjectivity) and conditions that inhibited the human flourishing. More precisely, it presents Mandela’s life of struggle and legacy as part of what Nelson Maldonado-Torres (2008a: p. 115) termed “a third humanist revolution that has existed alongside the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, always pointing to their constitutive exclusions and aiming to provide a more consistent narrative of the affirmation of the value of the entire human species.”

In decolonial theory of the human, the first humanist revolution took the form of a shift from a God-centered worldview to a Man-centered conception of selves, others, and world (Maldonado-Torres, 2008a: p. 106). The second took the form of Enlightenment humanism that Immanuel Kant (1996: p. 58) celebrated as mankind’s emergence and liberation from “self-incurred immaturity.” This second revolution resulted in creation of modern institutions ranging from Inquisition, the nation-state, and modern racial slavery, to the establishment of universities as centers of studying the humanities (see also Maldonado-Torres, 2008a: p. 109). Mandela is a creature of the third humanist revolution and is driven by thinkers, activists, and intellectuals from the Global South who experienced the undersides of modernity, such as, enslavement and colonization. The third revolution is inevitably predicated on decolonizing and deimperializing the world as part of breaking from the paradigm of war and paradigm of difference. Its horizon is regaining of ontological density by black people and construction of a new post-racial pluriversality.

This article challenges the paradigm of war as the normal state of human life and Slavoj Zizek (2013)’s intervention that Mandela’s iconic status owes to the fact that he did not disturb the global world order of power. Zizek opined that Mandela’s “universal glory is also a sign that he really didn’t disturb the global order of power” (Zizek, 2013: p. 1). Its central proposition is that Mandela deployed principles of critical decolonial ethics of liberation to question and challenge the modernity/imperial/colonial/apartheid paradigm of war and racial hatred directly. Mandela’s uniqueness lies in his advocacy of a paradigm of peace informed by a full commitment to democracy and human rights, to racial harmony, to racial reconciliation, and to post-racial pluriversalism.

The subject of this article is the meaning of Mandela, what he stood for, and what he symbolized in a world that decolonial theorists have described as a racially hierarchized, patriarchal, heteronormative, imperial, colonial, capitalist, Christian-centric, Euro-North American-centric, and modern (Grosfoguel, 2007, 2011; Mignolo, 2011; Quijano, 2000, 2007). Mandela experienced not only racial discrimination but also a long period of incarceration and even walked through the shadow of death. Like other humanists from the Global South, such as, Aime Cesaire, William E. B. Dubois, Frantz Fanon, and many others, Mandela experienced and endured the consequences of being a racialized and dehumanized subject as well as being written out of the human ecumene and being reduced to dispensability. Uniquely and paradigmatically, instead of this experience turning Mandela into a monster in the Nietzschean sense, he emerged from it fighting for a new world governed and informed by a paradigm of peace and underpinned by principles of pluriversal humanism and co-humanness.

Organizationally, this article is divided into four broad sections. The first section provides a theoretical framework in which such concepts as paradigm of war, decoloniality, critical decolonial ethics of liberation, paradigm of peace, and pluriversalism are defined and evaluated in terms of their conceptual value. The second section situates the Mandela phenomenon within the broader drama of African nationalism and decolonial struggles in which such luminaries as Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, Kenneth Kaunda, and others were active. Achieving political decolonization, nation-building, development, and democratization were the most important nationalist humanist objectives. The third section is a critical evaluation of Mandela’s leadership during the negotiations as signaling a departure from Nuremberg paradigm, which privileges the victim’s justice and advocates for criminal prosecution and punishments of individuals to a broader paradigm of political justice issuing from a survivor’s desk and privileging political reform and overall metamorphosis of settler/native/perpetrator/victim identities (Mamdani, 2013a, 2013b). The fourth section analyzes the Mandela presidency (1994–1998) with a particular focus on nation-building. The last section is the conclusion.

The Paradigm of War

The paradigm of war is one of the main obstacles to human liberation and flourishing. Friedrich Nietzsche in The Will to Power (1968) articulated the core contours of the paradigm of war, insisting that war was the natural state of things and that human beings were destined to rarely want peace and if they did so, it was for brief periods of time. To Nietzsche (1968: p. 550) “the world is the will to power.” It is dominated by human beings who were always attempting to impose their will on others. According to Nietzsche, there were no truly altruistic human actions and the idea of selfless action was discounted as a psychological error informed by Judeo-Christian thought. According to Nietzsche (1968: p. 382), “The commandment to love one’s neighbor has never yet been extended to include one’s actual neighbor.” It was the same Nietzsche (1909/1990: p. 102) who posited that “He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster […] When you gaze long into an abyss the abyss gazes into you.” Here, Nietzsche was addressing the other important aspect of the paradigm of war – that of dehumanizing its victims and making them to see war as natural, in the process falling into what Frantz Fanon (1968) understood as “repetition without change.” In this case, the “repetition without change” takes the form of embracing the paradigm war and degenerating into what Jean Paul Satre termed “anti-racist racism” in one’s search and struggle for peace and new humanism.

Mandela’s life of struggle and legacy challenges the paradigm of war and its ability to turn those who were involved in the liberation struggle against such monstrosities as imperialism, colonialism, apartheid, neocolonialism, and coloniality to end up becoming monsters themselves. The paradigm of war is founded on the politics of racial hatred and denial of humanity of black people, which is part of the darker side/underside of modernity (see Mignolo, 1995, 2000, 2011). Apartheid colonialism and the apartheid regime that came to power in South Africa in 1948 were a typical manifestation of this darker side/under side of modernity. It had survived the early decolonization processes of the 1960s and it continued to defy global antiapartheid onslaught until 1994. Apartheid existed as form of coloniality, which is not only a darker side/under side of modernity that has survived direct administrative colonialism but also a constitutive element of the paradigm of war and coloniality (Maldonado-Torres, 2007; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2013a, 2013b).

The core contours of coloniality are clearly distilled by Anibal Quijano (2000, 2007), a leading Peruvian sociologist. He defined coloniality as a global power structure underpinned by four invisible colonial matrices of power, namely, control of the economy based on appropriation of natural resources including land and labor as well as finance of indebted countries; control of authority through imperial institutions and use of military and sophisticated technology; control of gender and sexuality through projection of Christian, bourgeois, and monogamous family as a model for the rest of the world and naturalization of human heterosexual relations; and control of knowledge and subjectivity through universalization of rationalist-scientific Euro-North American-centric epistemology drawing from the Cartesian cogito (see also Grosfoguel, 2007; Maldonado-Torres, 2007; Mignolo, 2007).

A broader canvas is opened that places Mandela at the center of a broader decolonial critique of the modernity/imperiality/coloniality/apartheid system. Mandela’s political struggles as encapsulated in the autobiography and as demonstrated in actual leadership of the African National Congress (ANC) during Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA) as well as his presidency collectively signify a consistent push for a decolonial turn, which Maldonado-Torres (2008: p. 8) articulated as including “the definitive entry of enslaved and colonized subjectivities into the realm of thought at previously unknown institutional levels.” The premise of this article is in tandem with Maldonado-Torres’s (2008: p. 8) argument that “If the problem of the twentieth century and indeed the problem of modernity, is the problem of the color line, the solution for the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is, at least in part, the de-colonial turn” (see also Du Bois, 1903/1982). Mandela in this case is studied as the voice, conscience, and representative of the enslaved, colonized, and dehumanized subjectivities that have since the time of colonial encounters been fighting for restoration of their lost ontological density and for a new post-racial pluriversal world.

Mandela/Paradigm of Peace/Pluriversal Humanism

A paradigm of war is defined as “a way of conceiving humanity, knowledge, and social relations that privileges conflict or polemos” (Maldonado-Torres, 2008: p. 3). In his groundbreaking book entitled Against War (2008), Maldonado-Torres articulated the core contours of the paradigm of war that are constitutive of coloniality. Coloniality as defined in the previous section of this article is genealogically traceable to the of emergence a Euro-North American-centric modernity in 1492. Decolonial theorists identified the date 1492 as figuratively marking the birth of the modern world-system and its shifting global orders (Blaut, 1987; Grosfoguel, 2007, 2011; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2013c; Mignolo, 1995, 2000, 2011; Quijano, 2000).

Christopher Columbus’s breakthrough in reaching the Americas, which became known as the discovery of the “New World” in imperial/ colonial discourse, is interpreted by decolonial theorists as paradigmatic in a number of ways. In the first instance, it is said to have marked the birth of a world capitalist economy whose nerve center became the Atlantic region. In the second instance, it opened the resources of Latin America to the colonial exploitation of Europe. In the third instance, it marked the beginning of the rise of Europe and the crystallization of its notion of being the center of the world. Taken together, these developments marked the birth of a peculiar Euro-North American-centric modernity and a new world-system founded on racism (Amin, 1989; Blaut, 1987; Mignolo, 1995, 2000, 2011; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2013a, 2013b; Quijano, 2000, 2007). Decolonial ethics of liberation are opposed to this Euro-North American-centric modernity. Figure 1 summarizes the complex issues involved in the constitution of a paradigm of war and politics of alterity and points to the direction of decolonial humanism and its horizons.

While the paradigm of war is traceable to the birth of Euro-North American-centric modernity and capitalism, the paradigm of peace originated in the Global South as a decolonial epistemic site inhabited by those people who have been reduced to “anthropos of the planet” by enslavement, imperialism, colonialism, apartheid, and neocolonialism. Its advocates include ex-slaves, such as, Ottobah Cugoano (1999/1789) who wrote Thoughts on the Evils of Slavery and Other Writings where he expressed dismay at how Europeans who claimed to be Christians had embarked on the slave trade. The paradigm of peace is founded on what Enrique Dussel (2008) in his Twenty Thesis on Politics described as the politics of life. Eduardo Mendieta (2008: p. viii) elaborated on what Dussel (1989, 2011) termed “philosophy of liberation/politics of liberation,” highlighting what he termed “a politics of life with others and for others” and “a politics of life and for life, a politics from the underside of necrophilic globalization.”

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Source: Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni & Akhona Nkenkana.

But, Mandela was not the first leader emerging from the Global South to embrace and articulate critical decolonial ethics of liberation as the foundation of a new politics of life. Previous decolonial humanists, such as, Mahatma Gandhi, Aime Cesaire, William E. B. Du Bois, C.L.R. James, Albert Luthuli, Thomas Sankara, Frantz Fanon, Kenneth Kaunda, and many others, were opposed to the paradigm of war (Cesaire, 1955; Du Bois, 1965; Falola, 2001; Fanon, 1968; James, 1963; Rabaka, 2010). Decolonization and deimperialization were considered to be essential prerequisites for paradigm of peace to prevail. It had to be followed by the return of post-racial humanism as a foundation of a pluriversal society where everyone belonged. Such leaders as Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, the author of the Mulugushi Declaration, also espoused decolonial humanism (Kaunda & Morris, 1966). Milton Obote’s Common Man’s Charter and Julius Nyerere’s Arusha Declaration were products of imaginations of another world. Leopold Sedar Senghor of Senegal articulated humanism in terms of negritude and socialism. It was Senghor (1967) who described socialism as a form of humanism because it spoke directly against to the exploitation of human beings by others. It was also Senghor who explained that when he and Aime Cesaire formulated the term negritude in the 1930s they were plunged into a state of panic and despair as the horizon of liberation was blocked and colonialists were justifying colonialism using the theory of the tabula rasa (Senghor cited in Ahluwalia, 2003: p. 32). Negritude as a liberatory utopia emerged in struggle as Africans struggled “to divest ourselves of our borrowed attire – that of assimilation – and assert our being; that is to say our negritude” (Senghor cited in Ahluwalia, 2003: p. 32).

The former president of Tanzania Julius Nyerere like Senghor also understood humanism in terms of African socialism, which he tried to implement in the form of Ujamaa villages (Nyerere, 1968). Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana articulated humanism in terms of African personality, concienscism, and pan-Africanism. Nkrumah (1964: p. 70) advocated for a new harmonious African society born out of a synthesis of Islamic, Euro-Christian and African values. Mandela understood humanism as ubuntu as a foundation for a rainbow nation (Mandela, 1994). Therefore, here the concept of humanism is used to mean all those progressive efforts evolved by colonized and racialized subjects in the course of their struggle to regain their lost ontological density. This point was well captured by the leading African novelist and humanist Chinua Achebe when he said:

You have all heard of African personality; of African democracy; of African way to socialism, of negritude, and so on. They are all props we have fashioned at different times to help us get on our feet again. Once we are up we shall not need any of them anymore. But for the moment it is in the nature of things that we may need to counter racism with what Jean-Paul Satre has called anti-racist racism, to announce not just that we are good as the next man but that we are better. (Achebe in Ahluwalia, 2001: p. 61)

A decolonial turn is therefore part of the search for a paradigm of peace and transcendence of the paradigm of difference. Du Bois in 1903 announced decolonial turn as a rebellion against what he termed the “color line” that was constitutive of the core problems of the twentieth century. By the problem of the “color line,” Du Bois was speaking of the paradigm of difference. But broadly, decolonial turn embodies critical decolonial ethics of liberation as

an antidote to problems with Western conceptions of freedom, autonomy and equality, as well as the necessity of politics to forge a world where ethical relations become the norm rather than the exception. The de-colonial turn highlights the epistemic relevance of the enslaved and colonized search for humanity. (Maldonado-Torres, 2008: p. 7)

Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1993, 2009) expressed the decolonial turn in terms of “moving the center” (from Eurocentrism/Europhonism to a plurality of cultures) toward “re-membering Africa” (addressing Africa’s fragmentation that was imposed by imperialism and colonialism). In short, it is clear that decolonial turn is rooted in struggles against racism, slave trade, imperialism, colonialism, and apartheid. Maldonado-Torres (2008: p. 7) elaborated on decolonial turn saying it “began to take definitive form after the end of the Second World War and the beginnings of the wars for liberation of many colonised countries soon after.”

However, critical decolonial ethics of liberation differ from postcolonial approaches that became dominant in the 1990s in a number of ways. Genealogically, today’s decolonial thinkers stand on the shoulders of anti-slave trade, anti-imperialist, anticolonial, and antiapartheid icons originating from the Global South, such as, Dubois, Fanon, Nkrumah, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, whereas postcolonial theorists stand on the shoulders of thinkers from the Global North, such as, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Antonio Gramsci among many others. Postcolonialism was then popularized by those scholars from the Global South working in North American academies, such as, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, and others (Grosfoguel, 2007: p. 211). The core subject of attack in postcolonialism is meta-narratives and ideological certitudes. Decoloniality grapples with what Grosfoguel (2007) terms hetararchies of power, knowledge, and being that sustained an asymmetrical modern global system.

In terms of horizon, decoloniality seeks to attain a decolonized and deimperialized world in which new pluriversal humanity was possible. Postcolonialism is part of “critique of modernity within modernity,” which is genealogically building on Marxism, poststructuralism, and postmodernism. These critical social theoretical interventions do not directly address what decolonial theorists termed coloniality as the underside/darker side of Euro-North American-centric modernity. Coloniality of being that took the form of hierarchization of human races and questioning of the very humanity of black people is one of the major departure points of decolonial approaches. Decoloniality gestures toward pluriversality (a world within which many worlds fit). This is in tandem with Mandela’s push for ubuntu (the African ethic of community, co-humanness, unity, and harmony) and “rainbow nation” (Campbell, 2013). These are typical examples of decolonial horizon. This is why Mandela’s life of struggle and his legacy is an approach as a typical embodiment decoloniality:

I always know that deep down in every human heart, there was mercy and generosity. No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite. Even the grimmest times in prison, when my comrades and I were pushed to our limits, I would see a glimmer of humanity in one of the guards, perhaps just for a second, but it was enough to assure me and keep me going. Man’s goodness is a flame that can be hidden but never extinguished. (Mandela, 1994: p. 609)

Mandela’s interpretation of the anticolonial/antiapartheid struggle as a humanistic movement for restoration of human life is fully decolonial:

This then is what the ANC is fighting for. Their struggle is a truly national one. It is a struggle of the African people, inspired by their own suffering and their own experience. It is a struggle for the right to live. (Mandela, 1994: p. 352; my emphasis)

Thus, what one gleans from Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom is that, in the face of apartheid official and institutionalized racism as well as brutality and intolerance of dissent, he emerged as the advocate of decolonization, fighter for freedom, and face of new nonracial inclusive humanism. Mandela was ahead of his time to the extent of embracing democracy and human rights long before it became a major global normative issue. By as early as 1963, Mandela had already vowed to die for democracy and free society. Mandela did not easily dismiss the Euro-North American-centric modernist project of emancipation. Instead, he fought for realization of those positive aspects of it that were denied to Africans. Here was an African located in the “zone of non-being” (Fanon, 1968) claiming entitlement to the fruits of Euro-North American-centric modernity on the basis of being a human being with equal ontological density to those residing in Europe and North America. Zizek (2013) credited Mandela for providing a model of how to liberate a country from apartheid colonialism “without succumbing to the temptation of dictatorial power and anti-capitalist posturing.” He elaborated that “Mandela was not Mugabe” as he maintained South Africa as a multiparty democracy, ensuring that the vibrancy of the national economy was insulated from “hasty socialist experiments” (Zizek, 2013). Mandela was worried more about the denial of democracy rather than its Euro-North American genealogy and articulation. It would seem to Mandela, democracy and freedom were simple positive human values that have to be enjoyed by every human being irrespective of race and location.

At the same time, Mandela also credited his Xhosa traditional society’s mode of governance, which he described as “democracy in its purest form” where everyone irrespective of societal rank were allowed space to “voice their opinions and were equal in their value as citizens” (Mandela, 1994: p. 20). Mandela made it clear that while he “abhorred the notion of British imperialism,” he “never rejected the trappings of British style and manners” (Mandela, 1994: p. 48). Raymond Suttner (2007: p. 119) tried to make sense of this Mandela who never easily fitted “into a specific political orientation.” Suttner emphasized that

Mandela made his statements as a leader of a liberation movement trying to rally support from all quarters especially those that had been hostile or indifferent to the struggle of the ANC. It was part of his mission to win them over to support the organization. (Suttner, 2007: p. 121)

The Mandela phenomenon emerges as basically a synthesis of various ideological strands in the service of the decolonial struggle (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2016). Scholars, such as, Tom Lodge (2006), who insinuated that Mandela embraced liberal ideas and Ellis and Sechaba (1992), and Ellis (2013), who tried to highlight that Mandela was a communist, misunderstood the essence of the Mandela phenomenon. The Mandela phenomenon was forged in the crucible of colonial racial oppression that subsequently mutated into apartheid, in the process raising complex questions regarding concepts, such as, who was a national subject, what is the nation, who belongs, who constitute the political community, what is the best criteria of citizenship, what is entailed by democracy, and which ideology is suitable for carrying the decolonial struggle forward. Mandela was active in this struggle negotiating and navigating carefully the tensions between racial nationalism and multi-racial nationalism (Halisi, 1999: p. 1). It was while confronting the nascent questions of citizenship and national identity (how the people were to be redefined and exploring criteria of inclusion and exclusion) that Mandela shifted ideologically from a radical Africanism of the 1940s that was suspicious of inclusion of whites and Indians in the decolonial struggle to the Charterist ideology of the 1950s.

On use of violence in pursuit of decolonial struggle, Mandela began by lamenting how the apartheid system was leaving him with no option but to engage in counterviolence as form of defense for those fighting against apartheid. He became instrumental in the formation of “uMkhonto We Sizwe” (MK: Spear of the Nation) and became its commander-in-chief. In line with the dictates of decolonial humanism, the MK fighting forces were expected to adhere to strict ethical conduct of only engaging in destabilization and not in killing people. The adoption of armed liberation struggle must not be used to disqualify Mandela as a humanist. Mandela and his supporters had to embrace violence as a last resort. When the apartheid regime criminalized African political activity, when it dealt with peaceful protests violently, and when it banned African political formations, anticolonial/apartheid violence assumed the form of what Achille Mbembe (2013: p. 14) articulated as “pure discharge,” and “reptilian” form cascading from the “hunted man,” “back to the wall,” “knife to his throat,” fighting “for his life.” African people had to defend themselves against a vicious racist regime that was surviving through discharging violence and unleashing the paradigm of war on unarmed people.

Mandela played an active role in strategizing on how to survive politically within a context in which any form of African political activity was criminalized. This included drawing of the M-Plan that would ensure the continued existence and operation of the ANC in the event it was banned (Mandela, 1994: p. 135). Mandela also took the initiative to critique the strategy of nonviolence in a context of dealing with a violent regime. His idea was that “non-violence was not a moral principle but a strategy; there was no moral goodness in using an ineffective weapon” (Mandela, 1994: p. 147). Mandela strongly believed that “To overthrow oppression has been sanctioned by humanity and is the highest aspiration of every free man” (Mandela, 1994: p. 151). It was the experience of how the apartheid government responded to the Defiance Campaign that provoked Mandela to see no alternative to armed and violent resistance. His conclusion was this:

A freedom fighter learns the hard way that it is the oppressor who defines the nature of the struggle, and the oppressed is often left no recourse but to use methods that mirror those of the oppressor. At a certain point, one can only fight fire with fire. (Mandela, 1994: p. 155)

However, Mandela’s liberation struggle was also aimed at the liberation of both the oppressed and the oppressors from the cul-de-sac of racialism in the truly Freireian resolution of the oppressor–oppressed contradiction created by colonialism and coloniality (Freire, 1970). On this, Mandela wrote:

It was during those long and lonely years that my hunger for the freedom of my people became a hunger for the freedom of all people, white and black. I knew as well as I know anything that the oppressor must be liberated just as surely as the oppressed. A man who takes away another man’s freedom is a prisoner of hatred; he is locked behind the bars of prejudice and narrow-mindedness. I am not truly free if I am taking away someone else’s freedom, just as surely as I am not free when my freedom is taken from me. The oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of their humanity. (Mandela, 1994, p. 611)

This set him apart from such other African nationalist liberators, such as, President Robert Gabriel Mugabe of Zimbabwe who ended up frustrated by the policy of reconciliation and finally reproduced the colonial paradigm of war of conquest predicated on race. By the end of the 1990s, President Mugabe increasingly articulated the decolonial project in Zimbabwe in racist, nativist, and even xenophobic terms predicated on the idea of “conquest of conquest,” “prevailing sovereignty” of Zimbabwe over settler colonialism, and notion of “Zimbabwe for Zimbabweans” (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2009a, 2009b).

Indeed unlike Mandela’s nationalism, Mugabe’s nationalism had escalated to what appeared like “reverse-racism” as a form of liberation as he pushed for fasttrack land reform program predicated on compulsory land acquisition from white commercial farmers to give it to black Zimbabweans (Mugabe, 2001). Fanon (1968) had warned of the dangers of degeneration of African nationalism into chauvinism, reverse racism, and xenophobia and he characterized this regressive process as “repetition without change” cascading from pitfalls of national consciousness (Fanon, 1968). Mandela carefully managed to distinguish himself as a committed decolonial ethical leader and successfully avoided degeneration into reverse racism, nativism, and xenophobia.

Mandela is More Than an Ordinary African Nationalist

Paul Tiyambe Zeleza (2013, p. 10) posited that the political formation of Mandela and the meaning of his politics as well as legacy “cannot be fully understood through the psychologizing and symbolic discourses preferred in the popular media and hagiographies.” Zeleza emphasized that Mandela was a political actor within the broader drama of African nationalism and decolonial struggles concluding that

Mandela embodied all the key phases, dynamics and ideologies of African nationalism from the period of elite nationalism before the Second World War when the nationalists made reformist demands on the colonial regimes, to the era of militant mass nationalism after the war when they demanded independence, to the phase of armed liberation. (Zeleza, 2013: p. 10)

Zeleza (2003) distilled five important humanistic objectives of African nationalism that are discernible in Mandela’s life of struggle. The first was the anticolonial decolonization. The second was nation-building. The third was development. The fourth was democracy. The final was pan-African integration and unity. Zeleza added that

Reconciliation was such a powerful motif in the political discourses of transition to independence among some African leaders of the imperatives of nation building, the second goal of African nationalism. It was also a rhetorical response to the irrational and self-serving fears of imperial racism that since Africans were supposedly eternal wards of whites and incapable of ruling themselves, independence would unleash the atavistic violence of “inter-tribal warfare” from which colonialism had saved the benighted continent, and in the post-settler colonies, the retributive cataclysm of white massacres. (Zeleza, 2013: p. 12)

Mandela was however not the only African humanist who railed against both racism and reverse racism. Mahmood Mamdani (2013c: p. 112) documents how Julius Nyerere of Tanzania introduced an alternative model of statecraft that sought to dismantle both tribalism and racism in the same manner that Mandela sought to dismantle apartheid colonialism. Like Mandela, Nyerere in 1962 sought to create an inclusive citizenship and rejected color as a criteria of belonging. Nyerere stated that

Discrimination against human beings because of their colour is exactly what we have been fighting against […]. They are preaching discrimination as a religion to us. And they stand like Hitlers and begin to glorify the race. We glorify human beings, not colour. (quoted in Mamdani, 2013c: pp. 112–113)

One just needs to add though that the variations in forms of colonialism had a bearing on the forms of nationalism, nature of struggles for decolonization, and ideologies. Mandela emerges as a “largely a home grown pragmatic revolutionary” whose politics was shaped by his location within a country that was organized on racial basis (Zeleza, 2013, p. 10). The long incarceration further enabled him to reflect carefully on the nature of the racial problem facing his country and the possible solutions. Mamdani (1991: p. 236) once argued that “without the experience of sickness, there can be no idea of health. And without the fact of oppression, there can be no practice of resistance and no notion of rights.” Mandela’s explanation of his political formation and consciousness seem to confirm Mamdani’s argument. Mandela stated:

I cannot pinpoint a moment when I became politicized, when I knew that I would spend my life in the liberation struggle. To be African in South Africa means that one is politicized from the moment of one’s birth, whether one acknowledges it or not. An African child is born in an Africans Only hospital, taken home in an Africans Only bus, lives in an African Only area and attends Africans Only schools, and if he attends school at all. (Mandela, 1994: p. 89)

However, Mandela admits that when he left the University of Fort Hare, he was advanced socially and not politically. He only developed politically when he reached Johannesburg “a city of dreams, a place where one could transform oneself from a poor peasant into a wealthy sophisticate, a city of danger and opportunity” (Mandela, 1994: p. 56). The city life tended to erode strong ethnic distinctions and foster new broader identities and solidarities.

In Johannesburg, black people experienced the common problem of racial profiling and racial domination. This condition had the effect of politicizing Africans. This is why Mandela wrote that: “There was no particular day on which I said, henceforth I will devote myself to the liberation of my people; instead, I simply found myself doing so, and could not do otherwise” (Mandela, 1994, p. 89). Being an African in a racist society made African people to be political. What is worth noting is that Mandela’s early political consciousness was deeply nationalistic. He rejected communism. He also rejected involvement of Indians and whites in African politics. As he puts it: “At the time, I was firmly opposed to allowing communists or whites to join the league” (Mandela, 1994, p. 94). He elaborated that during the heydays of the ANC Youth League:

I was sympathetic to the ultra-revolutionary stream of African nationalism. I was angry at the white man, not at racism. While I was not prepared to hurl the white man into the sea, I would have been perfectly happy if he climbed abroad his steamship and left the continent on his own volition. (Mandela, 1994: p. 106)

Besides his activism and leadership within the ANC Youth League, by 1952 Mandela entered the centre of top ANC leadership when he was appointed First Deputy President to Chief Albert Luthuli. However, his first position in the ANC came in 1947 when he was elected to the Executive Committee of the Transvaal ANC. This meant that Mandela became exposed to banning, endless appearances in court and imprisonment. By then Mandela noted that he was “more certain in those days of what I was against than what I was for” (Mandela, 1994: p. 112). It was also a time for Mandela to reflect and revise some of his political convictions. He began to study works of Marxism and Leninism which resulted in him changing his opposition to communism without changing his nationalist bona fides.

Mandela also distinguished his leadership and commitment to the liberation of South Africa when he left the country illegally in 1962 to mobilize support for the armed struggle. He even underwent military training in Ethiopia. The experience he gained through his travel on the continent was that African leaders were suspicious of ANC’s cooperation with liberal whites, Indians, and communists. Mandela’s solution was that the ANC must feature prominently within the Congress Alliance as the effective leader of Africans (Mandela, 1994, p. 294). Even though Mandela was soon arrested when he arrived back in South Africa, he continued to demonstrate courage and leadership. He clearly understood what his life symbolized:

I was the symbol of justice in the court of the oppressor, the representative of the great ideals of freedom, fairness and democracy in a society that dishonoured those virtues. I realized then and there that I could carry on the fight even inside the fortress of the enemy. (Mandela, 1994: p. 299)

The long imprisonment of Mandela inadvertently contributed in a big way to the making of a global icon. Mandela became a macrocosm of the anticolonial and anti-racist struggle as a whole. However, as stated by Mandela the intention of the apartheid regime was to use imprisonment to undermine the anticolonial and anti-racist forces’ struggle and resolve. This is how he put it “Prison is designed to break one’s spirit and one’s resolve” (Mandela, 1994: pp. 373–374).

Within the prison, Mandela continued to play a leading role as the spokesperson for all prisoners. Oliver Tambo took over the presidency of the ANC in the absence of Mandela and built the ANC in exile. Mandela spent 18 years in Robben Island and he used that time to develop an even deeper understanding of the problems facing South Africa and its possible resolutions. By the time of his incarceration, Mandela was a radical nationalist and emerged from it as voice of reason and moderation – a radical humanist. He entered prison at the age of 44 and came out at the age of 71. Mandela had now assumed a mythical stature within anticolonial and anti-racist political formations. He became a “living” martyr of the liberation struggle. On the impact of imprisonment on one’s character, Mandela wrote that “Perhaps it requires such depths of oppression to create such heights of character” (Mandela, 1994: p. 609).

At another level, Mandela’s long imprisonment made him part of a project of those in control of the apartheid state. This was clear when they could suddenly remove him from Robben Island to Pollsmoor Prison in 1982 and then to Victor Verster Prison in 1988. Mandela could not be ignored in any of the political schemes of the beleaguered apartheid regime. The scheme involved isolating him from his fellow political prisoners. The second part was to offer him preconditions for release. However, this scheming opened the possibilities for a negotiated settlement. Even more importantly, Mandela effectively took advantage of the overtures from the beleaguered apartheid regime to push for political change at every stage of the encounters.

In justifying his individual initiative to initiate negotiations with the apartheid regime, Mandela stated that “There are times when a leader must move out ahead of the flock, go off in a new direction, confident that he is leading his people the right way” (Mandela, 1994: pp. 510–511). Opening up negotiations with the apartheid regime was very risky. Mandela risked being misunderstood by the ANC both inside and outside South Africa. The second bigger risk was well captured by Schechter (2013: p. 28): “He was one man up against an adversary with a whole bureaucracy behind it.” However, by standing on a high moral and humanistic pedestal, Mandela managed to gradually gain the confidence of his adversaries and support of the progressive world.

In initiating the negotiations, Mandela was in the process transforming his political identity from that of a terrorist and a prisoner to that of a negotiator and facilitator of “talks” between the ANC and the apartheid regime. Through his initiative, Mandela managed to pull off one of the most challenging, significant, and unexpected transitions from apartheid colonialism and authoritarianism to democracy. It is important to analyze and evaluate how the negotiations that produced the transition to democracy in South Africa were informed by a new logic of justice that was superior to the post-1945 Nuremberg template.

Mandela the Negotiator

The paradigm of war gave birth to Nuremberg trials as a template of justice. The paradigm of peace produces political justice. As argued by Mamdani (2013a, 2013b), the Nuremberg paradigm of justice is predicated on the logic that violence should be “criminalized without exception, it perpetrators identified and tried in a court of law.” The CODESA paradigm of justice became predicated on a particular thinking of mass violence as political rather than criminal, which suggested remaking of political society through political reform as a lasting solution (Mamdani, 2013a, 2013b). At the center was a drive to transcend a paradigm of war and conceptions of justice as criminal justice involving punishment of certain individuals. A paradigm of war is sustained by an unending circle of production and reproduction of perpetrators and victims in which today’s perpetrator becomes tomorrow’s victim and vice versa.

It would seem Mandela working together with other stalwarts of the struggle like Joe Slovo was fully committed to trying something new in the domain of transitional justice. In fact, the situation of a political stalemate needed political innovation and creativity to unblock. The stalemate was crisply captured by Mamdani (2013a, p. 6) in these words: “neither revolution (for liberation movements) nor military victory (for the apartheid regime) was on the cards.” Mandela led the ANC into CODESA fully aware that it was another “theatre of struggle, subject to advances and reverses as any other struggle” (Mandela, 1994: p. 577). History was not on the side of the apartheid regime. Apartheid had far outlived its life as a form of colonialism. If it survived the decolonial winds of change of the 1960s and 1970s, it could not survive the post-Cold War normative discourses of democracy and human rights. One can even say the post-Cold War dispensation was more favorable to Mandela’s initiatives. However, the ANC had also lost its major ally in the form of the collapse of the Soviet Union (Ramphela, 2008: p. 45).

The points raised above are reinforced by Frank B. Wilderson (2010) who argued that it took major tectonic shifts in the global paradigmatic arrangement of white power, such as, the fall of the Soviet Union which was the major backer of the ANC, the return of 40,000 black bourgeoisie exiles from Western capitals, and crumbling global economy, “for there to be synergistic meeting of Mandela’s moral fiber and the aspirations of white economic power” (Wilderson, 2010: p. 8). Indeed imperatives and interests of white capitalists who were experiencing the biting effects of sanctions and popular unrest at home played an important role in influencing the negotiators.

However, it is clear that what Mandela wanted and demanded from the apartheid regime was the dismantlement of apartheid and commitment to a nonracial, democratic, and free society. He sought to achieve this through the following strategy: “To make peace with an enemy, one must work with that enemy, and that enemy becomes your partner” (Mandela, 1994: p. 598). Building on Mamdani’s (2013a) argument on how South Africa’s transition to democracy was predicated on a paradigmatic shift from the post-Second World War Nuremberg form of justice founded on criminal justice, one arrives at a favorable evaluation of CODESA. It was not merely a time of betrayal of decolonial liberation struggle through compromises, but CODESA embodied another form of justice. This reality was well captured by Mamdani who wrote that

Whereas Nuremburg shaped a notion of justice as criminal justice, CODESA calls on us to think of justice as primarily political. Whereas Nuremberg has become the basis of a notion of victim’s justice – as a complement to victor’s justice than a contrast to it – CODESA provides the basis for an alternative notion of justice, which I call survivor’s justice. (Mamdani, 2013a: p. 2)

Mamdani went on to elaborate on the differences between criminal justice and political justice in this way:

CODESA prioritized political justice over criminal justice. The difference is that criminal justice targets individuals whereas political justice affects entire groups. Whereas the object of criminal justice is punishment, that of political justice is political reform. The difference in consequence is equally dramatic. The pursuit of political justice requires that you decriminalize the other side. This means to treat the opponent as a political adversary rather than as an enemy. This makes sense only because the goal is no longer to punish individual criminals, but to change the rules and thereby reform the political community. Morally, the objective is no longer to avenge the dead but to give the living a second chance. (Mamdani, 2013a: p. 7)

Indeed the decolonial antiapartheid struggle was not meant to punish the ideologues of apartheid but to destroy the edifice of apartheid itself. On the ashes of juridical apartheid, the ANC and Mandela envisaged a new post-racial and pluriversal political community founded on new humanism and inclusive citizenship. The ghost of apartheid had to be laid to rest. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was the chosen mechanism of “laying ghosts of the dark past to rest with neither retributive justice nor promotion of a culture of impunity: (Ramphela, 2008: p. 46). Mamdani (2013a: p. 13) credited the TRC for transcending the Nuremberg trap “by displacing the logic of crime and punishment with that of crime and confession.”

Having said this, Mamdani went on nonetheless to distil how the TRC was still influenced by the Nuremberg template of justice particularly in its definition of a victim and a perpetrator. In the first place, victimhood was individualized alongside the individualization of the responsibility of the perpetrator (Mamdani, 2013a: p. 13). This had two immediate implications and one long-term implication. The first was that a human right violation was consequently narrowly defined “as an action that violated the bodily integrity of an individual” (Mamdani, 2013a: p. 13). The second implication was “obscuring the fact that the violence of apartheid was mainly that of the state, not individual operatives” (Mamdani, 2013a: p. 13). The long-term implication was that the narrow definition of both victim and perpetrator created an ideal environment to avoid dealing with the pertinent question of social justice and structural socioeconomic transformation. Most of the energy was spent of finding an immediate way of creating a viable post-apartheid political society in which those who had survived apartheid hailing from across the political divides could have a chance to live a new life.

Joel Netshitenzhe (2012) explained the logic of the negotiations and the settlement from the perspective of the ANC. He argued that

At the risk of oversimplification, it can be argued that a critical element of that settlement, from the point of view of the ANC, was the logic of capturing a bridgehead: to codify basic rights and use these as the basis for more thoroughgoing transformation of South African society. (Netshitenzhe, 2012: p. 16)

Perhaps a strong confidence in the morality of decolonial humanism made the ANC and Mandela even naïve to the extent of expecting those who benefitted from apartheid economically to be immediately reborn into new compassionate human beings capable of acknowledging historical grievances of those who were abused and dispossessed by apartheid to the level of voluntarily committing themselves to play an active in equal sharing of resources.

However, Netshitenzhe (2012) reinforced the argument that decolonial humanism drove the way Mandela and the ANC imagined a post-apartheid South Africa. He argued that:

The articulation of the ANC mission by some of its more visionary leaders suggests an approach that, in time, should transcend the detail of statistical bean counting and emphasis on race and explicitly incorporate the desire to contribute to the evolution of human civilization. At the foundation of this should be democracy with a social content, excellence in the acquisition of knowledge and the utilization of science and a profound humanism. (Netshitenzhe, 2012: p. 27; my emphasis)

The decolonial humanism that Mandela espoused had very deep roots within the ANC. Some of the leading ANC decolonial humanists include the founding leader Pixley ka Isaka Seme who was committed to the African struggle to deliver a new civilization that was deeply humanistic. This is how he expressed his decolonial humanistic vision:

The regeneration of Africa means that a new and unique civilization is soon to be added to the world […]. The most essential departure of this new civilization is that it shall be thoroughly spiritual and humanistic – indeed a regeneration, moral and eternal! (Seme, 1906)

The second leading decolonial humanist in the ANC was Chief Albert Luthuli, a president and Nobel Peace Prize winner, who during his acceptance of the prize informed the world that Africa was offering the world the gift of ubuntu and proceeded to anticipate and envision a new post-racial civilization: His acceptance speech included this prediction:

Somewhere ahead there beckons a civilization which will take its place in God’s history with other great human syntheses: Chinese, Egyptian, Jewish, European. It will not necessarily be all black: but it will be Africa. (Luthuli, 1961)

Mandela is a child of this ANC decolonial humanism. However, concretely speaking, the year 1994 marked not only the end of administrative apartheid but more importantly the beginning of a difficult process of nation-building, which was always tempered with a delicate balancing between allaying white fears and attending to black expectations and demands. This reality became a major test of the plausibility and praxis of decolonial humanism.

Mandela as a Nation Builder

When he became the first black president of South Africa in 1994, Mandela practically implemented a decolonial humanist vision of the post-racial pluriversal society. At the core of this vision was a departure from racism toward a deeper appreciation of the importance of difference. In this vision, difference is not interpreted in terms of superior and inferior races. It is interpreted in terms of pluriversality and rainbow. Maldonado-Torres (2008a: p. 126) argued that the appreciation of human difference is informed by a humanistic “interest in restoring authentic and critical sociality beyond the colour-line.” This point is also articulated by Lewis R. Gordon (1995: p. 154) who posited that “the road out of misanthropy is a road that leads to the appreciation of the importance of difference.” Apartheid was a worse form of misanthropy founded on “bad faith.” It had to be transcended by all means including symbolically.

This is why Mandela’s presidency was a terrain of the symbolic, which he used effectively to further hail the erstwhile racists into a new South Africa. Nation-building through use of symbolic gestures and other means including sporting events dominated Mandela’s presidency. These involved him visiting the 94-year-old widow of Hendrik Verwoerd, who was identified as the ideologue of apartheid and its architect. Mandela also agreed to the erection of a statue in remembrance of Verwoerd. He visited Percy Yutar who played the role of the prosecutor during the Rivonia Trial in which Mandela was sentenced to life imprisonment. He even visited ex-apartheid President P.W. Botha. While he was criticized in some quarters of bending too much to placate whites, his idea was to ensure that indeed the erstwhile “settlers”/“citizens” and the erstwhile “natives”/“subjects” were afforded enough room to be reborn politically into consenting citizens living in a new political society where racism was not tolerated (Mamdani, 2001: pp. 63–70).

Conclusion

While there is an emerging discourse mainly within those circles dominated by unemployed youth and disappointed academics, to the effect that the Mandela phenomenon symbolized nothing less than a sellout arrangement in which white power remained unchanged and black aspirations were compromised and frustrated, this article has proven that Mandela symbolized a deep and unwavering commitment to the liberation of black people from the scourge of racism to the extent of being prepared to die. Such a struggle cannot be simplistically understood from micro-South African context because it is part of the broader third humanist revolution that is aimed at transforming a strong and resilient Euro-North American-centric civilization, which is 500 years old. At many levels, Mandela fought a good fight and directly challenged the paradigm of war and difference. Whatever angle one looks at the Mandela phenomenon, it still remains a positive African invention gesturing toward a post-racial world in which new humanism was possible. It is an aspiration that is shared by many across the world.