Blogs > Cliopatria > The Mandela-ization of South Africa

Apr 3, 2004

The Mandela-ization of South Africa




The Mail and Guardian had an article yesterday about a trend that has some a bit worried in the New South Africa. It is about the renaming after Nelson Mandela of parks and squares and just about anything else on which one can slap a name.

On the one hand, this seems to me a rather picayune criticism, especially when aimed at predominantly white, rich suburban enclaves such as Sandton, outside of Johannesburg, given that if such communities did not name some things after Madiba they'd confront another sort of criticism lambasting them as racists.

That said, it is possible to saturate the market. I love, admire, and respect Mandela more than any other figure in my lifetime. What he did to help heal the New South Africa, and to prevent mass bloodshed and even race war cannot be understated. But reflexively to name roundabouts or shopping malls after him does reveal something of a lack of imagination. After all, luminous as Mandela was, there were thousands of other activists worthy of similar recognition. Surely someone can spare a street name for Walter Sisulu or Chris Hani or Ruth First? Further, all of the Mandela-ization runs the risk of either promoting backlash, sanitizing a great and complex man, or making references to Mandela pretty much jejune.

We have a similar difficulty in the United States, where for too many public figures and Americans generally, Martin Luther King is the only figure seemingly worth knowing or honoring. King's greatness is unassailable, but King was far from the only figure to have stood for civil rights in the United States, and there would have been a civil rights movement in his absence. In a sense, what we run the risk of by so personalizing civil rights or the antiapartheid struggle is a sort of cartoonish reductionism that sands away complexity and thus reduces the need or impetus for raising difficult or disquieting questions.

At the same time, it is interesting how much resistance there is in South Africa to renaming particular institutions. My main university affiliation in South Africa has been with Rhodes University where alumni, known as"Old Rhodians," were up in arms over the idea of renaming"The Oxford on the Veld" as"Ruth First University." I should think that anything in Subsaharan Africa named after Cecil Rhodes should be up for a new name posthaste.

In any case, one good thing is that many South Africans are at least engaging these sorts of questions, and I'd rather see too many things named after Mandela than too few.



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Derek Charles Catsam - 4/5/2004

Oscar --
While in some sense this article would seem to dictate otherwise, obviously the view of him in South Africa is more complex, or at least more rich than here. Keep in mind that he was President of the country for five years, has been a, perhaps the, crucial public figure since, and for four decades prior to 1994 was a key figure in the resistance struggle. This might lend itself to its own form of hagiography, of course, but nonetheless, South Africans have an intimate connection to Mandela that is far more expansive than what the overwhelming majority of Americvans would understand about him. Both lend themselves to a fair amount of idolotry, of course, but if ever anyone was worthy of it . . . Interestingly, some of those South Africans most willing to take on the "Mandela myth" and try to make him into more of a real person are not white supremacists, but Africans.
dc


Oscar Chamberlain - 4/4/2004

I wonder how different the vision (or should I say "visions") of Mandela is in South Africa from the one we have in the United States?