Читать книгу Tafelberg Short: Moments with Mandela - Wilmot James - Страница 5

An almost immodest conviction wells from the page in William Ernest Henley’s gritty, four-stanza poem, Invictus, a forthright declaration of the poet’s resolve in the face of what he describes as ‘the fell clutch of circumstance’ and ‘the bludgeonings of chance’.

We all know now the special South African connection to these stirring verses – mirrored in the life and what I think of as the invincible morality of Nelson Mandela, who is memorably portrayed by Morgan Freeman in the Clint Eastwood film named after the poem. Invictus the movie achieved deserving acclaim.

For me, personally, there are meaningful associations with Invictus. Some are coincidental, but the most inspiring association has been a gathering appreciation of the sentiments of the poem through the impulses and achievements of the man who, perhaps more than any other, has truly lived up to them.

Nelson Mandela, of course, is a very different man from the Victorian poet who inspired him.

Henley was born in 1849, and his widely quoted poem, first published in 1875, bears the hymn-like stamp of its time. Initially it appeared without a title in a book called Book of Verses, but was given the name Invictus – from the Latin for ‘unconquered’ – by editor Arthur Quiller-Couch when it was later included in The Oxford Book of English Verse.

For Henley, Invictus was his statement of personal bravery as he confronted and dealt with the consequences of a debilitating medical condition. He had contracted tuberculosis of the bone, also known as Pott’s disease, at the age of twelve. Five years later, he was compelled to have one leg amputated just below the knee and, immediately after, intensive surgery on the other if he was to live. He wrote Invictus while recovering in the infirmary.

Remarkably, this young man’s poem, virtually the only one he is known by, has inspired many over the years; it has cropped up in songs and declarations, novels, films and autobiographies.

Most memorably, perhaps, Henley’s four stanzas of defiant fortitude reached across an ocean of time and geography, nearly a century after they were written, to enthral the man to whom we in South Africa are indebted, and whose challenge to us – his primary legacy, if you like – remains vivid.

The historic and monumental task Mandela began, of reconciling a nation forged through conflict, is ours to continue if we are to succeed in achieving anything of value and to match the vision for which he gave up so much.

The poem tells us something about that, too.

One can imagine how, perhaps reading it aloud to himself in the spare cell he had every reason to believe would be his home for life, Mandela found in Henley’s stirring cadences some essence of courage and self-mastery, and the inspiration to endure.

The poem is a perfect match for the man, right from its opening stanza: ‘Out of the night that covers me / Black as the pit from pole to pole, / I thank whatever gods may be / For my unconquerable soul.’

We recognise much else too: ‘I have not winced nor cried aloud. / Under the bludgeonings of chance / My head is bloody, but unbowed’; that for all the ‘wrath and tears ... the menace of the years / Finds and shall find me unafraid’. Yet, if like all of us, really, when we read them, Mandela felt the transcendent lift of Henley’s closing lines – ‘I am the master of my fate; / I am the captain of my soul’ – there is little doubt that the man apartheid South Africa turned into the 20th century’s most famous prisoner understood them less as an instance of inspirational sentiment, of piercing poetic effect, than as the confirmation of his credo, that he must remain unbowed, unafraid and unconquerable, master his fate and be captain of his soul, not merely for himself and his own dignity and sense of self-worth, but for his country and all the people in it.

He had, after all, already demonstrated a rare conviction in declaring in the dock in 1964 his willingness to die for what he believed was right – a society of indivisible dignity, freedom and equality. He was spared the gallows; now the challenge was to remain true to that conviction and see the thing through.

Invictus tells us something of the strength of character that lies behind the humanity Mandela breathed into his efforts at nation building. He was undoubtedly a smart politician who knew perfectly well where to take the gap, but it’s not a matter of lionising him, which would be a disservice, to see that for him nation building was an act of deep faith, a moral imperative.

Nelson Mandela’s moral stamina was, at heart, selfless. The resonance he found in the lines of Invictus reveals, I believe, something of the fact that reconciliation for him was the expression of self-actualisation under unimaginably difficult circumstances. It was neither an election ploy nor a public relations gimmick nor an opportunistic repertoire of programmed outcomes. As a result, it imbued Mandela with monumental moral authority.

Reconciliation for Mandela was the process through which all South Africans could be drawn into a single moral universe where, given our bitter and divided history, none existed before. At the heart of nation-building, therefore, lay the conviction that we needed a single ethical code which all could trust and by which all could live in harmony, peace and civility.

Two institutions were critical to advancing these goals.

The first was the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). It was imperfect. The ethics of reconciliation and justice required authentic repentance and authentic forgiveness. The real culprits responsible for apartheid-era atrocities never repented and yet the victims magnanimously forgave them.

The second was the Constitution of 1996. In its unyielding fidelity to the rights, responsibilities and obligations of a free people living under circumstances in which the rule of law and justice prevailed, and in a state kept in balance by the constraints the separation of powers imposed on the arbitrary exercise of power, it had lasting endurance.

James Joseph, whom I got to know well when he was US ambassador to South Africa during Mandela’s term as president, once made the distinction between ‘soft power’ and ‘hard power’. Soft power, he argued, was having influence by virtue of moral suasion; hard power was having your way by the use of force.

Mandela, with his moral authority, was the master of soft power.

In his short time as president, he made striking progress in drawing all South Africans into the single moral universe he understood we must all inhabit. He not only advocated it, but also gave substance to it both in his personal political style and in what he did, nationally, as the first president of a democratic South Africa.

His successor Thabo Mbeki undid much of this with his ‘two nations’ thesis, one white and rich and the other black and poor, eroding the power of the idea of Mandela’s single moral universe, and deflecting society from its journey towards it.

Mandela’s idea remains with us; it is his legacy, but it is unfinished business.

Reconciliation was, and had to be, a work in progress, but it dissipated after he left office. Nationalists and ethnic entrepreneurs now occupy that space.

It did not take very long for former guerrilla and intelligence chief Jacob Zuma to sully Mandela’s bequest by turning the soft power of moral suasion into the hard power of organised intimidation. Zuma’s leadership appears to have no morality at all. It is about who survives electoral contests and who has power, the basest motivation of the crass politician. It is a betrayal of Mandela’s vision.

I published a book on these themes in 2001 – After the TRC, reflections on truth and reconciliation in South Africa (David Philip Publishers and Ohio University Press, 2001) – based on a conference I’d arranged. I don’t think much of the political economy of South Africa has changed since then.

Jeffrey Lever and I wrote the concluding chapter, The Second Republic, which we ended by observing that the democratic values promoted by the TRC can only be sustained if the inequalities of our political economy are bridged by astute political leadership.

A decade later, this still has resonance. The poverty, inequality and unemployment in our country, bad in itself two decades into our democracy, threaten whatever sense of nation unity remains.

Mamphela Ramphele, then vice-chancellor of the University of Cape Town (UCT), made a short, punchy contribution at the conference where she cautioned against a false bonhomie, and the ‘failure to do enough about the truth that we have spoken and uncovered’.

‘If we find the courage to look at ourselves in the mirror,’ she wrote, ‘and stop pretending that we can simply talk ourselves into being a Rainbow Nation or into being a true democracy, we can develop into the kind of society we want to be.’ She professed to being ‘very optimistic’ on the grounds that she felt South Africans had the energy and the will to succeed in this; but, she concluded, ‘we must get down to work’.

Njabulo Ndebele, who succeeded Mamphela at UCT, wrote with considerable imaginative flair about the lessons to be learned from the story of the lion that caught a rabbit in the act of helping himself to a meal he had found in a trap the king of the beasts had laid in a cave. Just as the enraged lion was about to devour the thief, the rabbit, desperate to escape, screamed in terror that the cave was about to collapse and unless the lion, who was stronger, immediately propped up the roof, they would both perish. Of course the rabbit fled, and only after some time did the lion realise the cave was not about to fall, and that he had been tricked. Ndebele offered a range of interpretations in the context of the new South Africa as to who was the lion and who the rabbit. However, what was central to their condition, the rabbit and the lion, was the cave itself, for it represented their shared fate and their shared world. And the question was: who keeps up the cave’s roof?

These thoughts serve to help us in reflecting on how things have turned out in the ensuing years – beyond that ‘place of wrath and tears’ of Henley’s conception.

It is safe to say we are ever mindful of the implicit challenge in the poet’s idea that, despite the ‘Horror of the shade ... the menace of the years / Finds and shall find me unafraid’.

By a typically unforeseen confluence of events, I was to have a wholly unexpected association with Invictus in the following years.

In the early 2000s I had taken up the directorship of a new division of the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC), which I framed as the Social Cohesion and Integration Research Programme, based in Cape Town.

At the time, I had become a sort of unpaid project leader dealing with values in education for Kader Asmal, then minister of education in Mbeki’s cabinet.

When, in 2002, I was preparing to take up the Gordon Moore Visiting Professorship at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) the next year, I was anxious not to leave Asmal in the lurch, and so persuaded my friend David Chidester, Chair of Religious Studies at UCT, who was spending a year at the HSRC, to fill in for me as Kader’s sounding board.

I arranged a meeting and the three of us met at Kader’s house. After the meeting Kader, graciously escorting us to the car as was his habit, mentioned that he really wanted to do something special for Mandela to mark his 85th birthday the following year. What he had in mind was the political equivalent of a festschrift, but it was all a bit hazy. Chatting in the car on our way home, David ventured the idea of a book of Mandela’s speeches. Would it work? Could it be done? It seemed a mammoth undertaking, yet overnight, and to his immense credit, David produced a table of contents which, in a remarkably short time – with both of us working on it night after night – became the birthday volume we presented to Mandela on his 85th birthday.

Nelson Mandela, From Freedom to the Future (published by Jonathan Ball, and Little Brown in the UK) was distinguished by having two forewords, one written by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, the other by the 42nd President of the United States Bill Clinton.

It was quite a thing.

Kader delivered the speech at the handover ceremony at the Nelson Mandela Foundation’s offices in Johannesburg. He made a telling point which struck a chord with all us there for the occasion, a group that included the late Frederik Van Zyl Slabbert and Graça Machel, who both have chapters in the book. Mandela, he noted, ‘is noted for his distinctive merger of the personal and the political’. He went on to say that political transformation in South Africa ‘was enabled by Nelson Mandela’s personal capacity to purge any poison of hatred or revenge from his soul, to rise above bitterness, to demonstrate a generosity of spirit, and to reach out to others, all the while remaining true, even under the harshest conditions of injustice, imprisonment and oppression, to his political principles.’

Within a month of Mandela’s 2003 birthday celebration, I left for the United States.

I had undertaken to teach a course on South Africa, and the book came in very handy indeed. I ordered many copies and shared them with new and old friends – among them Michael Burawoy of the Department of Sociology at the University of California-Berkeley, who was teaching a course just then on Mandela, Antonio Gramsci and Lenin. It was a very interesting time to be in America, and in the intellectual milieu of California there was a great deal of discussion about South Africa post-Mandela.

One of the people I enjoyed seeing again was a family friend Caroline Graham. (Caroline is the former daughter-in-law of Washington Post proprietor Katherine Graham and features in the Frost-Nixon debates.) Mamphela Ramphele once asked me to look after Caroline in Cape Town because she (Mamphela) could not be in town to host her, which is how I first met Caroline. Not long afterwards she got in touch to say that a friend of hers who was a movie producer wanted to meet me. In due course, my wife Delecia and I were introduced to Mace Neufeld. Our meeting appeared to be a useful opportunity for him, for he had been mulling over a movie script about South Africa and was keen to hear our thoughts. After reading it, we told him that while we weren’t movie people, it seemed an attractive script. I have to say we had private anxieties about the risk of a Hollywood gloss rendering the subject superficial.

The script, of course, was Invictus – though it didn’t have that name yet.

The story is based on journalist John Carlin’s book Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation. The game in question was the cliffhanger 1995 Rugby World Cup final which South Africa won before a roaring crowd and a beaming Madiba when Joel Stransky booted the ball through the posts in the tense closing moments of the game.

About two years later I got an email out of the blue from Mace Neufeld to say that he and his wife would be arriving in Cape Town in the next couple of months to start filming. Mace invited me to the set where I had the great honour and opportunity of a lifetime to meet Clint Eastwood and Morgan Freeman. It was a brief meeting, but fabulous, Eastwood and Freeman being in fine form, joking constantly with each other.

The title of the movie was chosen just before the release. Delecia and I were asked to offer some suggestions, but it was Eastwood and Freeman who settled on Invictus. It was a good choice.

Around that time, Mace Neufeld remarked how, until he began work on developing the screenplay for Invictus, ‘I only had the usual general information about Nelson Mandela: his struggle to end apartheid, his philosophy of reconciliation and his iconic status as a national leader.’ His research, however, deepened his sense of Mandela’s extraordinary character. ‘Along with Morgan Freeman and his partner Lori McCreary,’ he wrote, ‘we discovered the miracle that was this man.’