All South Africans should be grateful for Zindzi Mandela

There is a social media post by one Helgard Muller that went viral at the news of the passing away of Zindzi Mandela. “Great news… Zindzi Mandela, the RACIST.”

The post in itself was not unexpected. This is South Africa after all, the most unequal society in the world.

What was unexpected is the thousands of locals who joined the United States-based Muller in his morbid celebrations of the death of a serving ambassador. All the racists came out to play.

Zindzi Mandela, who was only 18 months when her father (and South Africa’s father of the nation) Nelson Mandela was sent to jail, passed away on Monday 13 July.

He was only released from prison in 1990, when she was already a mother to three of her four children. Not only that, she had grown up in a household that was run by her late mother, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, whose persecution by apartheid security forces is well-documented.

One Christine Grace comments on the post celebrating Zindzi’s death that “Zindzi Mandela’s claim to fame is that her parents were terrorists!!!”

It’s very easy to dismiss such posts as isolated rants of a bunch of disgruntled racists, but when a post has been shared over 4,000 times, its reach is big. Most of those celebrating her death only “know” Zindzi Mandela from a couple of tweets she made two years ago referring to “land thieves”.

They do not know of the 24-year-old brave woman who stood in front of a packed Orlando Stadium in 1985 to read a letter from her jailed father Nelson Mandela rejecting PW Botha’s offer of a conditional release.

“What freedom am I being offered when I might be arrested on a pass offence?” she read from her father’s letter.

The racists that have congregated online to celebrate her passing don’t know that she read that letter because her mother could not, by law, read it. This was the land that Zindzi tweeted about in her life later, the land on which she had parents on paper but in practice, she had no parents.

Her father, Nelson Mandela, is now celebrated the world over as an ambassador of peace. She will be buried on the 17 July and the next day, 18 July the world will celebrate Mandela Day. It is a day earned by her father sacrificing the right to raise her, so that he could continue fighting for a free South Africa. She became an activist for peace by the virtue of her being born to her parents. Nelson Mandela’s forgiving spirit has led millions of South Africans to believe they were entitled to expect the same from every South African who suffered under apartheid.

Zindzi Mandela is not really hated because of her tweets, she’s hated because she didn’t meet the expectations that people had of a person bearing her surname. Her tweets were a call to South Africans to resolve an issue that has been a divisive one since the advent of democracy. Who can really dictate how angry she should be to a daughter who grew up “without” parents, because they chose to give their lives to a country with a section of the population which still insists on calling them “terrorists”?

In his book, Long Walk To Freedom, Nelson Mandela says that until she was 15, she was a child “who knew her father from old photographs rather than memory”.

She did not turn out bitter, vile, or worse, as most ordinary human beings would have. She did not turn out be her saintly father either, because she was herself. He gave himself to South Africa by choice, she didn’t have a choice but to give herself to South Africa. And a section of South Africa that didn’t deserve her celebrates her death when they should be thankful.

Maybe they don’t know that she was banished to Brandfort with her mother when she was only 17 years old in 1977, on the laws of the government that they and their parents voted for. If alive, she probably would frown from her legacy being explained to this section of the population because she never explained herself.

The choices that life made for her are part of the foundation that this country is built on. All South Africans should be grateful for her sacrifices.

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