Liberator or traitor? This is where Mandela lost the plot

Nelson Mandela had it easy when he was still alive and people were afraid to criticise a Nobel Laureate and international icon – from 1990 to 2013 nobody could touch Mandela.

But, after the passing of the statesman, there has been revisionists taking pot-shots at the old
man’s legacy – was he liberator or traitor?

With the passage of time the dominant narrative is that he gave too much for too little.

But Mandela wanted the bare minimum and it’s exactly what the apartheid regime, from the discomfort of its deathbed, offered him, even squeezing further concessions from the little he was ready to accept.

Signs that Mandela was affable were already there during his Treason Trial.

With his back against the wall and having been already found guilty of sabotage, a conviction that carried anything between life and death, Mandela uttered a conundrum in his mitigation plea: “I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination.”

That was odd because the South Africa of 1964, let alone the world had never had a society where Blacks were politically and economically dominant.

How did Mandela fight against something that did not exist?

One can argue in his defence that he was referring to tribal domination.

Even then, his own history showed he had not waged a single battle against any form of domination that could be construed to be Black.

Black was not a race but a class, and the Black class still awaited its turn to oppress.

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Some are quick to say Mandela should not be branded a traitor because he worked with what he was given; that he didn’t have enough cards to play.

True, he didn’t have the security apparatus the regime boasted but he held the Aces.

When Groote Schuur and Pretoria Minutes were wrapped, FW de Klerk requested to hold a whites-only referendum to seek a political mandate from his electorate on whether he should negotiate or not.

He received a resounding 68.73% YES.

After the completion of Codesa, Mandela could have asked to subject the agreement to a Blacks-only referendum.

Voters could have been asked if they supported a two-stage theory version of liberation or they wanted a wholesale reversal of apartheid legacy to the day the Land Act was promulgated.

South Africans would have overwhelmingly rejected the deal.

Mandela chose to append his signature on the document in his capacity as president of the ANC, which in effect is non-binding to Black South Africans but ANC members only.

De Klerk’s five-year term as president ended, and 1994 was election year. Mandela could have refused to participate in an election if the issue of the economy and land were not settled in the Codesa agreement.

There’s no way the apartheid regime, after the assassination of Chris Hani, which demonstrated the depth of Black anger, would have risked a whites-only election in 1994.

The genie was already out of the bottle.

Maybe Mandela played to his strength. Maybe his best was not good enough for the nation.

Maybe he needed to align more with the Pan Africanist Congress of Clarence Makwetu and the Azanian People’s Organisation of Itumeleng Mosala to strengthen his negotiating point.

Mandela was prepared to break bread with the Nats and murderous Inkatha Freedom Party but not bend backward to accommodate a pan-Africanist agenda.

Maybe that’s where Mandela lost the plot; to try and be an African liberator without being an African.

Goodenough Mashego is a political analyst, author and civil society activist.