To the very end, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, though frail and somewhat forgetful, remained the Father of the Nation for South Africans. It could even be said that, in the several trips he’s made to the hospital over the past two years, he was, in his own way, preparing his family—biological and extended—for his final return home. The renowned South African writer Zakes Mda once told me, “In our indigenous languages, we reserved the equivalent words of ‘death’ only for animals. For humans, we say ‘She has left us,’ ‘He had passed,’ ‘She’s gone home,’ ‘He’s gone to join the ancestors.’ ” It seemed as if Madiba—that is Mandela’s Xhosa clan name—had delayed his departure long past that of many of his contemporaries and comrades-in-arms so that his family, both near and national, could simply mourn him, without the sense that his loss might throw the country into a crisis.
Fathers can make themselves felt through their absence; Mandela did, by walking away from power after his term as President was up. Mandela’s own father passed away from tuberculosis when Mandela was nine. And yet, Mandela has written, “I defined myself through my father.” By that he meant that his father possessed “a proud rebelliousness, a stubborn sense of fairness, that I recognize in myself.”
Mandela would be the first to admit that he did a lousy job as the biological father of six children, by two different wives. He was married first and foremost to the movement—to the liberation of his people from the vicious, stifling bondage of a white minority who saw themselves as superior, who forcibly removed blacks and other people of color to isolated townships that often lacked running water and indoor plumbing, and which the regime could easily encircle in case of trouble. Mandela wrote about the difficulties of his first marriage, to Evelyn Mase, in his autobiography, “Long Walk to Freedom”:
The aftermath of the separation from Evelyn was not pleasant. Soon, however, Mandela, by then a young, successful lawyer, met and married a beautiful social worker named Nomzamo Winfreda Madikizela. Winnie, whose first name, Nomzamo, means, appropriately in retrospect, “she who undergoes trials,” also demonstrated against the white regime and paid for it with imprisonment, once almost losing the child she was carrying; she spent four hundred and ninety-one days in solitary confinement. She rarely saw her husband. When Winnie’s second child, Zindzi, was born, Mandela was miles away, visiting his ailing son by Evelyn, itself a rare act on his part. Mandela even remained outside, in the car, when a comrade came into their house and asked Winnie to pack some clothes for him, because he was going away, to an unspecified place, for an unspecified amount of time. It was almost three decades.
Knowing Mandela meant getting used to his absences. He had come into his political consciousness after leaving his rural home, in the Eastern Cape, where he was born, in 1918, and, after his father’s death, was reared in the house of the powerful Thembu acting regent, a member of the Xhosa nation. By the time Mandela got to college, his innate moral compass and the traits he had inherited from his father had begun to define him; he prematurely left Fort Hare, a prestigious black college, after a protest about the poor quality of food ended in a compromise he couldn’t accept.
After that, Mandela headed to Johannesburg, the fast-paced city known to South Africans as Egoli—the City of Gold. There, despite living in bleak quarters, studying by candlelight, and often going hungry, Mandela, who wanted to become a lawyer, met the people whose guidance put him on the path that joined his history with his country’s. Men like Walter Sisulu and Oliver Tambo and Gaur Radebe got him involved in his first public demonstration, a bus boycott in the Alexandra township; others provided his first introduction to the African National Congress. He rapidly became one of its leaders, organizing peaceful protests. All this extracurricular activity meant that it took Mandela longer than usual—about seven years—to qualify as an attorney. He finally managed it, just as the white-controlled government introduced the apartheid system, in 1948. In 1952, Mandela opened the first black law firm in Johannesburg with Tambo, defending mostly poor black people—for little or no money—who would, no doubt, not have had legal representation otherwise; and, for the first time, he got to know Indian South Africans, who were also victims of the system, as well as whites, although for a time he was distant from both. And he continued his work for the A.N.C.
On March 21, 1960, police opened fire on a group of black South Africans who were peacefully protesting laws requiring blacks to carry passes that restricted their movement. The police killed sixty-nine people, in what became known as the Sharpeville massacre. Shortly afterward, the regime declared a state of emergency and banned the A.N.C. Sharpeville persuaded Mandela that peaceful protests wouldn’t be enough. Already facing treason charges, he went underground as a leader of the A.N.C.’s new guerrilla wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (“Spear of the Nation”). Dressed in different disguises—a gardener, a chef, a soldier—he popped up around the country, and then disappeared again. His exploits earned him a nickname: the Black Pimpernel.
As Mandela said, in a statement released in June, 1961:
He was posing as a chauffeur when he was finally caught and arrested (thanks, it is widely believed, to information that the C.I.A. or MI6 intelligence agents gave to South African authorities). In court, Mandela defiantly wore the traditional outfit of a Xhosa chief—a leopard-skin kaross with one bare shoulder exposed, and beads around his neck. This time, he was charged with inciting workers to strike and with leaving the country illegally. He was faithful to his movement marriage. He accused the government of “behav[ing] in a way no civilized government should dare behave when faced with a peaceful, disciplined, sensible, and democratic expression of the views of its own population.” The South African political journalist Max du Preez wrote, of Mandela’s goodbye to Winnie, “There were no tears, no clinging to each other; he gave her advice—almost like a father figure—on how to conduct herself in his absence, and gave her a letter of love and encouragement written earlier.”
Seven months later, he and nine others were brought back to court, this time charged under the all-encompassing Suppression of Communism Act, as well as the Sabotage Act, in what became known as the Rivonia Trial. They faced the death penalty.
Mandela, known as Accused No. 1, was undeterred. Given a chance to address the court, he spoke for four hours, talking passionately about the desire of the black majority to have “a just share in the whole of South Africa,” as well as “equal political rights.” He insisted that “the violence we chose to adopt was not terrorism,” and that the A.N.C. was committed to “nonviolence and negotiations.”
And then he spoke words that captured the attention not only of those in the courtroom but of people all over the world. They remain to this day among his most memorable—and are the only words of his captured on audio for almost three decades:
The sentence was not death but life in prison.
For the next two and a half decades, Mandela was the invisible man. He and other political prisoners were first confined on Robben Island, two square miles of land surrounded by the waters off Cape Town. While they managed to create an atmosphere that was referred to as Mandela University, where the younger prisoners were encouraged to study, prison life took its toll. Mandela was forced to dig in a lime quarry, day in and day out, without protection for his eyes from the sun and dust, and suffered such lasting damage to them that, even after his release, he could not abide the flashing lights from journalists’ cameras. And, in time, he also developed tuberculosis, which made him vulnerable to problems with his lungs that continued until his death.
After eighteen years, he was moved, along with Walter Sisulu, Raymond Mhlaba, and Andrew Mlangeni, to Pollsmoor Prison, near Cape Town, which is where he was when I first went to South Africa, in 1985, when the country was in yet another state of emergency. Mandela, I had been told, busied himself with a garden he had planted; I stood on a nearby hillside and tried in vain to catch a glimpse of it or of him, but I had been followed by security police and so couldn’t linger long.
I found that children in every black township knew his name, and not only his. One day, walking up to a small group of teen-agers dancing in a circle and singing in Zulu, I asked what the words meant, and they told me breathlessly, “We want Mandela to be released, and Walter Sisulu, Raymond Mhlaba, Andrew Mlangeni, Govan Mbeki, and all the other political prisoners.”
Mandela’s marriage to the movement had produced children like these. But his daughter Zindzi was only eighteen months old when her father was sent to prison, and, along with her mother and sister, Zenani, endured night raids from security forces, along with banishment to a remote town. In 1985, young Zindzi stood before a crowd of thousands at Jabulani Stadium, in Soweto, and read a letter from her father that had been smuggled out of prison, his first public statement in twenty-one years. She began, “My father says …” and went on to read his refusal of an offer of conditional release that involved renouncing violence. It ended with the resounding words “Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts …. Your freedom and mine cannot be separated. I will return.”
The speech invigorated the movement. But in time, and on his own, Mandela began discussions with the apartheid regime about how to bring about a peaceful transition. Five years and a day later, on February 11, 1990, to the surprise of even his comrades, both inside and outside the country, Mandela was released. He was seventy-one. He had been in prison for twenty-seven years.
And, in the ensuing months, before he actually became President of the country, he spent time not only embracing the children of the movement but extending an olive branch to the whites who had never reached out to them or to him. He seemed to many to go out of his way to reassure whites that he believed in the words he had long ago spoken—that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white. It wasn’t obvious to everyone in his own ranks that he should be so welcoming, so inclusive. It was obvious to Mandela. It also earned him and the Afrikaner President who freed him, F. W. de Klerk, the Nobel Peace Prize, in 1993, the year before Mandela replaced de Klerk.
Mandela further solidified his credentials as Father of the Nation, the whole nation, when he pitched up at a rugby match wearing the team cap. The Springboks team had been all-white, and blacks associated them with apartheid, but when the game was over, and the team had won the 1995 Rugby World Cup, a broadly smiling Mandela walked onto the field, shook the team captain’s hand, and encouraged the entire nation to “get behind our boys.”
He had another nasty divorce, from Winnie, in the interim, though they eventually reconciled. When his eldest son died of an AIDS-related illness, the country saw Mandela as a grieving father, one who also stood up and told the nation—his nation—that there was no shame in being H.I.V.-infected, and that people living with H.I.V. should not be stigmatized. It was a dramatic departure from the position of Thabo Mbeki, his successor and the President at the time, who had dismissed the connection between H.I.V. and AIDS.
In his autobiography, “Long Walk to Freedom,” published in 1994, the year he assumed the Presidency, Mandela wrote:
And so Mandela wasted no time in trying to locate the father he had not been to his biological children, their children, and those of his third wife, Graça Machel.
I interviewed Mandela in 1994, a few days before he was to be sworn in as President of the Republic of South Africa. I apologized to him for not being able to be at the inauguration itself, explaining that there was hardly anything on earth that would make me miss that historic occasion, but that my son Chuma was graduating from Emory University, in Atlanta, on the same day. And I needed to fly back for it. At that, Mandela relaxed his stiff, about-to-be-interviewed posture, leaned forward slightly in his chair, and smiled, with an enveloping warmth.
“Of course you have to be there. You can always interview me,” he said.
I found myself responding, “Thank you, Tata”—just what a child of Mandela would have called him.
And now I am reminded of something else I learned during my years in the country—which is probably why South Africans, though sad now that the Father of the Nation has closed his eyes forever, will not be desolate. It is the tradition that takes South Africans to the gravesite of a departed one to speak about whatever problems they may be having, in the belief that wisdom will come from one who is now an ancestor, and who lives forever.
Above: Mandela surprises locals on an impromptu walkabout, 1994. Photograph by Ian Berry/Magnum.
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Read more of The New Yorker’s memorial coverage of Nelson Mandela.
