Private legacies of Mandela

Posted on September 16, 2010

Nelson Mandela is alive, but the battle for his legacy has already begun. There are gold coins in his likeness one can buy, countless biographies, a large statue of him in Sandton Square and even a painting in which his autopsy is depicted. He is the Father of the new South Africa, and its, and sometimes the rest of the world's, moral compass. We are obsessed with him and the implications of his legacy. Yet, we don't know much of Nelson Mandela the person- who is he in his private life. All icons are entitled to some privacy, but in many ways the separation of home and work that was brought about by industrialization has lulled us into dangerous bifurcations of our domestic selves from our public ones. When 'great men' and women go into the world they do not leave their everyday selves at home; the joy, the pain, the small frustrations and the big tragedies all travel with them. Nelson Mandela is one member of the dyad of South Africa's 'great men'; Desmond Tutu the other, but what we know of Mandela as a son, husband, father/grandfather and friend could fit into a thimble. So when I learned of David James Smith's biography, Young Mandela, detailing the man before Robben Island, I ran out, got it and devoured it cover to cover.

Once I got beyond some of the clunky writing of the first pages I was rewarded for my efforts. Smith gives us a biography that juxtaposes Mandela's version of his family history as given in Long Walk to Freedom with what the archives offer. He shows both how Mandela chooses to remember his relationships "his father and his father's career as a chief; his relationship with his mother; and himself as a husband and a father" and how official documentation and others' memories sometimes counter his. Smith peels back the layers of Mandela's silence around the dissolution of his first marriage, the deaths of his two sons and the troubled relationships that he has with most of his children and grandchildren. Much of the book details the ways in which both Mandela's first and second wives, Evelyn and Winnie, and their children felt sacrificed by Mandela on the altar of the struggle. Before the Treason Trial, Smith writes, "Winnie felt she was a sacrifice to the cause. Marrying Madiba - she never called her husband Nelson as that would have been too familiar...marrying Madiba was marrying the ANC". A little further on, he explains that when Mandela went underground he never actually told Winnie: "[i]n Winnie's recollection he came home from the Treason Trial one day in March 1961...he did not actually come into the house but stood outside the gate" and "[Joe] Modise came to her...and said, Mama, can you please get me a suitcase and pack a few clothes for Madiba?"(181). Winnie reportedly had no illusions about the life she would have with Mandela, "[i]t was a cause ... and the fight for dignity, the fight for your work, was much bigger than your personal life". Yet almost simultaneously she expresses loss and anger about his betrayal of their personal lives: he was never there for the birth of their daughters.

Even less known to us are the facts of his first marriage beyond the fleeting reference to Evelyn taking the curtains from 8115 Orlando West in Long Walk to Freedom. Smith takes us inside the story. From his account they were a young, upwardly mobile couple "Evelyn a nurse and Mandela studying to become an advocate" thwarted by Mandela's philandering and Evelyn's attempt to study and qualify in midwifery. The struggle and Evelyn's increasing devotion to her religion seem far less central to the demise of their relationship here than Mandela alludes in Long Walk. On the day of Mandela's release Evelyn is reported to have said that "People worship Nelson too much".

Interestingly, the Mandela family histories that Mandela's children and grandchildren tell is inflected with their sense of whether or not their mother/grandmother was wronged or sidelined by Mandela or in the case of Evelyn and her children (Thembi, Mokgatho and Makaziwe), by Mandela's 'official' family (Winnie, Zindzi and Zenani).

Young Mandela is not a biography meant to tarnish or destroy Mandela's legacy 'that would be opportunistic' but to restore his humanness by showing us some of his youthful foibles. I think, by putting them into public discourse Smith asks us to think about the nature of family in South Africa and what its implications are for how we 'do' democracy on the street, in parliament and in the home.

David James Smith's Young Mandela, Orion Publishing, 2010

Victoria Collis-Buthelezi is a doctoral candidate at Columbia University, New York, and an associate of the Research Initiative in Archive and Public Culture at the University of Cape Town.