Mandela's mandala

Last week was a time for the apotheosis of Nelson Mandela.

The world celebrated his passing away with a lot of beautiful noise.

The average person in every corner of the world had something to say about Mandela. People who don't remember the names of their dead ancestors said they felt moved by the memory of "Madiba".

In Mandela we had a global figure, not a South African one, whose loss was a global, rather than a South African loss. 

But the rendering of Mandela's mandala into a global entity and the ballooning of his legacy into a global one, is a sign not of Mandela's achievements, but of his ineffective, mostly symbolical, life during the years in post-apartheid South Africa.

Such is the argument of the brilliant Czech contrarian, Slavoj Zizek.

Zizek writes that Mandela wouldn't have become an universal hero had he really/fundamentally won the invisible yet potent war against injustice and inequality that he said he had dedicated his life to fighting. 

The dismantling of apartheid in South Africa, like the abolition of slavery in Europe and North America, was in and of itself a singular achievement of Nelson Mandela, but the fact (of history) remains that Apartheid as a system had become unsustainable in an era which came to be defined by Perestroika, Glasnost and the fall of the Berlin Wall, all symbols of freedom, triumph of free market thinking and unification of people divided by artificial "walls". Apartheid increasingly looked and felt like an analog technology in a time of the digital.

According to Zizek Mandela played an active role in surgically removing the cankerous cyst that was apartheid, but wasn't able to remove the "order" which had given rise to a system like apartheid in the first place.

South Africa, as Zizek reminds us, continues to be a deeply troubled society, divided on the basis of race still. After apartheid, the Black elite joined hands with the White elite to practice what would be a structural apartheid (like structural racism in the United States), i.e. where exploitation of the powerless by the powerful is carried on indirectly instead of directly. 

Zizek doesn't blame Mandela for failing to sustain the momentum of a radical emancipatory politics that he was instrumental in ushering into South Africa, but he reminds us that Mandela would not have been thus universally glorified had he really disturbed the dominant global order.

I keep thinking of the brutal, untimely assassinations of Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. among many others. These leaders did disturb an order, not just dismantle a temporal system. Che Guevara disturbed a dominant global order of capitalist exploitation in Latin America, and we know how his life ended.

Continuity of life isn't innately a sign of ineffectuality for leaders, but Zizek has a point when he says that the reason why Mandela had transcended the local and the specific to become so universally loved and revered is because like Mickey Mouse he had pleased more people than threatened their securities:

If we want to remain faithful to Mandela's legacy, we should thus forget about celebratory crocodile tears and focus on the unfulfilled promises his leadership gave rise to. We can safely surmise that, on account of his doubtless moral and political greatness, he was at the end of his life also a bitter old man, well aware how his very political triumph and his elevation into a universal hero was the mask of a bitter defeat. His universal glory is also a sign that he really didn't disturb the global order of power.