For the love of Mandela

By Derek Hook

How should one approach the obsessive media speculation concerning Nelson Mandela’s declining health and approaching death? Such commentary as a rule wavers between requests that we respect Mandela’s privacy, honour the appropriate cultural customs and an unrelenting — and at times prurient — hunger for ever more details pertaining to Mandela and his feuding family. A second, and related, tension is also at play here between calls that we “let him go” and a clear wish to be exactly the opposite.

It would be wrong to dismiss this excessive public interest in Mandela’s health out of hand, irrational as it no doubt is. This flurry of concern is deeply significant; it is a token of a more far-reaching and less easily communicable form of social unease than can be explained away simply by Mandela’s advancing and inevitable death. This behaviour can, in other words, be read symptomatically, as a crisis of concern that condenses within itself a series of fundamental anxieties underlying the post-apartheid condition as such. Before elaborating upon this idea any further we need to consider Mandela’s unique status, the unprecedented position that his name and legacy have come to acquire in the psyche of national and global culture alike.

A name starts to function as a “master-signifier” when, despite the predominance of a general meaning, it comes to signify a great many different things to a great many different people. Despite the diversity of such investments, all related parties — the public as a whole, we might say — remains powerfully identified with the name in question. What this means is that the name “Mandela” represents a point of convergence in which an inordinate variety of incompatible values and identifications overlap. For some Mandela is the benign, forgiving father of the nation, the embodiment of hope and reconciliation; for others Mandela is the radical protagonist of the armed struggle, the ANC icon who played his part in establishing the youth league and Umkhonto weSizwe alike; for yet others he is a global celebrity, a largely de-politicised figure, who remains nevertheless, an emblem of credibility, a touchstone of moral and social capital.

A master-signifier, furthermore, is never totalised; it remains always “empty”, able to accommodate fresh articulations. This is so obviously the case in respect of Mandela’s name — various applications of which are, today, seemingly never-ending — that it barely warrants mentioning. Whether in the form of architectural or structural features (bridges, statues, squares, street-names), institutions (universities, charities, museums), commemorative commodities (gold coins, a literary sub-genre including memoirs, coffee table and cook-books), and even rival political party interests (as in the DA’s recent attempt at appropriation), “Mandela” is a signifier that can be appended to a virtually endless stream of post-apartheid objects and aspirations.

Clearly evident also, in the elevation of Mandela to the realm of pure symbol, is the role of mythologisation. This is to say that the signifier “Mandela” is today always in part a projection of those who so strongly identify the man and his legacy. In speaking of Mandela then, we have in mind not just the man or Mandela as historical event, but Mandela as focal-point of multiple subjective investments and identifications, Mandela, that is, as shared social fantasy. To make such an observation is by no means to depart from pressing “real world” political concerns. “Mandela” has served as a stabilising signifier, a signifier more able than any other to lend moral purpose and meaning to the post-apartheid era. “Mandela” enables us to knit the otherwise discontinuous elements of post-apartheid social experience into a narrative of progress. It is in this respect that the demise of Mandela has so anxiety-provoking for the nation; it heralds the prospect of a crisis of re-definition, of the divergent strands of post-apartheid society failing to cohere.

The question of how — or why — we love Mandela is also crucial. We may distinguish between two types of love. There is a love that is largely narcissistic. We love someone who makes us feel good about ourselves, who enables us to maintain an idealised image of ourselves. The loved person here is essentially a prop for our own self-love. Given the function of this type of love — to make us loveable to both ourselves and others — it is once again understandable why the prospective demise of Mandela occasions so much anxiety. The death of Mandela means — at least in part — the loss of what South Africans feel makes them special, extraordinary, in the eyes of the world.

There is also the more abstract love of shared social and historical ideals. This type of love concerns those “to live or die for” values that ground a society and mark out the ideals it will continue to strive for. Such a set of social and symbolic ideals necessarily exceeds the role of any one person. These comments put us in a position to respond to the question — painful for many — of how, and in what capacity, to let Mandela go. If it is the first of these two types of love that underscores our reticence to give him up, that is, if we love Mandela chiefly as a means of loving ourselves, then it is time to let him go. We could extend this argument: if we love Mandela as a fetish that enables us to conceal the radical injustices and inequalities of the post-apartheid condition, then we must let him go. More succinctly put: we need to forego the illusions that the imaginary figure of Mandela allows us to maintain.

However, inasmuch as Mandela encapsulated a vision of social bonds traversing apartheid’s structural divisions, a vision which made the (imperfect) transition from apartheid possible, then it is right to cherish his legacy, and not to fear his death. For, after all, this set of ideals is bigger than any one man, even if Mandela did more than most to bring these values vividly to life and lend them a readily recognisable human face. That being said, anxiety may emerge here also, even in respect of Mandela’s symbolic legacy. If Mandela made possible “the post-apartheid”, as both political era and mode of subjectivity, then his death cannot but imply the question: What comes after the post-apartheid era, an era which has been synonymous precisely with the figure of Mandela?

Having intimated that love and idealisation are rarely innocent, we may now turn to a facet of the current public obsession with Mandela that few have remarked upon. The universal outpouring of love and idealisation for Mandela has been accompanied by a period of intense vilification directed at his successor as leader of the ANC and South African president, namely Jacob Zuma. These two processes — idealisation and vilification — are clearly connected. They are in fact both a part of one and the same dynamic. The more Mandela is idealised, the more Zuma’s (not inconsiderable) faults are progressively magnified. Whereas Mandela is lionised, Zuma by contrast is reduced to caricature, to the embodiment of everything wrong with South Africa. It perhaps goes without saying that neither of these portrayals is wholly accurate or completely rational in nature. This dynamic reflects something of the country’s speculation on its own identity. It represents also the country’s inability to bring together what is best and worst, what is most inspiring and most dismaying, in our recent history. One is reminded of the resentful words Oliver Stone puts into Richard Nixon’s mouth in a scene from his (1995) film Nixon. Staring with bitterness at a portrait of Kennedy and wondering why the American people loved the younger man so much, he laments: “When they look at him, they see themselves as they want to be; when they look at me, they see themselves as they are.”

The death of a father — particularly one of the status of Nelson Mandela — can represent a great many things symbolically. It need not be read fatalistically; such an event can represent just as much a great beginning as a great end. This is in fact a well-known literary trope: a grand family story — or historical epic — only in effect really begins following the death of a great patriarch. What most certainly is signalled by such an event is that the father’s descendants now need to assume responsibility for what had hitherto been his duty. One of Mandela’s tasks — perhaps his over-riding achievement — was to pull together a radically divided and diverse society, to enable a post-apartheid imaginary that the entire nation could — in very different ways — share in and identify with. The signifier “Mandela” provided the basis — historically unimaginable up until that point — for a type of social consensus that made the post-apartheid public sphere viable.

It is this perceived ability to transcend apartheid’s lingering culture of hate and separatism, to foster ties of allegiance that crossed the boundaries of race, ethnicity and political allegiance, that characterises Mandela’s lasting greatness. What the “father of the nation’s” imminent demise throws into perspective is the fact that we will no longer be able to delegate this task to him. This responsibility, the labour of developing a viable post-apartheid consensus, one which avoids the descent into vicious forms of factionalism, will soon become our own responsibility.

Derek Hook is a reader in psychosocial studies at Birkbeck College and a visiting associate professor in psychology at Wits University. He is the author of (Post)apartheid Conditions.