As a devout secularist with one hand always on the deep pulse of history, I cannot help but feel moved and appreciative of the role that Nelson Mandela played in the peaceful transit of South Africa from apartheid prejudice to a working democratic structure. Mandela’s leftist African National Congress background was perceived by a generation of Kulturkampf American conservatives (such as Jerry Falwell) as a scheming communist just itching to unleash the distributionist revolution if he were ever let out of prison.
Oh were they wrong! The man had an abiding decency and bigger picture understanding of what it meant for his nation if reconciliation and toleration were not the standard. Mandela also pointedly refused to run for a second term as president in order (much like our own George Washington’s rejection of a third term) to nip in the bud a personality cult where the president might start feeling themselves to be indispensable. Instead, the peaceful democratic transition of power must be the model, or the system is fatally compromised.
Contrast this with Mandela’s contemporary freedom fighter, Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, who failed to follow any of Mandela’s track and instead managed to squander his nation’s human and natural resources as he worked out his own paranoid delusions of competence (not even grandeur for him, sorry). It is a sad irony that the recent comedy IgNobel Prize Awards awarded a $10 trillion cash prize to each of their recipients this year—for real. Not American dollars, of course, but one of Zimbabwe’s hyper-inflated currency notes.
Ideas do indeed have consequences, and so do the works of man. And in this regard Nelson Mandela has acquitted himself quite well.
