Cui Bono?

Nelson Mandela is a titanic figure on the world stage, but in a recent TNR piece Eve Fairbanks observes that many younger South Africans view him as a traitor who sold out the cause.

One reason for this perception is the economic disproportion in South Africa since apartheid: “white South Africans have fared remarkably well financially post-apartheid. Only 9 percent of the shares of the top 100 companies listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange have moved into black hands, and whites still comprise 70 percent of senior management.”

The blacks that made the most gains were those of what Fairbanks calls “a high-flying class of black-liberation-movement veterans or their friends, the so-called ‘black diamonds’ who now sit on the boards of formerly white-run corporations and drive tricked-out BMWs.”

The Mandela family has capitalized more than any:

“Mandela personally has never particularly flaunted his wealth, but his house is in Johannesburg’s version of Westchester—a leafy estate of soaring mansions and stately tree-shaded avenues—and his foundation is known for fiercely protecting the copyright on his iconic smiling visage, so that the wealth it produces redounds only to the family. His grandson led a heavily capitalized mining company that was later prosecuted for defrauding its workers. His granddaughters cashed in with a reality TV show.” One of Fairbanks’s sources complains that the liberation leaders “were representing themselves . . . . Look at the Mandelas—the whole family is making a killing.”

The perception that Mandela backed off on his agenda is correct, but it’s a matter of his bowing to economic reality: “Prior to Mandela’s liberation from prison in 1990, the ANC had long advocated radical economic change, projects like the nationalization of mining and more equitable sharing of agricultural work and profits. When Mandela was released, he began to make the rounds at Western economic summits, where he was quickly persuaded that such dramatic moves would be folly.”

Fairbanks concludes that the complexity or even ambiguity of Mandela’s legacy leaves most of the analysis of his remarkable career still to be done: “It amazes me that there are so few substantial biographies of Mandela. So much about his full record is yet to be assessed. There will be many obituaries for him, but today the story of how we will remember him is only beginning to be written.”