Mandela’s appeal

Tom Lodge’s Mandela: A Critical Life does a good job of explaining the mythical, iconic attraction that Mandela attained, and finds its roots in Mandela’s upbringing, his legal training, and the deliberate effort to present him as the face of a new Africa.

Lodge writes, “Mandelas childhood was unusual because of his early departure from his mothers household and his subsequent upbringing as the ward of a royal regent. Mandelas emotional self-control as a personality, as well as his receptiveness to new ideas, is, I think, attributable to his upbringing in highly institutionalised settings. Both at court and at school, Mandela absorbed principles of etiquette and chivalry that remained important precepts through his public life. They were principles that were reinforced by a sophisticated literary culture that fused heroic African oral traditions with Victorian concepts of honour, propriety, and virtue. From his boyhood, Mandelas life was shaped by ideas or values that were shared by rather than dividing his compatriots, black and white. In this context, the absence in his early life of intimidating or humiliating encounters with white people is significant.”

This tradition of courtliness and chivalry came into play in his post-apartheid political conduct:

“Mandelas willingness to embrace all his compatriots as citizens was sustained by professional protocols and codes of behaviour. Even in the increasingly polarised climate of South Africa . . . these ideas about social conduct could transcend racial identity and they reinforced the decorous manners and patrician conventions that Mandela had maintained from home and school.”

Intriguingly, Lodge also points to Mandela’s legal training as a source of his political practice, observing “In general, historians of anti-colonial movements have paid insufficient attention to the influence of colonial legal ideas on African nationalist leadership.” Law gave Mandela certain notions of human rights, but “Most importantly, the structured world of courtroom procedure itself shaped Mandelas political practice, restraining it even in its most theatrically insurgent phases, and reinforcing his respect for institutions, traditions, and history.”

And there was a performative aspect to his appeal: “Birth, upbringing, emotional self-sufficiency from an early age, social grace, imposing appearance, and elite status combined to encourage in Mandela an unusual assurance about his destiny as a leader, a sense of his power to shape his own life that seems to have been shared by those around him. For Mandela, politics has always been primarily about enacting stories, about making narratives, primarily about morally exemplary conduct, and only secondarily about ideological vision, more about means rather than ends. In the South Africa of the early apartheid era, Mandela was one of the first media politicians, showboy as one of his contemporaries nicknamed him, embodying a glamour and a style that projected visually a brave new African world of modernity and freedom.”