By BRENDAN O’NEILL
In the seven days
since the death of Nelson Mandela, many a Western right-winger has found
himself accused of rewriting history. For politicians like David Cameron of
Britain’s Conservative Party to gush and blub over Mandela is outrageous,
critics claim, considering his party was hardly a friend to the cause of
anti-Apartheid in the 1970s and 80s. All this ‘right-wing fawning’ for Madiba –
as every white liberal in Christendom has rather embarrassingly taken to
calling Mandela – is nauseating, we’re told, given it is coming from some of
the same organisations and people who either backed or were ambivalent about
Apartheid just 30 years ago. These people are trying to ‘rewrite’ the past,
says South Africa-born Labour MP Peter Hain. It’s like
Pontius Pilate paying tribute to Jesus Christ, says one melodramatic observer.
It is true that
the history of South Africa is being rewritten in the wake of Mandela’s death.
But it isn’t being rewritten by right-wing opportunists scrambling for a feel
of Mandela’s holy hem. Rather, it’s the mainstream canonisation of Mandela,
indulged by everyone from Barack Obama to the NGO industry to the entire sphere
of liberal commentary and campaigning, which is warping the truth about what
happened in South Africa.
It is the secular
beatification of Mandela, the increasingly unhinged cult of global mourning for
this ‘great liberator’, the transformation of
Mandela into a Christ-like ‘saviour’ of black South Africans from the horrors
and deprivations of Apartheid, which is doing far graver harm to historical
truth than someone like Cameron could ever achieve. For it is airbrushing from
history the true destroyer of Apartheid, which was not Mandela, or even his
African National Congress, far less those white folk with consciences who
refused to buy certain oranges at the Hampstead branch of Waitrose in the
1980s, but rather South Africa’s teeming, convulsing black masses.
The mainstream
story of Mandela that has been foisted on us by Washington downwards over the
past week is built on a fallacy: that Mandela liberated South Africa; that he
was, in the words of one observer, ‘the man who brought down Apartheid’; that
he was a Jesus-like figure whose ‘colossal moral strength’ transformed South
Africa from a racist hellhole into a new nation with ‘majority black rule’. By
this religious-style reading, Mandela, simply by conjuring up his inner moral
resources, remade an entire nation and boosted the fortunes of its sad,
benighted inhabitants.
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