As the vigil continues outside the hospital, we don't know how close to
the final freedom Nelson Mandela is. But after the strange denials that this old,
sick man is dying I want to talk not with pity but of his power.
Before the
pygmy politicians line up to pay tribute to this giant, I want to remember how
he lived so much for so many. Part of my memory is that he was not a living
saint to the very people whose staff will now be writing their "heartfelt"
speeches.
Really, I have no desire to hear them from
leaders of parties who described his organisation as terrorist, who believed
that sanctions were wrong, whose jolly young members wore T-shirts demanding he
be strung up. Of course, not all Tories were pro-apartheid, but I can already
feel the revisionism revving up.
So we must recall how it really was. The struggle
against apartheid was the one thing that unified the left. I came to it
accidentally. Isn't that how politicisation happens sometimes? Via
extraordinary people, unlikely meetings, chance encounters?
Like this one: in 1981 I had just come back from
travelling around South America and got a job in a care home with Haringey
Social Services in north London. Some of the local kids were in big trouble –
the girls were on the game at 14, the boys breaking into houses and stealing
cars.
A large, in every sense of the word, African woman became my ally there.
She was always encouraging them to be lawyers despite their constant truanting.
We were an unlikely pair, but she believed in "discipline" and I
believed in "manners" so we would talk late into the night.
She
was one of the poshest people I had ever met – she drank Perrier water, which
at that time was exotic beyond belief. Sometimes she would weep after receiving
calls from South Africa and talk of murders and
assassinations. Sometimes she would take me out for cocktails and get
diplomatic cars from embassies to take me home. Her name was Adelaide Tambo, the wife of Oliver. They
were the exiled leaders of the ANC.
I began to know what this meant. How Mandela had
ridden to power in 1952 in the Defiance
Campaign, how he was harassed and, of course, finally taken to Robben Island. To that tiny cell. The Tambos had to leave much
later. One night she called me as she was locked out of her house in Muswell
Hill. "Can't you just break a window? "No Suzanne," she said.
"The windows are all bullet proof glass." That's how they lived.
This personal introduction to the ANC is my story
but everyone I knew opposed apartheid. Indeed, who could support such
barbarism? This was more than racism – there is only one race, called the human
race. Botha's regime did not regard black people as humans but as animals.
By 1984 Jerry Dammers had written
Free Nelson Mandela. But apartheid continued to exist, propped up by the
Tories. Some of their elder statesmen, such as Norman Tebbit, still see
Thatcher's policy as a success. David Cameron denounced
it in 2006, saying she had been wrong to condemn the ANC as terrorists and to
have opposed sanctions. Too late for those veteran campaigners such as Peter
Hain, who had seen the massacres in the townships and knew it was
a life-or-death struggle.
Indeed, when I saw Mandela in later years having
his garden surreally being "made over" by Alan Titchmarsh or being
cuddled by random Spice Girls, I wondered if they had ever heard Gil
Scott-Heron's Johannesburg (1975) or been at the anti-apartheid demos outside
the South African embassy where we were all kettled.
When we hear Cameron's inevitable tribute, don't
forget that in 1989, aged 23,
he went on a "jolly" to South Africa paid for by a firm that did
not want sanctions busted. This does not mean he supported apartheid, but by
then it would have been impossible not to know of the regime's brutality. Many
people knew, and boyotted South African goods.
I see Dylan Jones, a Cameron fan, has written a
book on Live Aid, defining the 80s as caring: more anodyne revision. The key
concert of the 80s was the more political and consciousness-raising Free Nelson Mandela one, not long after.
Mandela himself was there on stage with that smile that came from the centre of
the Earth.
The glare of his grin made us cheer and cry. The glare of the
sun, when he was breaking rocks in Robben Island, had permanently damaged his
eyesight, but not his mind. When he walked to freedom he wrote, that unless he
left bitterness and hatred behind, "I would still be in prison."
This is wonderful, but do not let his story be
rewritten, do not let those who opposed his struggle pretend they didn't.
"There is no passion to be found playing
small," he said. He told his own people to recall the past. I ask simply,
before we are inundated with those who want to bask in his afterglow, that we
remember our own past too.
It is sad, but let him go. I just wanted to remind
you of how it was before he passes and before the "official" rewrite
of history begins. Forgiveness is possible. Forgetting isn't.
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