Now that he is finally buried, can we please restore the truth and stop trying to beatify Nelson Mandela
No saint
The world mourns a former terrorist, and lays him to rest in reverence
Nelson Mandela is gone. He has been buried, amidst a flurry of pomp and ceremony. After his death the great and the good lined up dutifully to tell us what a great and wonderful man he was, and what a loss to the world he is. It is as if his life only consisted of the last 30 years, since his emergence from Robbin Island prison.
There is no denying that he had reasonable grievances against the state he grew up in. Nor can it be denied that he went on to spend a very long time behind bars, following his conviction - possibly politically motivated and more than the crimes merited. And, yes, he reformed. Yes he was the figurehead of a (relatively) peaceful revolution that was significant. But people are glossing over the fact that 50 years ago of all his contemporaries he was most in favour of violence in his day, to the extent he was a founder of the MK and tried to get China to underwrite an all-out armed uprising. No-one, not a soul, has dared remark on his role before imprisonment in orchestrating the bombing campaign he was arrested for which passed as the "moderate" compromise after China (somewhat sensibly) refused to get involved and his colleagues refused to back his calls for civil war. One of the principal reasons he changed his tune was that the world had changed around him, and he would have become irrelevant had he not. Undoubtedly there was a feedback loop, in which he was one driver in changes in attitudes, but he was far from the only one.
I don't doubt the sincerity of his reformation, but he was a clever man and it was forced upon him by circumstance (politics had changed, and he was too old). He certainly wasn't Saint Madiba this blatant whitewash of history tries to present him as. If the darker elements of his past are covered up and ignored now, all that will happen is that some future generation of devotees will rediscover it and start incorporating it back into his "greatness" and use him once more as figurehead to preach a philosophy of armed violence.
