At his death, Nelson Mandela received a saint like praise around the world, but he has his critics also. Rick Lyman looks at him from critic’s point of view. ( F. Sheikh) Some excerpts;
“When Andile Mngxitama, a black-consciousness advocate and frequent critic of Mr. Mandela, fired yet another broadside at the former leader before he died — comparing him unfavorably to neighboring Zimbabwe’s authoritarian president, Robert Mugabe — it certainly caught the attention of South Africa’s political class.
“It’s not an exaggeration to say Mandela’s leadership style, characterized by accommodation with the oppressors, will be forgotten, if not rejected within a generation,” he wrote in June.
““There isn’t this kind of mania about him here that there is in some quarters overseas,” Mr. Friedman said of Mr. Mandela. “This sanctified image of him has always been more extreme elsewhere in the world than the local attitude.”
“Often, criticism of Mandela was disguised as criticism of others,” said Adam Habib, vice chancellor of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. “Some of the things that his successor, Thabo Mbeki, was criticized for were actually things that Mandela had initiated or supported.”
“The criticism has been that he made too many concessions, while the real victims of apartheid still have to live with the consequences,” Mr. Habib said. “He is a global icon, a great leader, but he was not perfect.”
In a widely noted 2010 interview with Nadira Naipaul in The London Evening Standard, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela leveled blistering criticisms at her ex-husband.
“Mandela let us down,” she is quoted as saying. “He agreed to a bad deal for the blacks. Economically, we are still on the outside.”
“Who really gains from the elevation of a political figure into an untouchable icon?” Anthony Butler, a University of Cape Town political science professor, wrote in his column in the June 28 issue of South Africa’s Business Day newspaper. “Not Mandela himself, who does not need our plaudits. The mythmakers who claim that a leader is beyond fault are ultimately seeking to shield a whole political class, and not just one individual, from the public scrutiny upon which democracy depends.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/07/world/africa/mandela-politics.html?pagewanted=2&emc=eta1
It is fashionable to paint an iconic leader larger than life, in super-human colors. The fact that a human being has individual weaknesses, as a signature imperfection making him/her a human being, gets over-looked. Yes Mandela was the greatest leader Africa ever produced. The adjective of greatness bestowed on him is based on the fact that he suffered the rigors of a hard life, first in a stone quarry and later in a lime quarry wearing shorts, bare-footed, with no protective eye wear, for 18 long years, but none of those hardships succeeded in breaking his spirit to fight apartheid. His eyes were damaged irreparably by excessive exposure to the sun reflected in lime-quarry, got infected with tuberculosis, developed enlarged prostrate, but never relented the opposition to apartheid. Is there any other example of such over-whelming personal sacrifice ? His struggle is long and hard, spanning three decades and we need not go into those details. But the fact that once he prevailed upon not only South African Whites but also on Margaret Thatcher and Reagan, both of who considered Mandela an staunch Marxist communist, and UNO also pressured South African Govt to free Nelson Mandela unconditionally, he walked tall leaving the prison. He swept the first election, where Blacks voted as full citizens along with the White Afrikaans. On top of all this, he refused to hold on to power and voluntarily decided to quit after the first term as President of South Africa, to make room for the fresh leadership to continue the struggle for complete parity of rights and privileges between Blacks and Whites in South Africa in all spheres of life. to quote an apt verse here that fully describes Nelson Mandela is this.
“Aziz-e-Misr ban ne meN Aseeri haem ghulami hae, kuNwaaN hae”