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Beyond the Elder Statesman: Reflections on Teaching About Mandela and South Africa in Neo-liberal Times

OnDecember 5, 2013 I ended my course entitled “Jesus, Africa, and History”with a lecture on Nelson Mandela. While Mandela as a figure seemed somewhat far removed from this context, his life—the struggle— allowed us to grapple with larger, ethically charged questions centered on forgiveness, reconciliation, politically motivated violence and retribution. Mandela disrupted what my students sensed were problematic narratives that portrayed the African continent as anachronistic; many of them were not fully aware of scholarship critiquing representations of Africa. For them, Mandela was a perfect symbol of African modernity and redemption through his wisdom, pacifism, and even stoicism—all necessary components for a world-renowned elder statesman. Of course, Mandela led a magnificent life dedicated to the liberation of his people. Yet, to portray him solely as an infallible leader is to undercut his humanity. It erases his history of personal and political evolution by suggesting that his political strategy had always been grounded in an ethos of Western humanitarianism and democratic moralism. Further, it eclipses any unsavory representation of the “new” South Africa that could disrupt that legacy. The fact is: my students only saw Mandela and the nation he once led as exceptional. Many of my students actively refused unfavorable representations ofMandela and South Africa. They did not process the existence and meaning of working-class movements featured in Western news circuits such as Abahlali baseMjondolo or service delivery protests that advocated improved living conditions for the poor. In more recent iterations of my course, my students do not connect recent South African student protests for free and quality education beginning with #RhodesMustFall and evolving into #FeesMustFall as connected to economic inequality generated in post-apartheid South Africa under leaders such as Mandela and Thabo Mbeki, whose presidency followedMandela’s. Social, political, and economic inequities are certainly part of an apartheid legacy, but they can also be attributed to a patronage-driven economy that Mandela cultivated as he channeledwealth tomembers of his political party, the African National Congress (ANC). At best, my students labeled these South African movements disorganized responses to a global recession marked by an economic downturn. More often than not, my students categorized these moments as sporadic outbursts that were more representative of a sociopolitical phenomenon outside of South Africa but pervasive throughout the rest of the continent. Whenmy students did consider Mandela and his South African legacy, they defined his presidency (1994–2004) as a transcendent form of African politics. They constructed Mandela and South Africa in limiting ways to uphold a particular narrative of African politics or to filter their own Western perspectives and ideologies through it. The lecture, given on the day he died, inspired me to create a course on him, “Mandela: