The day after the announcement of Nelson Mandela’s death the following exasperated note was posted on her Facebook page by Adu Amani, a friend who lives in Ghana:

Pls if u don’t know who Mandela is,
Please shut up, haba! I just saw a girl’s FB update saying ‘RIP’
Mandela, I love your Movies: an Actor is gone, God what is
happening in Nollywood?# hian!

The idea that anyone anywhere in the world would not know who Mandela was seemed at first incredible, but what followed my initial lol! was a pause to consider what it really means to claim to “know” someone like Mandela in an era of global media and mass social networking, and this especially for the younger generation who had no experience of the anti-apartheid movement. Everyone seems to know Mandela in one way or another and there are now countless stories of how he has affected various people’s lives both directly and indirectly.

Some months ago when news of Mandela’s illness began to trickle into the media I decided try and ensure that my 12-year-old knew something about the great man beyond the coverage to be found on the news. I sat him down one day after school, and after telling him a bit about Mandela’s early life and the start of the anti-apartheid struggle, read him portions of the his Rivonia trial speech, which of course ended on the now much cited and immortal words:

This then is what the ANC is fighting. Their struggle is a truly national one. It is a struggle of the African people, inspired by their own suffering and their own experience. It is a struggle for the right to live.

During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against White domination, and I have fought against Black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.

By the end of the passage my son sat wide-eyed in obvious wonder, but his question immediately afterward almost threw me: “But why is he a great man?”, he posed earnestly. Gentle questioning on my part (I thought it was obvious) made me see that despite the fact that he had heard and read many comments on Mandela’s greatness he still wanted me to either confirm what he had heard, or at least to help him prioritize among the various contending labels: saint, father of Africa, freedom fighter, one who was able to forgive his enemies, nation builder, and global icon. I sensed immediately that a broader answer was required but only subsequent reflection gave me what answer I was looking for. I now think that Mandela’s greatness did not lie in any of the well-rehearsed labels, but rather in the fact that he did not allow a principle larger than himself to dehumanize him and to turn him into “a thing with one face, a thing”, as Louis MacNeice puts it in “Prayer Before Birth”. Or indeed into an emblem, a figment of his own imagination. For the real challenge of being animated by a principle as resplendent as the fight for the freedom of your own people is the danger of assuming that this principle is by itself what magnifies your status, often in the eyes of others that you come to galvanize, yet most dangerously, within the deepest recesses of your own mind. The principle takes on the guise of a non-negotiable epic totality, which then prevents you from admitting to the validity of perspectives that might counter or indeed serve to qualify the principle. Tragic literature provides us many such examples, including Clyaetmenestra, Oedipus, Lear, Coriolanus, and Othello, among many others. But from the theatre of African decolonization there is no better example than the chastening one we have of Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah.

Like Mandela, Nkrumah was that rare breed of political visionary that also had a choice turn of phrase. Among other things he took a bachelor’s degree in Sacred Theology from Lincoln University in 1942 and a master’s in Philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania in the United States. Having already trained to be a teacher at Achimota School in Accra in the 1920s and 1930s, on his return to the then Gold Coast in the late 1940s he proceeded to craft a message that fully encapsulated the most exquisite understanding of political utopias. On Ghana’s attainment of Independence on March 6^th, 1957, he was to utter words that have been engrained in every Ghanaian school child’s mind since then: “Seek ye first the political kingdom, and all other things shall be added unto you”. And also, “We have won the battle and again rededicate ourselves. . . our Independence is useless unless it is linked to the total liberation of Africa!” Despite the beautiful utopian nationalist and Pan-Africanist sentiments of his many speeches, Nkrumah managed to slide into an impervious solitude. All counterpoints to his views were discountenanced (as in defaced) and many of his opponents were thrown into detention. He became engrossed with plots on his life, some would say understandably so given a failed assassination plot on his life. He gradually lost all interest in dialogue with those that might not have agreed with him, and began short-circuiting the rule of law for his own political devices. All that knew him personally declared him to be one of the most modest and decent human beings you imaginable and yet he became a victim of enchantment, an enchantment that was nothing less than the epic principle of service to the greater good by which every fiber of his being had been shaped since his early adulthood. Nkrumah was overthrown, partly with the connivance of the CIA, and died in exile in Romania. If Nkrumah was an earlier avatar of Mandela in almost every respect, he was different in one, and that is that he completely surrendered to the enchantment of his own principles and thus became dehumanized by them. Both African leaders were placed by History at key conjunctures and given the task of leading their people to freedom from colonialism and the shackles of racism. But things turned out dramatically differently for each, partly because of the processes by which they came to take on the mantle of leadership, but also, as I am trying to show here, but the degree of enchantment on them exercised by their own magnificent principles. We must thus not understand Mandela as an isolate, or even a one-off, but always as an aspect of a highly complex process of political self-fashioning that is full of pitfalls.

We must pause then to recall an illustrative passage from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, after Marco Polo has set up a series of representative yet elusive pantomimes by which to represent for Kublai Khan the many cities he has visited:

Returning from the missions on which Kublai sent him, the ingenious foreigner improvised pantomimes that the sovereign had to interpret: one city was depicted by the leap of a fish escaping the cormorant’s beak to fall into a net; another city by a naked man running through fire unscorched; a third by a skull, its teeth green with mold, clenching a round, white pearl. The great Khan deciphered the signs, but the connection between them and the places visited remained uncertain; he never knew whether Marco wished to enact an adventure that had befallen him on his journey, an exploit of the city’s founder, the prophecy of an astrologer, a rebus or a charade to indicate a name. But, obscure or obvious as it might be, everything Marco displayed had the power of emblems, which, once seen, cannot be forgotten or confused. In the Khan’s mind the empire was reflected in a desert of labile and interchangeable data, like grains of sand, from which there appeared, for each city and province, the figures evoked by the Venetian’s logoriphs.

. . . .

“On the day when I know all the emblems,” he asked Marco, “shall I be able to posses my empire, at last?”

And the Venetian answered: “Sire, do not believe it. On that day you will be an emblem among emblems.”

Here Marco punctures the Khan’s desire to deploy knowledge as a pure instrument of power by noting that all the knowledge of the world, once fully grasped, converts the knower into an emblem among others. It is thus an ineluctable totality that also devours the self.

The true mark of Mandela’s greatness, then, is that despite all the clearly painful experiences that he accrued in prison and during the course of the anti-apartheid struggle and the strong principles about freedom that he evolved precisely because of those experiences, he did not surrender his mind to the emblematic quality inherent to such epic designs.

And that is why he has freed himself to be an icon for us all.

May he Rest in Peace