Mandela turns from hero to scapegoat as South Africa struggles
In South Africa, Nelson Mandela is everywhere. The country’s currency bears his smiling face, at least 32 streets are named after him, and nearly two dozen statues in his image watch over a country in motion.
Every year on July 18, his birthday, South Africans celebrate Mandela Day by volunteering for 67 minutes – painting schools, knitting blankets or cleaning up city parks – in honor of Mandela’s 67 years serving the country as an anti-apartheid leader, largely behind bars.
But 10 years after his death, the attitude has changed. The party that Mandela led after his release from prison, the African National Congress, is in serious danger of losing its absolute majority for the first time since he became president in 1994 in the first free elections after the fall of apartheid. Corruption, incompetence and elitism have tarnished the ANC
The image of Mandela, which the ANC has plastered across the country, has shifted from hero to scapegoat for some.
To enter the courthouse in Johannesburg where he works, Ofentse Thebe passes a twenty-foot-tall sculpture of a young Mr. Mandela as a boxer. He said he deliberately doesn’t look at it for fear of turning into “a walking ball of rage.”
“I’m not Mandela’s biggest fan,” said 22-year-old Mr. Thebes. “There are many things that could have been better negotiated when it came to freedom for all South Africans in ’94.”
One of his biggest concerns about the economy is the lack of jobs. The unemployment rate is 46 percent among South Africans aged 15 to 34. Millions more are out of work, like Mr. Thebes. He studied computer science at the university level and never received a degree. The best job he said he could find was selling funeral insurance policies to court staff.
The maze of courtrooms, with marble pillars and fading signs, was recently closed due to a city-wide water shortage. Days before, the courthouse had been closed because of a power outage. Blackouts across the country are routine.
Faith in the future collapses. Seventy percent of South Africans said the country is heading in the wrong direction by 2021, up from 49 percent in 2010, according to the latest survey published by the country’s Human Sciences Research Council. Only 26 percent said they had confidence in the government, a huge drop from 2005, when it was 64 percent.
In most places, Mr. Mandela’s name is not associated with these failures, but with triumph over injustice. There are Mandela statues, streets or squares from Washington to Havana to Beijing to Nanterre, France. This week, the South African government plans to unveil yet another memorial, at his ancestral home, Qunu in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province.
But when news of the new Mandela memorial hit her social media feed, Onesimo Cengimbo, a 22-year-old researcher and aspiring filmmaker, simply rolled her eyes.
“Maybe the old people still buy it, but we don’t,” Ms. Cengimbo said. “It’s actually starting to get a little annoying that when it comes to elections, they don’t really do anything else, they just show Mandela’s face again.”
During the tumultuous transition from apartheid, children of color were told by their families that Mr. Mandela was just one of many leaders who fought for their freedom. But after he triumphantly emerged from prison in 1990, traveled the world and led the country to democracy, he became a hero in a special way.
On the playground, children jumped rope and sang: “There is a man with gray hair from afar, his name is Nelson Mandela.”
For those who had the chance to be in his presence, it left an indelible impression.
In the staff room in the basement of the Sheraton Pretoria Hotel, Selinah Papo scanned a wall of photos of VIP guests until she found a black and white image of Mr. Mandela in 2004.
“It was like he was made of gold,” Mrs. Papo said with a grin. Nearly 20 years ago, she said, she was among a group of housekeepers who welcomed Mr. Mandela with a song of praise in the lobby. The memory was still so vivid that she burst into song and did a little two-step dance.
Ms Papo, 45, has lived through Mr Mandela’s heyday. She worked her way up in the hospitality industry as international hotel chains returned to South Africa. She studied through correspondence, supported her siblings through school, and eventually bought a house in what was once an all-white suburb.
Today, the strangling cost of living and constant blackouts have dampened her optimism about South Africa, but she doesn’t blame her hero.
“Those who came after should have fixed it,” she said.
Even some memorials to Mr Mandela have fallen on hard times. A Johannesburg Bridge named after him that crosses dozens of stalled trains on rusting tracks is a hot spot for robbers. A crack is beginning to split at the base of the country’s largest monument to Mandela: a 30-foot-tall bronze statue in South Africa’s executive capital, Pretoria.
On a bleak winter morning, Desire Vawda saw a group of South Korean tourists taking pictures next to the monument. He said he was killing time after protests over unpaid scholarships and tuition shut down his college campus.
Mr. Vawda, 17, belongs to a generation that only knows Mr. Mandela as a historical figure in textbooks and movies.
To him, Mr. Mandela’s struggle to end apartheid was admirable. But the huge economic divide between black and white South Africans will keep him busy when he goes to vote for the first time next year, he said.
“He didn’t rebel against white people,” said Mr. Vawda. “I would have retaliated.”
Outside the library of Nelson Mandela University in the coastal town of Gqeberha, Asemahle Gwala said he spent hours sitting on a bench next to a life-size statue of Mr Mandela during his college years. Students sat on the statue’s lap or dressed it up with clothing and lipstick.
Mr Gwala, now 26, said he took it as a reminder that Mr Mandela was human – not the commercial brand he’s turned into.
South Africans, he said, would now identify more with Mandela if they could see him not as a statue and monument, but “as a human being who just wanted to change his world”.