He got to me. At first I cried. And then marvelled. And then more than hoped to change.
February 11, 1990. Sitting with my wife in our living room, as I watched Nelson Mandela’s surreal treading of those long metres of that walk to freedom, I broke down. And we held each other and wept long tears of believing disbelief, of joy, of affinity.
Our bodies convulsed in the release of exasperation, overstretched patience, restless indignation. Who could but be overwhelmed at this watershed moment in that seemingly unending drought of inhumanity, at this turn in the struggle against one of the lowest of mankind’s lows – apartheid?
It is hard, very hard for us from this distance to get a profound sense of the soul ravaging that is the bitter pay-off for a life of fighting such evil. We have no experience of unrelenting grating racial discrimination, no involvement in brutally suppressed activism.
Not even of house arrest or ban.
We have not suffered dehumanizing imprisonment for a cause that an entire despotic system, inclusive of prison warders, beats down with resolute cruelty. We know nothing of comrade bloodily, ruthlessly silenced forever.
We have to make do vicariously with titbits in stalwarts’ personal accounts, films, photographs, five per cent (?) glimpses of this dark side of humanity.
But I entered in through these skimpy means and felt my African brothers’ cause. Its twin, to me, was the struggle of the Blacks in the United States – whose bitter fruit I tasted by way of Billie Holiday’s song, and hearing of Emmett Till’s story.
I partook, too, by reading from Baldwin to Bond, and Carmichael to Cleaver and Du Bois and Gregory and Malcolm X and Wilkins and Rustin and Young and Newton and Seale and Jackson (George) and Davis and Jones (later Baraka).
Following, from this far, Martin Luther King from Montgomery to that monument in Washington and to Memphis and his cutting down, I despaired of his dream and mostly burned with anger and resentment.
Better came more quickly in North America than in Mandela’s African hell.
So, in my own far-off second-hand Hades, I waited. And grew hard. And hot under more than my collar about this grievance and that.
After 27 years, out came a man who actually lived in the fire. The freedom fighter was free.
My tears did not quench my fire. But through the days and months and years, even as I continued in a mix of hope and embitterment, I watched this freedom fighter move through discussion, negotiation, governance and consultative influence with an amazing something.
And I marvelled.
He was indeed an embodiment of what he wrote: “The oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of their humanity. When I walked out of prison, that was my mission, to liberate the oppressed and the oppressor both.” What a strange turn of mind! Not naturally mine.
What a balance of cause and character! In the case of many people with causes, their public persona is nothing to soul-engage. There are no great stories of anything but their passion, their committed activism. Which, in many cases, is worthy.
But Mandela, for me, had something more. I don’t think it was this thing that people call charisma, the charm of devotion-inspiring attractiveness. This was the “charm” of a heart-moving spirit. He exuded the power to influence at a deep level.
If it is necessary to build a viable future together, the former oppressor must believe he can trust his new “master”. But what engenders trust? Is it not the scent of grace (“free and unearned favour”)?
And is not grace the beginning of redemption? Nelson Mandela was redemptive. He was a remarkable dispenser of grace.
It is nothing short of astounding that a man who was so terrorized, so brutalized, could still be so inviting of and to his former tormentors.
Freedom fighter? No doubt. And sometimes the press of circumstances makes freedom fighters do what would not otherwise have to be done. But he was so much more. The more that does not in his wake leave a devastated landscape, that did not win while civilization lost even more of its soul.
Did Mandela get to us enough? Enough for us to be not only passionate about our cause, but also passionate about humanity?
Now, I think we must grapple with our own character as we almost overrun ourselves with celestial descriptions of the man, when we veritably ooze admiration. Can we then proceed as though our words were of a painting, a sculpture, a waxwork piece? Is there to be no flowering of Mandela in us after we have hailed, eulogized, monumentalized, named?
Mandela challenges us. For we all fancy ourselves as at least little freedom fighters – we rail in big square or little against this wrong or that one. But where is that spirit that not only desires to overturn today’s downpresser, but also wants to redeem him? Seems to me that was what Nelson Mandela had.
I want that. He got to me, I tell you.
• Sherwyn Walters is a writer who became a teacher, a song analyst, a broadcaster and an editor. Email offwally@gmail.com.