topia final version oct 31

TOPIA 12 41
Maryann Martin
Throwing Off the Yoke to Carry the Man:
Deconstructing the Myth of Nelson Mandela*
ABSTRACT
The West’s history of exploitation and occupation inform present geographies, both
physical and imaginary. This paper considers Western representations of South Africa as
oscillations between “white-wished” assumptions in the films Cry, the Beloved Country
(Roodt 1995) and Mandela: The Man and His Country (Dean 1990) on the one hand, and
the more provocative perspectives of The Tribal Mind (Dyer 1994) and Sarafina! (Roodt
1992), on the other. Such oscillation illustrates ideas of place but also of people. Nelson
Mandela is both a person and a mythological construction. The article examines the
transformation of Mandela-the-man into Mandela-the-myth and encourages readers to
rethink their relations to/with popular narratives of race and redemption.
L’histoire de l’Occident, marquée par des processus d’exploitation et d’occupation, modèle
les géographies présentes, qu’elles soient physiques ou imaginaires. Cet article analyse les
représentations occidentales de l’Afrique du Sud comme étant fondées sur une oscillation
entre, d’une part, des préconceptions blanches, comme dans les films Pleure, ô pays bienaimé (Roodt 1995) et Mandela: The Man and His Country (Dean 1994) et, d’autre part, des
perspectives plus provocatrices présentées dans The Tribal Mind (Dyer 1994) et Sarafina!
(Roodt 1992). Cette oscillation informe non seulement l’idée de lieu, mais aussi celle de
personne. Nelson Mandela est à la fois une personne et une construction mythique. Cet
article examine la transformation de Mandela l’homme en Mandela le mythe et encourage
les lecteurs à repenser leurs relations avec et au travers des récits populaires sur la race et la
rédemption.
*For Travis
The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those
who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a
pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only.
An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an
unselfish belief in the idea—something you can set up, and bow down before,
and offer a sacrifice to …
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
It is said that you can kill a man but not an idea. Nelson Mandela is a man who
has become an idea.
Peter Davis, Remember Mandela
TOPIA 12
42
Since the beginnings of cross-cultural contact, Westerners have been fabricating
notions of Other places. They have talked about Africa, for example, analyzed it,
managed it and even produced it for Western commodity and exotic tourist consumption. The Western gaze upon Africa has been marked by a program of “individualizing observation, with characterization, [and] with the categorization of
space” (Foucault 1977: 203). Africa is both a physical place and an imaginative
construction—e.g., the “dark continent”—symbolically registered in the West’s
utopic construction of itself. Edward Said’s conception of Orientalism incorporates a place called the Orient, a homogeneous paradise that he describes as “the
place of Europe’s greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other” (1995: 87). The Other is rendered visible through the
West’s gaze. Consequently, the recurring Other is seen but does not see; he/she is
passive object, never active subject. The existence of the Orient, Said explains,
“has helped to define Europe [the West] as its contrasting image, idea, personality,
experience” (87). Orientalism, then, is a sutured discourse that “depends for its
strategy on this flexible positional superiority which puts the Westerner in a whole
series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing him in the
relative upper hand” (90). As an “Oriental” continent, Africa is purposefully mapped
outside the West’s sense of itself. The discourse of inferiority that anchors Africa’s
position in the latter half of the twentieth century also anchors South Africa’s place
in the West’s imaginary cultural geography. Said’s conceptual framework enables
Africa in general, and South Africa in particular, to be considered not as inferior
to the West, but as a living reminder of the West’s violent colonial history.
Within the categorizing discourse of the West, South Africa is the so-called firstworld country of third-world Africa. Before South Africa and South Africans became objects in a Western discourse of inferiority, the country and its inhabitants
had to be located on the Western world map. Russel Vanden-broucke recounts that
“[w]hen Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country was published in 1948, a review in The
Atlantic Monthly noted that there was “no large area of the civilized world which we
have read less about than South Africa” (1985: xiii). During the last four decades,
however, much has been reported in the West about South Africa: the politics of
apartheid, riots, boycotts, censorship, political prisoners, the murdering of tourists.
Since the 1980s such reports have included the assassinations of prominent party
leaders prior to the country’s first democratic election in 1994; projections about
the future of the Rainbow nation; and the political roles of Desmond Tutu and
Winnie and Nelson Mandela in the New South Africa. Despite the increased
visibility of stories pertaining to South Africa in Western media, the country’s
socio-political complexity is often simplified to black-and-white outlines. The
positional superiority of whiteness is secured in the West, rendering blackness
visible through Western eyes and reinforcing cultural differences in boundary formation within a Western “whitewishing” fantasy. Michael Dyson explains that
whitewishing “is the fulfillment of a fantasy of whiteness as neutral and objective,
the projection of a faith in whiteness as its own warrant against the error of antiuniversalism because it denies its own particularity” (1999: 223). Whiteness is
encased in a politics of purity that informs fixed categorizations of the Other and
“has developed, over the past two hundred years, into a taken-for-granted experience structured upon a varying set of supremacist assumptions (sometimes cultural, sometimes biological, sometimes moral, sometimes all three)” (Bonnett 1999:
213). In other words, the so-called non-white identity is made singular, simplified
and static through the practice of whitewishing.
The myth of neutral discursive space in cross-cultural contact can no longer be
afforded. Derrick de Kerckhove describes the myth of neutral space as “something that can be divided neatly into public and private property. Space, in and of
itself, used to be considered neutral in a Western perspectivist mindset…. [T]he air
is not empty anymore” (1995: 164). Related to the identification of the myth of
neutral space is the recognition of the impossibility of fully translating from “the
subaltern discourse to the imperialist discourse” (Chow 1993: 35). Different discursive strategies inform these two discourses, contributing to the loss of specificity
in the process of translation. This loss of specificity, particularly in translations
from the West to the East, is framed within imaginings informed by particular
histories and geographies. The positional superiority of whiteness is secured in the
West, as Dyson has acknowledged, rendering blackness visible through white eyes
and placing cultural differences as central to boundary formation within a Western
whitewishing fantasy. Symbolic violence permeates cultural, biological and moral
misrepresentations of Africa and the experiences of Africans that fashion a universal history in the Western imagination.
“The problem of writing about a place as remote as Africa and getting it right is
more than academic,” explains George Parker of The National. “Events on that
continent come at us like intermittent dispatches from a distant front … no causes,
TOPIA 12
The emergence of intelligent, decentred popular representations of South Africa
by Westerners has been gradual, and the number of quality productions has been
disturbingly few. Western representations of South Africa reflect the tension in the
act of cultural enunciation that oscillates between the recirculation of a false image, the essentialized “white man’s symptom” (Chow 1993: 31), and those
enunciative acts which inhabit a reflexive, hybrid space in which multiple perspectives can coexist. Four media artifacts that present the two poles of Western representation of South Africa illustrate this oscillation: Cry, the Beloved Country (Roodt
1995) and Mandela: The Man and His Country (Dean 1990); The Tribal Mind
(Dyer 1994) and Sarafina! (Roodt 1992). Examination of these artifacts and the
contrasts they present forms a base from which to launch an investigation into the
mythical figure of Nelson Mandela.
43
no connections, no patterns” (qtd. in Wekesser 1992: 92). Whitewishing allows
the West to configure such dispatches into a coherent, systematic series of events
marked within a pattern of cause and effect. It is time, as Alastair Bonnett suggests, that whiteness be rearticulated “from a natural to a political category” (Bonnett
1999: 214). The recognition of single-sided representations and monolithic modes
of politically-charged seeing opens up spaces in which to rethink and reconsider
cultural difference. The relationships between politics and culture are myriad and
sometimes contradictory, informing feelings of pleasure, displeasure, jouissance,
anxiety, guilt, insecurity, fragility, empowerment and disempowerment. Structures
might not only constrain and oppress; they might also enable and empower. As
Grossberg points out, however, “[e]mpowerment is never total, never available to
everyone, never manifested in exactly the same way; moreover, its success is never
guaranteed” (1992: 95).
TOPIA 12
44
In Cry, the Beloved Country and Mandela: The Man and His Country, the South African
Other is contained within whiteness and within the master narrative of Christianity
replete with preconceived political positions, cultural assumptions and moral
judgements. Cry, the Beloved Country is not a film about South Africa. It is instead a
film that contains a generic sense of the Other in a South African narrative setting.
The film’s narrative is primarily concerned with the moralistic account of two
South African men: Fondisi, a black country preacher, and James Jarvis, a white
retiree who embraces the racial segregation of blacks and whites. Both men are
drawn from the farmlands of Natal to the city of Johannesburg to attend a court
trial in which Fondisi’s son, Absalom, is accused of murdering Jarvis’s son, Arthur.
Absalom is guilty of the charges against him. The film maps the two fathers’ personal
struggles with faith, grief and each other, familial tensions, and racial relations.
Ultimately, it collapses under the weight of its thematic and political undertakings
into a film about generic black and white race relations with a strong moralistic
overtone most evident on the morning of Absalom’s execution for his mistakenly
racially-orientated crime. Fondisi seeks solitude and meditation in the mountains
of Natal, an act reminiscent of Moses’ ascent to Mount Horeb to meet God in the
form of a burning bush (Exodus 3: 1-4).1 Few specifics, other than place names,
actually serve to locate the film in South Africa. Apartheid is never mentioned
though James Jarvis speaks briefly and generically about the “separate development”
of blacks and whites. When Fondisi is prevented from entering a bus by an angry
mob of black protesters, their political activism is not explained historically or
politically. In reality, the South African government’s deployment of oppressive
apartheid legislation against blacks, Indians and so-called coloureds sparked mass
demonstrations, strikes and boycotts from these communities. But the location of
the filmic bus boycott remains unnamed and undated. Portrayed mainly as a hindrance
to movement, the boycott’s political significance in a South African context remains
unexplained and a precise historical tracking is rendered impossible. The West’s
Other is contained in a South African narrative setting. The absence of detail
posits this incident as a fact of whiteness in the whitewishing process.
The monolithic treatment of the South African condition produces a disembodied
knowledge that allows the West to reinscribe itself at the centre. The concept of
“separate development” and the subsequent political action involving bus boycotts
is not unique to South Africa, but mirrors the experience of many citizens in the
American south. Curiously, South Africa is marked as the West’s Other but is also
a reflection of the West itself. The potential threat this mirror reflects is contained
through constant symbolic cartographic framing. The South African Other has
been moved from an uncharted position in the West’s imaginary geography to a
subject position in the Western socio-political landscape. According to Karl Magyer:
South Africa is singled out precisely because of its substantial European
population and consequent embarrassment to the West. The plethora of other
offences occurring routinely in other distant third world and Asian lands are to
be “expected,” due to the assumed but unmentioned general lack of civilization
as understood in terms of the Judeo-Christian ethos. (Qtd. in Boles 1988: 6-7)
While the dominant Western eye regards South Africa with embarrassment, discomfort is embedded in another emotion that perhaps spurs more socio-political
action: fear. Whitewishing helps enforce Western authority in its own imagining,
and washes or whitens over Western fear of the Other. Fear must be contained
and, consequently, so must the Other.
“The most likely and dangerous threat to Western interests,” explains Andrew Pierre,
is “the internal deterioration of South Africa into a state of civil war. This failure,
she [Elizabeth Boles] argues, stems from the existence in the West of a large number
of myths and misconceptions about South Africa itself ” (cited in Boles 1988: vii).
Myths help explain the past, present and future to willing audiences and generate
feelings of solidarity and participation among groups.2 Moreover, myths incorporate a meeting of temporalities: chaos and order, reason and emotion, the sacred
and profane. Mythic stories weave a cyclical pattern throughout memorial land-
TOPIA 12
Steve Russell/Toronto Star
45
scapes, offering at times truth, knowledge, interpretation, assumption and conjecture. Within the confines of myths and misconceptions about South Africa, the
South African Other is contained and mapped by Western “force lines” of categorization similar to those the United States, as the “last superpower,” uses to “structure the world” (Said 1993: 282). These force lines are already in place as the
South African Other is secured within a canonical Christian narrative where conflict is morally resolved through reconciliation. Cry, the Beloved Country does not fuel
consideration of cultural difference; rather, it presents a story, a fatherly lesson to
an audience geographically distanced from South Africa. The lesson is clearly outlined: punishment is valuable, prejudice is destructive, and tolerance and forgiveness are rewarded. The film provides a reassuring coherence for a Western audience through the grand narrative of Christianity, which condenses two men’s lives
into a series of moralistically white-centred representative moments.
TOPIA 12
46
In Mandela: The Man and His Country, the South African Other is once again contained within the grand narrative framework of Christianity. On the descriptive
packaging of the video jacket, MPI Home Video describes Nelson Mandela as “a
modern-day Moses leading his people to the promised land of freedom.” Mandela
is not South Africa’s modern-day Moses, but the West’s modern-day Moses in
South Africa. The Christian metaphor becomes an explanatory template for
Mandela’s life story.3 He is born into humble beginnings in the Transki in 1918, and
his life is marked by struggle, sacrifice and submission. Initially he struggles for the
political needs of black South Africans, but subsequently he fights for all South
Africans. Mandela-the-man becomes invisible as Mandela-the-whitewished-culturalsymbol is placed within the Christian paradigm which continues to support the
canonic form of narrative structure in centred Western society, and which literally
constitutes an imaginary geography. Mandela’s life story unfolds as the Western
audience is introduced to relevant characters and setting, including Winnie, Mandela’s
friends, political allies and his opponents in Johannesburg. There is the presentation
of conflict, namely Mandela’s personal and political struggles along his journey to
the land of freedom promised in the new South Africa. A teleology formulated by
American television network ABC links situations and events to the conflict, followed by resolution. Mandela’s release from prison, after more than twenty-seven
years, symbolically signals that freedom is coming, and leaves the Western mind
comfortably at rest. ABC’s news coverage, through its constructed teleology, shapes
viewers’ response to this story of Mandela’s life, and consequently informs how
the West imagines Mandela. Information concerning Mandela’s past involvement
with The Spear of the Nation, the violently radical wing of the African National
Congress, for example, is glossed over, his representation strictly contained within
the parameters of his modern day Moses image. Moses did not murder citizens
who opposed his plan for reaching the Promised Land, and, as Mandela’s placement within the Christian paradigm suggests, neither did he.
Mandela, the icon, is framed within a Western Christian mindset, an imagining that
enforces the coherence and structured causal relations whiteness facilitates. Occasionally situations arise which need reimagining in order to maintain the coherence
of this imaginary geography. One moment of discontinuity between Mandela-theman and Mandela-the-myth is Mandela’s support for armed resistance to oppression, which causes some consternation within Western imaginings and narratives
concerning terrorism, especially after September 11th. These tensions are ignored
in favour of the West’s modern-day mythic constructions of Mandela-the-man. A
recent example is the Canadian government’s offer in November 2001 of Canadian citizenship to Mandela, who graciously accepted. “Now, when immigration
and refugee policies are vulnerable to fear and misunderstanding,” explains James
Travers:
[T]his country and this capital need to be reminded that for millions around the
world the dream of citizenship remains just that.
Even more timely and poignant is Mandela’s unapologetic support for armed
resistance to oppression. Speaking to reporters after his [acceptance] speech,
Mandela gave [Prime Minister Jean] Chrétien reason to squirm by reaffirming
that it is not always possible to separate violence from political purpose.
Canada’s new and controversial anti-terrorism plan turns criminal law on its head
by including motivation in the definition of what is acceptable. In its effort to
cast the widest net, the federal government broadly captures terrorist activity as
acts in or outside Canada that are “committed in whole or in part for political,
religious or ideological purpose, objective or cause....”
The only avenue of escape for a Mandela or an ANC, labelled terrorists by then
British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, would be political or, worse still, a
police decision to ignore a movement that raises funds to finance the violence that
focuses international attention on often obscure causes.
So it was momentarily awkward for Chrétien yesterday when he was forced to
duck the question by saying the courts would judge the difference between
terrorist and freedom fighter. (2002: A16)
Bearing in mind that remembering is coupled with forgetting, it is evident that
Mandela-the-myth overshadows and subsequently takes the place of Mandela-theman within popular cultural imaginings. Since September 11, Mandela has become
one of many celebrities narrated into North America’s support network. Mandela
met with President George W. Bush on November 12, 2001, and reportedly claimed
to “support the U.S. attacks on Afghanistan” (CFTO News); on November 15 he
traveled to New York to view Ground Zero (CFTO News). During moments of
cultural uncertainty about Mandela’s terrorist and freedom fighter roles, symbolic
boundaries are narrated to reaffirm his place in the West as a cultural icon and
friend of America.
The pervasiveness of this narrative strategy suggests that whiteness is not considered aesthetic at all but “natural,” despite evidence to the contrary. Mandela no
longer speaks for himself, or the peoples of South Africa. The West speaks for
him in this context. The threat of the South African Other is contained within a
narrative paradigm informing the West’s sense of cartographic categorization.4 This
grand narrative map of an imaginary world reciprocally and recursively constitutes
the self that reproduces it. The West is culturally and politically stable within this
TOPIA 12
Oops. That net would not only catch the young lawyer unjustly imprisoned for
so long, but the African National Congress that in ’94 made the startling but
hardly unique transition from outlaw organization to national government.
47
imagining, and whiteness reified. Bonnett explains that “[t]he reification of whiteness has enabled people of European [and Western] extraction to imagine that
their identity is stable and immutable and, relatedly, to remain unengaged with the
anti-racist historicization (and naturalization) of ‘racial’ meaning” (1999: 200-1).
Mandela’s configuration as a Moses figure within the context of the American
dream reinforces a relation between dream and representation that Paul Feyerabend
describes as one of necessity: “We need a dream-world in order to discover the
features of the real world we think we inhabit” (qtd. in Nichols 1991: 43). The
capitalist and Christian work ethics represented in Mandela: The Man and His Country mirror the economic strategy upon which the American dream is built. The
South African political world is presented through the West’s sutured representation of Mandela, reflecting the whitewishing gaze of a Western eye.
TOPIA 12
48
Another, albeit smaller, body of representation displays a very different geography
from that which has been previously imagined. Tension, displacement and anxiety
inform the emergence of thought-provoking Western representations of South Africa.
The recognition that colonial pieces no longer fit within a postcolonial world, or
perhaps never actually completed the puzzle though the pieces appeared to fit
together, is unsettling. Cry, the Beloved Country and Mandela: The Man and His
Country form one pole of Western representation of South Africa; The Tribal Mind
and Sarafina! form another. The first two films mark the South African Other
according to the translating culture’s sense of itself through the reliance upon the
grand narrative of Christianity to reproduce the West as the invisible centre.
Conversely, The Tribal Mind and Sarafina! represent a movement outward toward a
more hybrid, heterogeneous space that involves the decentring of the whitewishing
Christian paradigm in shaping cross-cultural experience. In these latter films, Other
voices simultaneously speak from other places, effectively fueling the possibility of
knowing cultural difference differently in the Western world. Conversely, homogenized
messages produced through Western media outlets inform the perception of the
South African subject as object. Failing to recognize the complexity of cultural
difference sufficiently, these monolithic messages provide a pleasure in mapping
difference for the purpose of coherence, while a sort of disorderly polyphony
critically re-examines the tropes that inform the Other’s place in the imaginary
museum. A new representational cultural geography is accomplished with the
emergence of a cross-cultural hybrid space.
The importance of new cultural geographies cannot be underestimated. The acknowledgement of uncertainty and complexity behind anxious repetitions of representational, and consequently spatial, separations brings forward the potential
for other stories and strategies that incorporate reconstructions and rerememberings of past events. “History, in other words, is not a calculating machine,” explains Bazil Davidson, “[i]t unfolds in the mind and imagination” (qtd.
in Said 1993: 3). Searching for ways past the rigorous old physical and imaginary
maps of traditional history through the acknowledgement of histories from other
places and voices—the reimaginings and retellings of experiences through stories—is to reposition and rethink old ideas of place, geography and symbolic categorization. The need to record, to map out, to map onto, the landscape and our
experiences of it, represents a need to fix places in physical and memorial worlds.
Registering the physicality of land on maps informs particular viewpoints, codes
of marking and, ultimately, imaginations to connect the lines with the actual land-
scape. In this way, James Duncan and Derek Gregory explain, “all geographies, are
imaginative geographies” (1999: 5). If archaic images of fixity are to be rethought
and reimagined, old representational boundaries must be crossed in order to shift
rigid perceptions of the past, present and future.
Dyer’s account of tribalism reconfigures the master narrative of Christianity informing Cry, the Beloved Country and Mandela: The Man and His Country. The
symbolic mapping of a cultural figure like Mandela within the centre’s Christian
narrative is a form of tribalism. Similarly, the entire Western discourse that places
South Africa before a mirror of cosmetic pluralism is a constructed tribal
whitewished fiction. Dyer relocates the centre from its Western context and places
it in South African experience through the documenting of the “new breed of
South Africans [that] are rising about old tribal reflexes as they struggle toward a
real democracy” (1994: video jacket). Dyer is concerned with the knowledge of
reflexivity, not the coherence that follows a structured line of causality. Tribalism
is a narrative thread akin to Orientalism that weaves throughout and underneath dominant representations of South Africa presently in place.
The multi-generic film Sarafina! deconstructs familiar dominant representations
of South Africa by forming a hybrid cultural space in which the monolithic map of
whiteness is openly challenged. It deals specifically with the Christian meta-narrative and the myth of Mandela from the perspective of a young Soweto girl. The
striking rendition of The Lord’s Prayer sung by the Soweto school youth during
morning assembly, led by history teacher Mary, appears as a celebratory adaptation
of Christianity in South Africa; yet while The Lord’s Prayer is reconfigured within
the exuberance of the Other’s praise and worship, attention is drawn to the students’ clichéd performance which serves to highlight the prominence of the Christian meta-narrative in the apartheid project. The Soweto youths enact this vocal
rendition of The Lord’s Prayer in the presence of the teaching faculty and troops
TOPIA 12
The Tribal Mind acknowledges sameness while educating its audience to difference.
A sense of community is formed that attempts to unify without homogenizing.
Writer and series host Gwynne Dyer discusses the concept of tribalism as a cognitive mapping strategy in different cultures all over the world. South Africa cannot
be configured entirely as Other if tribalism cannot be contained in the Western
gaze. For it is in the very act of imagined containment that the tribalist discourse
flourishes. Tribal fictions are linked with social, economic and political strategies to
assign the cultural Other his/her place in a centred imaginary geography. Dyer
renders visible the surface existence of this prejudiced mindset and unravels its
inner workings for a Western—Canadian—audience. The Tribal Mind encourages
reflexivity when considering the dominant view by positioning everyone within a
tribalist framework. The process of normalized exclusion in this perspectival shift
is broken down along with the Western whitewished conception of the South African Other. “In a sense,” Dyer explains, “we all live in South Africa, with a dreadful
past behind us and an uncertain future ahead. The whole planet is a single environment, and it’s already in deep trouble. But the South Africans are not doomed to
cut each other’s throats, and neither are we” (1994: video jacket). Dyer goes on to
call for the rethinking of dominant, primarily white-centred, cognitive maps, a
reflexive process that forms a sense of community, acknowledging sameness while
educating the audience to difference.
49
from the South African army who are present to quell violent outbursts the youths
might initiate against white authority. While The Lord’s Prayer is viewed by the
participating youths as reason for celebration, the film’s audience is aware of the
ironies of the black Baptist tradition performed within a township school surrounded by armed white guards. During these moments of celebration, the stiff
stature of the guards presiding over the event is visible in the background throughout the musical performance. The presence of the guards resonates with the institutional deployment of Christianity in South African township schools as an invisible symbolic mechanism for controlling black South African youths during apartheid. The film simultaneously deconstructs that which it celebrates. Christianity is
not merely a source of faith and hope in this South African context; it is a religion
built upon moral, cultural and territorial codes of whiteness.
Additional clues that tensions exist in the historical mapping of the Christian myth
and the Afrikaans imagination onto African cultures appear throughout the film.
Interpretation of history and historical texts is part of the whitewishing fantasy, as
Dyson further explains: “Whitewishing is the interpretation of social history through
an explanatory framework in which truth functions as an ideological projection of
whiteness in the form of a universal identity” (1999: 223).
TOPIA 12
50
Directly following the assembly, Mary delivers (much to the delight of her township pupils) a candid history lesson that decentres biblical, whitewished principles
and the Afrikaans’ story of origin in South Africa.
Standing before the class and framed by a large map of South Africa, Mary turns
to face her students and asks: “Name of the first man in . . . wait for it . . .
creation?” (ellipses in original).
The pupils reply in unison: “Adam.”
“Right, right,” Mary waves her hands, “and what colour was Adam?”
Again the students form a collective voice: “White.” Mary continues incredulously,
“White? Who says so? I never saw that in the Bible—did you see that in the Bible?
No, it doesn’t say that—it says God created man in his own image, which means to
be like him. So, what colour is God?”
In response, the students shout a variety of colours: “gold,” “pink,” “black,” “silver,” “green.”
Mary prefers the latter. “Green, green,” she smiles, “I like green. What kind of
green? Pea-green, sea-green, grass-green, olive-green, emerald-green, jade-green—
green like the dollars in American wallets? Or green as the mists on the hills of
Kinshasa? God-green, mankind-green. Yes! I like it.”
Mary’s rainbow response to the students’ identification of the Christian God as
white serves to decentre Christianity as a moral, cultural, and territorial authority
in this setting. This identification of a white Christian God is shown to be an
ideological projection of white truth, an explanatory framework with a strong
universalist attachment.
Mary continues her reimagining of Afrikaans history:
“So what is the name of the first man in South Africa?” she asks.
The class is silent.
“Right, right,” Mary continues, “nobody knows his name. What is the name of the
first white man in South Africa?”
The class barks back in unison: “Jan Van Riebeeck.”
Mary continues her questioning: “Date?”
All the students reply: “1652.”
“History,” Mary wryly smirks, “is so beautiful it makes you cry.”
Although the Afrikaans’ historical memory leaves little room for the Other’s resistance, Mary creates this space in her classroom, proving that it is possible to
reconfigure history, to reimagine facts and dates through an Other’s voice.
“So that’s what South Africa is to the whites,” she explains, “a gas station stop on
the way to somewhere else. A Pepsi and a piss in the sun.”
Afrikaans historicity involves an ideological projection of whiteness upon black
South African cultures, as the landing of the first white man, Jan Van Riebeeck, at
the Cape of Good Hope is recognized as an arbitrary marker in an Afrikaans
imaginary cultural geography.
In Sarafina!, the link between the West and the God of Christianity is made and
examined by black South African township youth who are the Other imagined by
Western hegemonic discourse. The white God that Western culture imposes upon
South Africa is aligned with the arbitrary Afrikaans markers upon black South
African cultures. The traditionally silenced Other of the West questions the
positional accuracy with which these cognitive frames have been cross-culturally
mapped. In much the same way as she reimagines Jan Van Riebeeck, Mary
reconfigures The Great Trek, another marker of Afrikaans supremacy and cultural
authority, by placing it into a black South African context.
“So now begins The Great Trek of 1836. The white boys are looking north. They
say: ‘[w]hat do you see?’” Mary, squinting, peers at her class. “‘Ah, we see great
land, man, beautiful land.’ ‘Anybody there?’ ‘No, just a few kaffirs sticking spears
up each other’s futures.’”
Mary addresses the class, “[a]nd what does this mean to us?” She pauses only for a
moment.
TOPIA 12
“Here is Holland,” Mary continues, “here comes Jan Van Riebeeck in his boat
followed by lots of other boats, and they’re on their way to the East Indies to fetch
some spices, but they’re passing South Africa and they know that they’re thirsty, so
they stop here for a drink. Jan says: ‘Hey, why don’t I stay here and set up a
refreshment stop, this way it will be here every time you pass by.’ Good idea,” Mary
says sarcastically.
51
“Sjamboks, pass books, P. W. Botha, Afrikaans lessons, and—” she spies the armed
white guards approaching through the classroom window—“and democracy, and
justice, and very, very, very, fine schools, yes. Hmm. We’re so lucky! Isn’t history
beautiful?” Mary wryly asks the class.
“YES!” the students chime in unison.
The West’s Other, embodied in this instance by Mary, has radically relocated the
cultural and political significance of The Great Trek by transforming what Helan
Page and Brooke Thomas describe as “white public space” (qtd. in Hartigan 1999:
194), a rather homogenizing place involving cultural coercion and manipulation,
to form a more heterogeneous “public space” whereby the township classroom
becomes a forum for voicing black dissent against white oppression. This public
space is transformed once again into a white public space when the army troops
come within earshot of the history lesson. This conversion of public space to
white public space is not simply a replacement of the Other’s subservient condition, for the white markers of Christianity and Afrikaans history as political mechanisms of moral, cultural and territorial control have been made visible, and they
continue to be visible throughout the film.5
TOPIA 12
52
Once again, Christianity and whiteness, while shown to have cross-cultural presence, are displaced within a black township school setting. Mary arrives late to a
classroom filled with excited students. She asks for ideas for the upcoming end-ofschool show. “Look for a show with a happy ending,” Mary suggests.
“Killer disease comes through South Africa, but only the Boers get it,” Crocodile
confidently exclaims.
Another student volunteers his economically pleasing vision: “we strike gold in
Soweto and we all get rich!”
These two suggestions are met with enthusiastic laughter, nudging and cheers from
the class. Geeta, typically quiet and reserved, offers his idea which becomes the
film’s central narrative thread: “Jesus comes back!”
A moment of silence is followed by a close-up of Geeta, framed by wide-eyed
faces, finger-pointing and the sound of jeering laughter. There is little hope among
the students that Jesus is coming back at all, let alone to Soweto.
The negative reaction of the class to the last suggestion is unlike the responses to
the previous two ideas. Gauging these responses, it is more likely that all the Boers
will contract a fatal disease and that gold will be found beneath the shanty houses
and squatter fields of Soweto, than that Jesus will return. The three ideas for the
school show each encompass the happy ending Mary requests, but are located
within differing cultural perspectives. The first two suggestions are resistant whitethreatening stories voiced from within black South African culture. Geeta’s idea,
while physically voiced by a black Soweto youth, is recognized by the class as
removed from the center of their cultural map. Indeed, “Jesus comes back,” is
part of a Western grand narrative that is continuously mapped onto South African
cultures.6 Tension exists in the action of cross-cultural mapping between the West’s
desire to maintain control and South Africa’s unwillingness to be controlled. In
other words, “A quiet kaffir is not a happy kaffir,” as one politically outspoken
student explains. The whitewishing incorporated into the Afrikaans historical imagination and the Christ of the Christian grand narrative is displaced in black
South African culture.
Throughout Sarafina! Nelson Mandela is regarded as saviour, the symbol of freedom to the Soweto youth who adopt a campaign of resistance in the film. The
fourth response to Mary’s request for show ideas illustrates Mandela’s cultural
role. Directly following Geeta’s offering comes one that is more readily accepted
by the students:
“Mandela comes back!” Sarafina shouts, fist in the air. The class wildly erupts with
cheers, hand-slapping and singing.
“Day of liberation,” Mary muses, “I like it.”
A young student begins the chant “Free at last, Nelson Mandela, walking down the
streets of Soweto.”
It is Mandela whom the students envision will walk through Soweto one day and
lead them to the Promised Land of freedom, not Moses, not Jesus. Mandela’s
position as cultural saviour in the school extends religiously to the home. His
replacement role, however, does not go unexamined.
Mandela is a cultural star in black South Africa, as Sarafina acknowledges, and
within Western imaginings of South Africa. During her monologue, Sarafina articulates the silenced Other as it is described in Mandela: The Man and His Country, namely a Mandela whose star persona is framed within a Western whitewished
context. As Bonnett suggests, whiteness is a defining, not a defined category (1999:
205). Mandela looks at everybody, and says nothing. He is spoken for within the
Christian paradigm. Mandela-the-myth informs a defined category, one that is incarcerated by the Western whitewishing imagination. “White,” Bonnett explains, “is
allowed to ‘speak for itself.’ It is permitted the privilege of having an obvious
meaning” (1999: 205). Mandela is raised to saviour status and becomes a mythic
figure as his representation is bathed in Western whiteness. The West needs Mandela
as its cultural saviour in South Africa to contain its fear of the cultural Other. The
Western imagination is akin to the Afrikaans cultural memory; both are built upon
“[p]athos, terror, guilt, the joy of power and acquisition, the weight of responsibility and the resentment of such responsibility” (Crapanzano, qtd. in Hartigan 1999:
TOPIA 12
Mandela occupies the traditional place where Christ’s picture is typically hung
within the Christian construction of home. When Sarafina strikes a match in the
darkness of the crowded family bedroom, a warm glow envelops her face and the
framed picture hanging on the wall. She smiles, “[m]orning, Nelson.” Sarafina often talks with Mandela as a Christian might speak with God. She asks, “Why can’t
I be a star? What do stars do?” It is significant that Sarafina poses this question to
Mandela, as it solidifies his position as cultural icon. Her line of questioning and
the responses she provides serve a critical function, however, in deconstructing the
Mandela of cultural myth. Sarafina answers her own question: “Nothing. Look at
the camera. Flash. Smile at the camera. Flash. Look at everybody; big eyes, say
nothing. Stars don’t do, stars just be.”
53
189). It is through this recognition and the subsequent deconstruction of the myth
surrounding Mandela that whiteness is drawn into further engaged in the film.
While Mandela replaces Christ’s presence in Sarafina’s home, the mapping of the
Christian paradigm by the West onto South African culture proves defective in the
film. Mandela replaces Jesus within a failing cultural narrative. “You’re not there,
are you,” Sarafina whispers into the darkness of the prison in which she is incarcerated following a student protest; “[y]ou’ve gone away. We just dreamed you.
You’ve been away too long, Nelson. We are old now, and your children are dying,
and you can’t hear us.” Indeed, the myth of Mandela is part of the West’s whitewishing
fantasy, a dream-like reinforcement and pseudo-representation of a remarkable
man. The act of positioning Mandela as a centre of the failing Christian narrative
is marked by a nostalgia for a future that is tied to a longing for a past that in some
ways never existed. Mandela-the-myth becomes a form of symbolic compensation
to a culture that has been symbolically (and literally) annihilated by whiteness many
times over. Mandela, once slave to white domination, is raised to saviour status. As
Jamaica Kincaid explains, “[a]ll slaves of every stripe are noble and exalted; there
can be no question about this” (1989: 80). Mandela’s saviour status is granted
within the Christian paradigm; a placement that simultaneously exalts as it contains
Mandela-the-man, as cultural Other.
TOPIA 12
54
It is a curious but clever strategy: glorify Mandela, feel less national guilt about
satisfying a vicious desire for wealth and power, perpetuate his myth under the
guise of acknowledgement and remain safe within the policed boundaries of whiteness. While “[t]he characteristics of whiteness,” as Bonnett explains, “are removed
from social context and set outside history and geography” (Bonnett 1999: 206),
the actions informed by whiteness greatly influence and alter history and geography. Even as Mandela-the-myth is perpetuated through his saviour status within
Christianity, the Western religion is shown to have lost relevance in this South
African township school setting. Mandela-the-myth is displaced through his repositioning in a crumbling dominant Western narrative.
The decentring of Mandela-the-cultural-symbol is enacted in the film’s reflexive
ending. Sarafina finally becomes the cultural figure she longs to play for the school
show, namely Mandela. Sarafina is a star, but she is also Mandela, the star of a
culturally failing narrative. Glossy scenes of Sarafina-as-Mandela, performing a
tightly choreographed production number, are juxtaposed with images of Sarafina,
fist in the air, involved in a less-glossy, less-structured dance routine. Sarafina-asMandela, the star with a star persona, is juxtaposed with Sarafina-the-individualpolitical-activist dissatisfied with the treatment of blacks in South Africa. Mandelathe-man, the strong political leader, is collapsed into the fluff of Mandela-the-star,
Mandela-the-myth. The text following these images further affirms his cultural
decentring: “On February 11, 1990, Nelson Mandela was released. On June 17,
1991, South Africa’s apartheid laws were repealed. The struggle continues ... FREEDOM IS COMING!” Mandela’s release from prison did not bring the day of
atonement the students envisioned. The struggle for freedom continues beyond
Mandela’s release and the official legislative conclusion of apartheid in South Africa. Mandela is not black South Africa’s cultural saviour. Mandela is the West’s
cultural saviour in South Africa, to which the whiteness of moral, cultural and
territorial fantasy is shackled. The myth of Mandela is a construction packaged by
Western media outlets for its own cultural consumption, and for Other audiences.
In each of these artifacts, an oscillation occurs between the recirculation of a false
image within the grand narrative of Christianity, and the creation of a reflexive,
hybrid, cross-cultural space in Western popular representations of South Africa.
The two poles of Western representation of South Africa are found in Cry, The
Beloved Country and Mandela: The Man and His Country, and The Tribal Mind and
Sarafina!. The former two artifacts mark the South African Other through the
reliance upon the meta-narrative of Christianity, reproducing the West as the invisible centre. The latter two works offer a hybrid, heterogeneous space that
decentres the Christian paradigm from cross-cultural experience. Indeed, as these
films suggest, it is possible, to know cultural difference differently. The oscillation
of representational strategy however, is continuous. White-centred, homogeneous
representations weave throughout the mass media; artifacts continue to be marked
by recognition coupled with the absence of action, or subsequent reaction, to that
moment of recognition. Oprah Winfrey’s “interview of a lifetime” with Nelson
Mandela (November 27, 2000) is an example of this representational oscillation
embodied in a single, contemporary cultural event. The effect is jarring: incoherence and inconsistency are revealed during the show as Mandela’s social and political struggles are continuously and relentlessly mythologized by Winfrey.
“Do you find it difficult,” Winfrey asks Mandela during the interview, “to live up
to that myth, or did you when you first came out of prison?” Mandela responds:
Well, that is one of the things that worried me, to be raised to the position of a
semi-god. Because then you are no longer a human being. I wanted to be known
as Mandela, a man with witnesses, some of which are fundamental. That worried
me a great deal. Especially because I knew that it was not the contribution of an
individual which would bring about liberation, and the peaceful transformation
of the country. And my first task when I came out was to destroy that myth; that
I was something other than an ordinary human being. Whatever position I
occupy it was as the result of my colleagues and my comrades in the moment,
who had decided in their wisdom to use me for the purpose of focusing the
attention of the country and the international community on me. Not because I
had any better virtues than themselves, but because this was their decision.
Mandela is aware of the existence of the myth that is constructed about him, and
of the power invested in such a representation. While the purpose of Mandela’s
colleagues might have been to focus South Africa’s attention on him by way of
informing a particular political stance, the noted “internal community,” while participating in the process of narrowing political focus, reinforces the myth of Mandela.
Even as Mandela sits on stage with Winfrey, citing the desired defeat of the myth,
it continues to be constructed around him. Actual interview time between Mandela
TOPIA 12
Mandela acknowledges the existence of and discomfort with the myth of Nelson
Mandela, cultural icon, during the episode of the Oprah Winfrey Show, but the structure of the show, facilitated by Winfrey, perpetuates the very myth against which
Mandela voices his consternation.
55
and Winfrey is surprisingly short, since much time is spent viewing footage, imagining and disseminating the myth.
TOPIA 12
56
“Today a legend comes to life,” Winfrey announces near the beginning of the
show, “as we welcome one of the world’s great heroes, Nelson Mandela.” As Winfrey
recounts Mandela’s personal and political history, he is not present on stage; he
does not speak for himself. His story is told through Winfrey’s voice-over narration
as various photographs of Mandela and newsreel coverage of turbulence in South
Africa fill the screen. Occasional sound-bite recordings of Mandela delivering some
of his most famous speeches are included in this segment. These inserts serve to
enforce the construction of Mandela-the-myth that Winfrey presents. “Nelson
Mandela’s life story,” she explains, “has become almost mythical—a testament to
the power of the human spirit and one man’s ability to change the world by standing up for what he believed in.” Winfrey’s narration identifies Mandela’s social
and political actions as those of an individual, not as part of a collective sociopolitical movement of which he was a member; she thus helps to perpetuate the
very distortion Mandela expresses concern over later in the interview. Mandela,
known for his political activism, becomes depoliticized as he is canonized. Emphasis is placed upon Mandela-the-individual, considered distinct from his political comrades and effectively isolated from a larger political struggle that continues
even today. Mandela-the-man is seated next to Winfrey onstage, but Mandela-themyth is constructed and disseminated throughout the show.
Winfrey’s recounting of Mandela’s personal and political histories exists within a
Western white public space. “Few have ever had the global impact of Nelson
Mandela,” Winfrey continues. “He is revered by the world’s political figures... ”
images of Mandela pictured with Bill Clinton, and the Pope are shown, “respected by our
spiritual leaders ... ” footage of Mandela conversing with the Dalai Lama, then with Princess
Diana “and admired by other legends of our century” pictures of John F. Kennedy
Junior, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Queen Elizabeth. Mandela is confined within a
Western narrative that whitewishes him as myth. Mandela-the-cultural-saviour acting against white rule in South Africa is rendered nonthreatening to the West by the
marked reconstruction of Mandela-the-myth. The idea of Mandela as a friend to
Western leaders renders him a pleasing cultural icon through association.7 As
Mandela is canonized by Winfrey, he is assimilated into the politics of American
capitalism and celebrity. Winfrey’s narration configures Mandela-the-myth alongside other canonized figures in the Western landscape. Mandela becomes linked
with a tradition of Western wealth and power that is continuously narrated within a
depoliticizing cultural (e.g., Christian) framework of canonization. Winfrey, well
known as a voice for African-Americans, deploys a Western whitewishing gaze in
this episode, depoliticizing Mandela-the-man and confining him within Mandelathe-myth.
Nelson Mandela has become an idea. He is a mythical figure in the Western
whitewishing cultural imagination. He is Moses, Noah, and even little David who
defeated Goliath.8 Mandela-the-idea, the noble and exalted myth perpetuated by
the West, informing a contemporary master-servant relationship, incarcerates
Mandela-the-man. “Of course, the whole thing is,” explains Kincaid, “once you
cease to be a master, once you throw off your master’s yoke, you are no longer
human rubbish, you are just a human being. So, too, with slaves. Once they are no
longer slaves, once they are free, they are no longer noble and exalted; they are just
human beings” (Kincaid 1989: 81). Nelson Mandela is a remarkable man. But he
is just a human being.
Western representations of South Africa and its inhabitants oscillate between
thought-provoking conversations and mythological whitewishing narratives. Artifacts like Cry, the Beloved Country and Mandela: The Man and His Country inform a
universalist narration of events, while The Tribal Mind and Sarafina! offer compelling alternatives to traditional forms of symbolic violence. The two poles of this
movement weave throughout public space and confirm present ties to distinct
imaginings of history and geography. Occasionally the tension inherent in this
oscillation backward and forward, and forward and backward, is embodied in a
single artifact as witnessed in Mandela’s appearance on the Oprah Winfrey Show.
Even as Mandela-the-man denounces Mandela-the-myth, the myth is simultaneously reconstructed. Confronting the past in the present through the remembrance
of historical events involves a continuous act of recollection. The frameworks
through which the past is reconstructed are as informative as the recalled events.
Remembering events, places and people necessitates the intermingling of factual
and fictitious ideas. It is through such movement and intermingling that we in the
West come to know and acknowledge the vast world around us.
1. A more recent representation in online news media reinvents the story of Noah’s ark
and maps it onto a South African setting. The headline reads: “South African Noah’s
Ark brings animals home.” Darren Schuettler writes:
Durban, South Africa, 13 Nov 2000 (Reuters)—A modern-day Noah’s Ark docked in
South Africa on Monday bringing 22 giraffes and three rhinos home after 40 days’
fruitless sailing around Africa. There was no dove carrying an olive branch to mark the
voyage’s end, but animal handlers said they could not find words for their joy as the
Michele pulled into Durban harbour at dawn.
The animals were being transported to Spain, but while at sea, “publicity about the
return of foot-and-mouth disease to South Africa after an absence of more than 40
years led Spain to refuse to allow the ship inside its territorial waters.”
2. Chris Cutler offers four key points in his discussion of myth that I find to be
particularly useful reminders of the centrality of myth in popular culture: its
provisionality, myth as “living form of knowledge,” myth as a form of wisdom, and its
place in memory:
1. Myth is never definitive, it is always provisional—but at any time it does
embody a current and more or less universally held “truth.” These truths,
because expressed in pre-scientific terms (elliptically, allegorically,
symbolically, ironically) are no less truths for that. (Our prejudices about
what truth is cannot contain it: Truth itself can only be tested; it is not here
to be trusted.)
2. As a living form of knowledge, Myth is never in contradiction with those
who use it, who pass it on elaborating it to include new knowledge, who
express their attitudes towards the world through it. For as it is objectively
TOPIA 12
Notes
57
through work, so it is subjectively through myth that people come to terms
with the world it discovers and which discovers it.
3. Myth is wisdom. It changes organically as reality itself changes in order
to express that reality and to give it a human quality. In this respect myth is
a mirror of truth.
4. Belonging to no one, Myth has no life outside the context of its
immediate use. Its prolongation in human memory is necessarily also its
transformation (unlike a book, for instance, whose letter is inviolate. The
crucial point here is that a book can never respond to its reader—by its
nature indeed it forces the reader to respond to it. Myth, on the other
hand, exists only in the space between teller and hearer—and the telling
as well as the hearing is a responsive act). (1985: 55-6)
3. During childhood, Mandela was introduced to the symbolic markings of
Christianity; exposure to the violence associated with such definition would come later.
In his autobiography Long Walk To Freedom, Mandela describes his
observations concerning the amaMfengu peoples:
TOPIA 12
58
[They] were the most advanced section of the community and
furnished our clergymen, policemen, teachers, clerks, and
interpreters. They were also amongst the first to become
Christians, to build better houses, and to use scientific methods
of agriculture, and they were wealthier than their Xhosa
compatriots. They confirmed the missionaries’ axiom, that to be
Christian was to be civilized, and to be civilized was to be
Christian. There still existed some hostility toward amaMfengu,
but in retrospect, I would attribute this more to jealousy than
tribal animosity. This local form of tribalism that I observed as a
boy was relatively harmless. At that stage, I did not witness nor
even suspect the violent tribal rivalries that would subsequently
be promoted by the white rulers of South Africa. (1994: 11)
4. Related to this notion of cartographic categorization is naming as a form
of symbolic branding. The English name, Nelson, was given to Mandela on his
first day of school at age seven. “On the first day of school,” Mandela
recounts,
my teacher, Miss Mdingane, gave each of us an English name and
said that from thenceforth that was the name we would answer
to in school. This was the custom among Africans in those days
and was undoubtedly due to the British bias of our education.
The education I received was a British education, in which British
ideas, British culture, British institutions, were automatically
assumed to be superior. There was no such thing as African
culture. Africans of my generation—and even today—generally
have both an English and an African name. Whites were either
unable or unwilling to pronounce an African name, and
considered it uncivilized to have one. That day, Miss Mdingane
told me that my new name was Nelson. Why she bestowed this
particular name upon me I have no idea. Perhaps it had
something to do with the great British sea captain Lord Nelson,
but that would be only a guess. (1994: 12)
5. While Mary narrates the history lesson from a black South African perspective, T. R.
Reid of the Washington Post, 6 November 2000, cites the relegation of imperialism
entirely to the past. “For most of the world,” Reid writes, “the age of imperialism is just a
chapter in the history books, a tale of bigotry, conquest and plunder as Europeans used
the gun and the gallows to impose Western rule on the peoples Kipling called ‘lesser
breeds without law.’” In fact, history is very much a part of the present. The process of
understanding history and subsequent impacts upon the present is illustrated well in
the existence of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission [TRC] in South Africa that
was, as Charayne Hunter-Gault explains, “created by an Act of Parliament known as
the National Unity and Reconciliation Act. The TRC, as it became known, was
designed to help facilitate a ‘truth recovery process’” (1999: x) in the new South Africa.
“The commission hopes its report will provide the history lesson needed to ensure that
South Africa’s tragic past never repeats itself,” Hunter-Gault explains.
The proof of the lesson may not be clear until future generations have had
a chance to consider the findings with the grace of time and distance. But
one of its certain legacies is the voices, so long unheard, that now speak
for the record about a particularly brutal history. Those who testified,
those who heard them and those, like Antjie Krog, who report on what
they said, are all living South Africans who are struggling to make
individual and collective sense of the past and to push ahead into a future
that may or may not fulfill the promise felt by those first-time voters in
1994. The Truth Commission, no more perfect than the messy work-inprogress called democracy, allowed them to face together, for the first
time, the profound task ahead (xii).
7. Another example of Mandela being framed in accordance with Western celebrity
occurs as Mandela enters and Tony Bennett leaves the Four Seasons hotel in
downtown Toronto on 16 November 2001. “Mandela paused briefly to acknowledge
on-lookers with a broad smile and wave,” recounts Maureen Murray of The Toronto
Star,
and he received a brief impromptu greeting from singer Tony Bennett,
who was leaving the hotel as the former South African president arrived.
Bennett once sang for Mandela at Royal Albert Hall in England and the
normally staid audience was enchanted as the lion of Africa sprang to his
feet and danced.
Bennett later told Gordon Cressy, a vice-president at Ryerson University,
that Mandela is the only remaining living icon, on par with great leaders
like Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi. “There are three great names of the
last century and he’s the one who is still with us,” said Cressy, who was
also at the hotel to greet Mandela. Cressy was moved by the brief
encounter. “It’s a magical moment,” he said. (A26)
Perhaps it was a moment more constructed within the confines of cultural myth
grounded within Western discourses of celebrity and iconicity, than an occurrence
defined strictly by hocus-pocus.
Mandela was in Toronto at the time to attend the ceremonial renaming of Park Public
School in Regent Park to “Nelson Mandela Park Public School” and to receive, along
with his wife, Graca Machel, honourary degrees from Ryerson University on 17
November 2001. I attended the latter event and was, admittedly, surprised to see a few
empty seats. The crowd was electrically charged with expectation, as people craned to
catch a glimpse of Mandela in the flesh, to experience, perhaps, Mandela-the-man
function as Mandela-the-myth.
TOPIA 12
6. One notable exception is Woza Albert! (1983), a play written by three members of
the Market Theatre: Percy Mtwa, Mbongeni Ngema, and Barney Simon. This satire
marks the Second Coming of Jesus Christ (Morena)—in South Africa.
59
8. Unlike Moses, Noah and David, Nelson Mandela’s mythical narrative directly
permeates our national borders. He is now, essentially, one of us. “My name is Nelson,”
Allan Thompson writes, recounting Mandela’s declaration, “and I am Canadian”
(2001: A17). The myth of Nelson Mandela is simultaneously constructed as local and
global. “Nelson Mandela,” Thompson continues, “African Statesman. Freedom fighter.
Icon. Canadian” (2001: A17). The decision to grant Mandela Canadian citizenship,
however, was not initially unanimous. The sole dissenter has been duly criticized.
James Travers explains: “Rob Anders, the Alliance MP ... foolishly and temporarily
blocked the symbolic gesture” (2001: A16). Even Mandela-the-myth encounters
opposition in curious moments marked by the discontinuity of cultural imaginings.
Mandela-the-myth wins once again within Western constructions and the hero
proceeds onward to claim the prize of citizenship. And thus the myth lives (happily)
ever after.
References
Boles, Elizabeth. 1988. The West and South Africa. Beckenham: The Atlantic Institute for
Internal Affairs.
Bonnett, Alastair. 1999. Constructions of Whiteness in European and American AntiRacism. In Race, Identity, and Citizenship: A Reader, edited by Rodolfo D. Torres, et al.,
200-214.Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
TOPIA 12
60
CFTO News. 2001. CFTO, Toronto. 12 and 15 November.
Chow, Rey. 1993. Where Have All the Natives Gone? Writing Diaspora: Tactics of
Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Conrad, Joseph. 1989. Heart of Darkness. Markham: Penguin Books.
Cutler, Chris. 1985. File Under Popular: Theoretical and Critical Writings on Music.
London: November Books.
Davis, Peter. 1988. Remember Mandela. Amandela Group.
Duncan, James, and Derek Gregory eds. 1999. Writes of Passage: Reading travel writing.
New York: Routledge.
Dyson, Michael Eric. 1999. The Labor of Whiteness, the Whiteness of Labor and the
Perils of Whitewishing. In Race, Identity, and Citizenship: A Reader, edited by Rodolfo
D. Torres, et al., 219-224.Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York:
Pantheon Books.
Grossberg, Lawrence. 1992. We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and
Postmodern Culture. New York: Routledge.
Hartigan, John Jr. 1999. Establishing the Fact of Whiteness. In Race, Identity, and
Citizenship: A Reader, edited by Rodolfo D. Torres, et al., 183-194.Oxford: Basil
Blackwell.
Henderson, Anne, director. 1994. The Tribal Mind. Written and hosted by Gwynne
Dyer. Part 2 of 4 part series: “The Human Race.” National Film Board.
Hunter-Gault, Charayne. 1992. Introduction. In Antji Krog, Country of My Skull, ix-xii.
Toronto: Random House.
de Kerckhove, Derrick. 1995. The Skin of Culture: Investigating the New Electronic
Reality. Toronto: Somerville House.
Kincaid, Jamaica. 1989. A Small Place. Markham: Plume Books.
Mandela: The Man and His Country. 1990. Narrated by Morton Dean. ABC.
Mandela, Nelson Rolihlahla. 1994. Long Walk To Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson
Mandela. Toronto: Little, Brown and Company.
Murray, Maureen. 2001. “Inspiring” Mandela in Toronto. The Toronto Star. 17
November: A1, A26.
Nichols, Bill. 1991. The Ethnographer’s Tale. Visual Anthropology Review 7(2): 31-47.
The Oprah Winfrey Show. 2000. “Nelson Mandela.” November 27. Harpo Productions.
Reid, T. R. 2000. A Step Down for Empire’s Icons? Washington Post: Altavista Online.
November 6.
Roodt, Darrell James, director. 1992. Sarafina! Hollywood Pictures and Miramax Films.
———, director. 1995. Cry, the Beloved Country. Distant Horizon.
Said, Edward. 1993. Culture and Imperialism New York: Vintage Books.
———. 1995 Orientalism. In The Postcolonial Studies Reader, edited by Bill Ashcroft et
al., 87-91. London and New York: Routledge.
Stewart, Kathleen. 1996. A Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an “Other”
America. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Thompson, Allan. 2001. Nelson Mandela, Canadian, pleads for help for Africa. The
Toronto Star. 20 November: A17.
Travers, James. 2001. Mandela’s vision an inspiration to all. The Toronto Star. 20
November: A1, A16.
Vanden-broucke, Russel. 1985. Truths the Hand Can Touch. New York: Routledge.
Wekesser, Carol. 1992. Africa: Opposing Viewpoints. San Diego: Greenhaven Press.
TOPIA 12
Schuettler, Darren. 2000. South African Noah’s Ark brings animals home. Reuters:
Altavista Online. November 13.
61