Nelson Mandela died yesterday December 5. 2013 and the world mourns for him. The South Africa that he was born into saw him, a black man as unworthy of equal citizenship, wished to keep him excluded and ignored, systematically discriminated and economically deprived. There are few people whose existence can stake a claim on the course of history; of having left the world inescapably altered, transformed, improved. He was such a one, in a world where there are very few.
The tiny house in Soweto, the slum where Mandela lived before his imprisonment is a tourist site today. The young black South African student, who was leading the tour when I visited, told her leader’s story well, as she led us through the tiny space. The smallness of it, the single crowded front room, the sparse bedroom, are crucial points in the legend of the man; his greatness rose from very little; his generosity from a want borne with grace. The prison cell on Robben Island where he would be held captive by the apartheid regime of South Africa was even smaller, the possibilities for change smaller still.
Triumph against apartheid; a peaceful movement that uprooted an unjust system; replaced the domination of the few by a democracy of the many; was iconic and exemplary. Nelson Mandela was a man of that extraordinary moment and his passing marks the point where it enters the past. South Africa’s present; is far more complicated. Beyond the tourist sites commemorating the moments of the anti-apartheid struggle, Soweto the slum where the struggle began, is still a slum. While there are no longer laws forcibly segregating the races; only blacks live there, over one million of them. The crammed together dwellings are still made of scraps, the many children still play in the rubbish, the men and women still fight for survival, for a job, for a reasonable living. It is not that the end of apartheid did not free them, make them equal and self-governing. It is that after that extraordinary achievement of the anti-apartheid struggle, now past; is the mediocrity of the present. After winning the big battles there are the small struggles for housing, for water, for medicines for children. One woman from Soweto who works as a maid in Johannesburg said it well; “we are still waiting for change.”
It is the moments after the extraordinary; after the iconic, that seem to bear the greatest challenges to hope and perseverance. The roots of the anti-apartheid movement were inextricably knotted with the anti-colonial impetus of the Indian subcontinent that drove the British out in 1947. Partition, the creation of two sovereign independent nations, was a historic achievement, a grand moment in lifetimes of lost struggles and subjugated populations. It was wrought on the brave backs of those that fought and fevered in its turmoil, sacrificed lives and homes and children. Independence and partition was the promise of a better and equal future, of self-governance and of a final end to foreign domination.
It is in the aftermath of great struggles that bonds unravel; that doubts seep in; old resentments return and new ones are born. For Pakistan; now so much farther away from 1947; this moment of doubt, of disbelief and of dissension is the present. The principles that were clear then in the glory of creation seem murky now; the unity that was real then is a memory now. Some parts of history have been kept close to hearts other parts erased fast. Dead leaders have been recast to fit present politics, and questions and confusions litter made-up memories. The moments in which the good triumph and the weak win are the ones we wish would last forever; the ones where the meaning of victory is elusive and the purpose of trying uncertain are the ones that we are left with. After the passing of the historic; lies the desolate wasteland of the ordinary.