Mandela
must have died a bitter man. To honour his legacy, we should focus on
the unfulfilled promises his leadership gave rise to
‘It is all too simple to criticise Mandela for
abandoning the socialist perspective after the end of apartheid: did he
really have a choice? Was the move towards socialism a real option?’
Photograph: Media24/Gallo Images/Getty Images
In the last two decades of his life,
Nelson Mandela
was celebrated as a model of how to liberate a country from the
colonial yoke without succumbing to the temptation of dictatorial power
and anti-capitalist posturing. In short, Mandela was not Robert Mugabe,
and South Africa remained a multiparty democracy with a free press and a
vibrant economy well-integrated into the global market and immune to
hasty socialist experiments. Now, with his death, his stature as a
saintly wise man seems confirmed for eternity: there are Hollywood
movies about him – he was impersonated by Morgan Freeman, who also, by
the way, played the role of God in another film; rock stars and
religious leaders, sportsmen and politicians from Bill Clinton to Fidel
Castro are all united in his beatification.
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