WHEN lilacs last in the door-yard bloom’d,
And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,
I mourn’d—and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring….
-- Walt Whitman (1865)
How to measure, to embrace, to understand the greatness in a man once he is gone is a challenge that confronts us in every age. In 1865, American poet Walt Whitman had been deeply moved by the assassination of Abraham Lincoln on 15 April - just as the Northern victory in the American Civil War had been assured. Whitman had spent the war years as a nurse, coping with the near-Sisyphean task of aiding the tens of thousands of wounded soldiers who had streamed into the ad hoc hospitals using Washington DC’s government buildings.
In the first moments of mourning after Lincoln’s sudden death, Whitman had written of his heart-breaking loss in the poem, “O Captain, My Captain”. Then, weeks later, he wrote a more contemplative work, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” In speaking to an age more sentimental than our own more cynical time, Whitman drew upon the annual flowering of lilacs – the traditional flowers of mourning - to help his readers share the poet’s sense of Lincoln’s final sacrifice in the cause of freedom. Like Nelson Mandela, Abraham Lincoln had been the central figure in the moral re-creation of a nation and a society – moving it upward on the ladder of human freedom and dignity.
But unlike Lincoln who was gone even before reaching sixty, Mandela was past seventy years of age when he had his chance for immortality. And unlike Lincoln, Mandela had the luxury to enter his own promised land, following those long years of isolation and imprisonment. He eventually became South Africa’s first democratically elected president and then, he could ease into his long, dignified retirement as an increasingly beloved, internationally respected, elder, world statesman. He was appreciated, even revered around the world as a living symbol of what could be achieved on behalf of the human spirit.
Finally, he metamorphosed into an almost-mute, unassailable symbol of his own considerable achievement. Mandela’s eventual good fortune stands in contrast to the lives of figures like Abraham Lincoln, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr, or even Moses - all of whom had only been allowed to glimpse the possibilities of their respective promised lands from a scenic overlook, but never permitted to enter and savour their actual triumphs.
In the first moments after the announcement of Nelson Mandela’s passing, as that message reached around the globe, the outpouring from the powerful and the powerless, the mighty and the meek, became stunning in its intensity – like a river whose force had been pent up. The encomiums are too numerous to repeat here. Some of these words will have been the formulaic – foreign ministries all have prepared statements ready for just such occasions. But the words have come from everywhere and everybody else as well. And they will keep coming for months yet to come. There will be a stream of scholarships, roads, bridges, buildings and museums in his name still to come. But it will still be a long time before we have fully measured the gaping hole he has left behind – and it will come back again and again whenever we contemplate an issue and we think aloud - what would Mandela have said about this?
But those expressions of national and international grief that have come from everywhere in the wake of Nelson Mandela’s passing also allow the writer to think back to a half century ago, when another American president, John Kennedy also fell to an assassin’s bullet in 1963. Unlike Nelson Mandela, or even Lincoln, Kennedy was still in youthful middle age, only three years into his only presidential term.
With Kennedy’s death, as with Lincoln’s, Whitman’s words once again symbolised the cutting down of still another national leader. Any American who was beyond the cradle on that day can still recall exactly where they were, and what they were doing, when the news reached them John Kennedy was suddenly no longer their president.
This writer was in his high school algebra class, wrestling with the mystery of simultaneous equations, when there was an announcement over the intercom that the president had been shot in Dallas, Texas. Silence. Then a second announcement - the school buses would take all students home, now that the president was dead. What else could we do; where else should we be at this time of nation tragedy?
In the days that followed, people across the nation moved as if in a dreamscape. Some stayed glued to the images from their televisions and radio stations played sombre, wistful, soulful music, even on the pop stations. On the three national television networks there was but one program, and it ran from morning till night. The route of that fatal Dallas motorcade was repeated and explained, over and over again. And then it was Kennedy’s casket lying in state in the rotunda of the US Capitol building. There was the funeral procession with the rider-less horse, its rider’s boots symbolically inserted backwards in the stirrups; the burial at Arlington National Cemetery; and Kennedy’s three-year-old son’s poignant farewell salute.
All of this came unrelentingly via the television, day after day, as a nation was immersed in a numb, shared grief. And the astonishment and shock of a political assassination would be repeated again, and then yet again, after the deaths of the president’s brother, Senator Robert Kennedy, and then civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. within the next five years.
As the years have moved on, despite the stories that have come out about Kennedy’s personal frailties, the legend of that new Camelot on the Potomac that had ended before its time has only grown larger as the years pass. As with Abraham Lincoln, books and memorabilia on John Kennedy continue to pour forth to satisfy a deep thirst by an ever-eager public anxious to share, somehow, in the glories, legacies and legends of these heroes.
And now Nelson Mandela has joined this litany as the latest figure on a a roster that is part of humanity’s shared need for figures worthy of emulation and respect from our history. In years to come, beyond the flood of books, films, television series, and multi-media products that will pour forth, the tangible sites associated with Nelson Mandela – his homes, his offices, the courtrooms where he was tried, and the spot where he was arrested - will all become places of secular, civic veneration.
There will be many more songs and dramas added to a litany that already ranges from the songs Jacob Zuma led at the ANC’s National Conference to Jerry Dammers’ “Free Nelson Mandela”, Johnny Clegg’s “Asimbonanga” and Brenda Fassie’s “My Black President”, and on to that wonderfully evocative opera, “The Mandela Trilogy”. And these are just the beginning of a flood that is yet to fully break upon us.
And yet, there were also those years when Nelson Mandela’s name barely drew a ripple of recognition, at least publicly. Back in the 1950s and 60s, he was a man on the rise, a man to watch, regardless of whether one was black or white. His law practice attracted hundreds of clients who invested their hopes in his solving the personal tragedies apartheid inflicted on them, through his skills and persuasiveness. He was a genuine page-one, A-list personality whose face, words and deeds often filled the pages of publications like the popular “Drum” magazine. He was seen out and around with attractive women and he seemed clearly marked for some as-yet-undefined-but-great height.
His overwhelming political and intellectual presence – especially in the Treason Trial and then in the Rivonia Trial that followed a few years later - literally dominated the news, the conversations, the rumours and the hopes of many millions – and made international headlines as well. He was an avenging angel, the African Scarlet Pimpernel and the new Moses rolled into one.
And then came the dark. Sentenced to life imprisonment, isolated behind bars, his writings banned, his image scoured from public viewing, Nelson Mandela slowly faded from view and attention, save among close friends, relatives and former colleagues now scattered in exile - his very name taking on a wraithlike, half-remembered presence. By the time of the revolutionary events of the Soweto Uprising in 1976, the new heroes and must-reads of this new generation were the Black Consciousness hero-ideologues, South African, American and Caribbean writers, thinkers and ideologues like Bantu Stephen Biko, H Rap Brown, Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael and Franz Fanon. In that new liberation canon, at least initially, there seemed little room for the presumed philosophical leftovers from an earlier
