WHO, EXACTLY, BURIED NELSON MANDELA?

At first glance the question might seem preposterous. Yes, we all know who buried Nelson Mandela! It was his family and this wife or that. It was the ANC and the new so called Rainbow South African State. Yes, and it was all the world’s politicians and heads of state former and current… And then, to many of us here  in Britain watching the endless rolling eulogy from the BBC in hush toned sycophancy that blotted out everything else that happened in the world over the last week, all of us knew that it was this disgustingly obsequious organisation to which we’re forced to pay a license fee that actually buried Nelson. Albeit under a ton of bullshit and other verbal garbage.

There is much that has come out of the Nelson Mandela Show as it was turned into by the BBC. The man’s status has now been elevated from global political icon to super-hero. A person whose value and worth exceeds Moses, Jesus Christ, Mohammed, Abraham Lincoln and dare I say it even Bill Clinton, all rolled into one. Just about the greatest human who ever lived. And whoops, sorry, I forgot, The Virgin Mary and Leonardo da Vinci. Okay, let’s look at it closely. When his jailors took him off the 27 year cross at Robben Island Prison it wasn’t black South Africans who turned him into a hero but the white political regime that put him there along with all those white liberal intellectuals who’ve done time worshipping black political leaders because they think it showed cred. Same as they once adored Robert Mugabe! On his release the ‘forgiving’ figure of Mandela was not only a gift to them but to all those black and white political rascals who’ve been attending official ceremonies in South Africa today. Naturally at their taxpayers’ expense!

What honest or genuine questions did the BBC ask of itself before sinking into its endlessly idolizing hysteria. Hello? Did anyone there ever ask themselves who it was who ACTUALLY ended apartheid because one thing is for sure as historical fact, it wasn’t Nelson Mandela but F.W.de Klerk, South African Prime Minister at the time who freed him from jail and then worked with him in an inspirational partnership as Joint Presidents to get rid of the scourge when he could have just as easily turned the army on the ANC in a bloody race war. It was de Klerk who abolished apartheid as no longer tolerable,  not Nelson Mandela.

Right now it comes to mind that I’d better stop calling him Nelson because that’s no longer his name! Jacob Zuma, current ANC President of the Republic has rechristened him as someone entirely black for the whole nation, the world and for posterity! None of that white man Nelson stuff, he’s now simply Madiba, everyone’s Father. The BBC arse-crawlers could therefore no longer call him by the white Christian name his parents had chosen. No, black South Africa was running the show so it couldn’t permit a white hero’s name from a white colonialist past. The world’s greatest human being and political hero was black so his name had to be black through and through. None of this Nelson stuff, understand! And naturally every BBC reporter and journalist understood. After all, they were in on the greatest event in human history since the Resurrection, and a resurrection it was!

Shame none of them asked themselves or anyone they interviewed, singly or in the dancing crowds, what the man had actually done to improve their living conditions. What he’d done to make the circumstances of their lives better and more tolerable, during the ten years or more he’d been President. If asked many of them might have said that what was important was that he’d freed them spiritually. That he’d liberated their minds from oppression. True indeed perhaps, and in the circumstances of a new and changed nation very important… only politically naïve. Nothing more loved by the hard-nosed political rascals and dignitaries who attended those rites, rituals and political speeches. A revolution of spiritual liberation. Well praise Jesus and Hallelujah! From all the world’s liberals to black African dictators, from Selfie Obama to East European and South American thugs of the right, the one thing they all love to hear are matters of spiritual inspiration. It means they won’t have to do anything concrete to make people’s lives any better! Freedom? The Spirit? It all sounds like flower-power and hippies, straight out of sixties California, when you could live in the sun, man, and love was all free.

No wonder so many of the world’s political elite were in attendance. Mandela? Freedom? It was all a matter of spirit, of liberation. Meanwhile he and his Party had done little to nothing for their fellow black Africans  during that time, except of course, enrich themselves with fine new houses and gifts of land, same as everywhere else throughout Africa over the last fifty years. No, Mandela began a spiritual revolution and left it at that. That’s what all the politicians and dignitaries there in adoring attendance love him for. A spiritual revolution and sawn off at that because no revolution is complete unless it is, at the same time, a social revolution. Betterment of the social and economic conditions of life of the masses of people. In South Africa that meant both the poor blacks and the poor whites. Mandela came out of prison, allowed himself to be iconized, canonized if you will as leader of a spiritual revolution while the ANC took over the politics. As its leader he had the power to do anything for those living in poverty in the townships but instead he did nothing. Just rested on his world given status as inspirational spiritual icon.

If doing nothing is satisfactory to the liberal intelligentsia then it’s satisfactory for the world’s political leaders. These people spend their lives thinking up creative talk about future promises of prosperity. Only spiritual regeneration first if you will and betterment of people’s lives second. Always second! In Nelson Mandela politicians saw one of themselves. And if he’d held up a mirror they’d have seen their own faces. That in truth is why so many attended. To be among one of their own. Of the same political character and class. So how did the mass of black South Africans see it. I’ll tell you how. Forget about the BBC love-in with the carefully selected handful on the streets or the myriad of adoring ANC hangers on… when the crowds in the stadium in Soweto heard the speech of Jacob Zuma, current ANC President of the Republic and a Nelson Mandela successor they wholesomely jeered and booed. Shouted their anger and booed. Rolling waves of disapproval and booing in contrast to BBC and other world media adulation along with the adoring rolling adulation of all the political dignitaries. And if they could have done the same they’d have booed them too… for allowing European and American bankers and finance jockeys to swindle the people of their countries. For lowering their expectations and hopes and indeed doing sweet nothing for them while they enriched their own friends.

Politicians helping themselves on one side while doing nothing for anyone else. And the masses of people on the other, black or white, booing at them in derision. This is what the BBC chose not to hear, whether it was in a black South African township or closer to home. That was the reality of Nelson Mandela’s legacy. Booing! Not something the grinning President Obama or the plump jovial David Cameron or the buxom Prime Minister of Denmark all smiling a selfie would have wanted to hear! Booing? No they definitely weren’t there to hear that. Only to participate in all that was righteous!

The ANC legacy of Nelson Mandela was treated with rightful contempt. Not the man himself. The legacy alas had promised so much and provided so little for so many for so long. Whose fault was that? The man who was the inspirational force for their struggle or his successors who inherited it? Almost certainly something of both. The ANC inherited Mandela’s inspiration but quite frankly not much else. They were guided by inspiration alone but never by a clear set of principles, a worked out ideological view for creating a just and egalitarian society. A socialist perspective. So sad to disappoint the liberal intelligentsia who spent so many years frothing at the mouth with adulation at the mere mention of the man’s name but your hero was never a socialist. Same as Robert Mugabe and all the other black leaders who’d inherited a mantle of anti-colonial struggle and took it forward. None of these leaders were socialists. None of them ever believed in social equality or tribal fraternity as is evidenced in their own post-colonial struggles for personal tribal domination. There never was and never would be any unity between tribes as is evidenced all over Africa, let alone social equality between rich and poor. The tens of millions in South Africa’s post-apartheid black townships know all about that. After 20 years of ANC rule and freedom, no running water, no electricity and no sanitation for most. 

In short just about nothing! That was why Jacob Zuma was booed, but then it wasn’t his fault. The party political mantle he inherited from Nelson Mandela and others came without definitive principles. Sure, there were members of the ANC engaged in the struggle who were socialists or communists but they were white, and black nationalists have never regarded socialism, Marxism or communism as anything more than European. The faith they inherited, as is quite logically the case, was one of anti-colonialism, or as it was in South Africa, anti-racist. Interestingly enough it was the white minority Afrikaaner who also inherited an anti-racist struggle, theirs being against the British who regarded them as racially inferior until the time when they fought them in the Boer War! In short, despite all the wretched comical mumblings of the white liberals, and in South Africa they are certainly more disgusting than anywhere else, none of that can detract from the fact that every ideological honor they give to Mandela is plain wishful thinking.

Or is it? Not if we recognise that any socialism espoused by such liberals, social democrats or others is about as revolutionary as Gordon Brown. What all these people are is probably only what they like to think they are over a good meal in Chelsea. Their radical leftism is only a delusion, something given them by others in jest or flattery. The whole damned lot of them wouldn’t know a day’s work in a packing warehouse, a building site or underground in a mine if you showed it to them. They’re as far from a black laborer living in a South African township as Nelson Mandela was from Karl Marx or Vladimir Lenin.

Given the intellectual poverty of his own heritage Nelson Mandela struggled to educate himself and to a fair degree was successful, but what he couldn’t overcome and probably would never have wished to overcome was the history of the struggle he came out of. A struggle for dignity and his own humanity along with that of millions of other South Africans denied basic rights. He didn’t come out of any kind of European tradition of class struggle. Struggle for a fair living wage or for trades union rights. He came out of a struggle of racial intolerance and exploitation that affected everyone. It made those who were nasty even nastier while in South Africa itself most white liberals continued enjoying a splendid lifestyle and were damnably complaisant.  It’s all going to get worse. Rainbow Nation of many colors? Quite frankly the phrase is a joke. Under ANC control a once successful economy based on farming and mining is going down the tubes fast. Those whites remaining will either be murdered, dispossessed or forced to emigrate with everything they own stolen or looted. It’s a processes that has repeated itself throughout decolonized Africa so why not there too?

And the logical consequence? When their economy becomes a basket case the ANC will turn to the EC for loans and after that China, ever hungry for minerals and gold. As for Mandela all that will remain will be a name out of memory and today’s adulation will seem like a myth. Time itself destroys all icons and legends. Men have their moments and moments degenerate. It was and is required that the youth of the townships be educated and given a future. Given the promise of a place in a prosperous and equal South Africa. The great legacy to come out of Mandela’s struggle was hope. With no promise to come out of the struggle for hope there is simply no legacy, just a betrayal of promise.

Who buried Nelson Mandela? Well right now they’re all burying him fast. All those heads of state there, politicians and presidents past and present on some tribal jamboree to bury one of their own. Made in their own image. Someone who promised everything and actually did nothing. His political party and the state they control can’t bury him fast enough, and the same goes for his family too, all hungry to take over a legend and sell it off piece by piece as mementoes . He may be dead but the Show must go on, with the BBC undoubtedly wanting to get in on the ground as stage managers.