On this day in 1918, President Nelson Mandela was born in the village of Mvezo in the Eastern Cape. When he was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1964, he was 45 years old.
The horrible conditions and the oppressive apartheid prison system extracted a profound cost from Mandela and his co-sentenced. For the next 27 years, he would become the world’s most feared and famous prisoner.
As a student at the University of the Western Cape in 1980, I recall seeing the first image of Nelson Mandela spray-painted on to the walkways all across campus. In reading Sahm Venter’s The Prison Letters of Nelson Mandela, one meets a man who slowly ground away against incredible hardship to carve out respect from friend and foe.
When he was finally released from prison on February 11, 1990, I was driving to Springbok that Sunday and crossed underneath the N1 with a cavalcade travelling above me, which I assumed was part of the cavalcade carrying Mandela to Cape Town.
There is no doubt that in people like Nelson Mandela, Robert Sobukwe and others, we have an epic intellectual profoundness that has largely been reduced, in Mandela’s case, to 67 minutes of doing good.
Are we missing the moment to build the most impactful legacy intervention models to change South Africa by trapping the greatness of Mandela into 67 minutes of conscience-salving altruism? What can we do with 67 minutes when the dire issues of systemic poverty that jailed Mandela linger on for generations? Does the legacy of Mandela and others not demand a more robust response?
Where are the theatre performances to enact his life story as freedom intellectual? Where are the readings from his various biographies that will remind us of his words during this week? Where are the sixty-seven R27 million corporate grants annually that will be employed to intelligently address poverty or the 67 employees dedicated to designing solutions to systemic poverty within 6.7 months?
The 67 minutes we have carved out to do good annually are a mere fraction of the potential we can harness to effect change in this country.
Today, millions of young people will sit on neighbourhood streets to benefit from a “67 minutes for Mandela” corporate activation. And more than 99% of them will still be there next year, and the next.
If we cannot imagine a bigger Nelson Mandela moment than 67 minutes, then we are slowly diminishing the legacy of one of the world’s greatest freedom intellectuals. This moment calls for 67 people to come together and commit themselves to work together – across the divides and beyond the toxic political culture of our day – to fix our country.
Too few are rising up in the spirit of Mandela and saying, “I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”
We are reducing the greatness of his intention and legacy by thinking that our 67 minutes of altruism will address the issues he spent 67 years of his life trying to fix.
My most treasured moment in political imagery is the Cape Town Peace March of September 13, 1989, led by various leaders. It was the one moment that 30 000 people from all cultures and classes defied the danger to their own safety and stood together and said, “Stop the killings”.
Who has the leadership and vision to yank us out of this selfish altruistic inertia and infuse us with a more profound way to celebrate a man who gave us 67 years of his life, not 67 minutes of his time?
* Lorenzo A Davids.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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