The over-reverence toward Mandela

Viva half-freedom Viva!

Nelson Mandela is an icon of our age and will go down in history as one of the greatest men who ever lived.  He will be called a freedom fighter, a fearless leader, a great statesman, and many other great titles. 

History is likely to judge Mandela as a near-perfect man, much like the historical verdicts for Ghandi or Mother Teresa.  But one thing we cannot help feeling about Mandela is disappointment.  He was not a freedom-fighter so much as an equality-fighter.  Indeed it would appear his and his organisation’s concept of freedom was limited to racial equality, which actually has very little to do with freedom per se.

Racial equality might be a natural result of genuine freedom, but it is not sufficient to bring about true freedom.  After, all racial groups can be equally oppressed and you would still fulfil the criteria of a ‘non-racial’ society.  Indeed communist tyrannies were of just that sort – vehemently rejecting racism while equally oppressing the masses.

Indeed most African ‘liberation’ movements have been nothing of the sort, but have instead been movements to remove white rule.  In their place they have tended to give rise to dictator-for-life cleptocracies, socialist backwaters, and crony-capitalist thug states.  In the end it’s the black Africans on the ground that always lose out as the whites simply pack up and leave.

Now by degree South Africa is much freer than many countries on this planet, and certainly by African ‘post-colonial’ standards it is a veritable bastion of liberty.  But it would be historically irresponsible to call South Africa truly free in both a constitutional, economic and political sense.

It is plain to see that African Nationalists’ understanding of individual freedom is not wholly different from Afrikaner Nationalists.  Both see the state as an organ of wealth appropriation for a few.  Both require the state to be integrally involved in economic development.  Both have a penchant for stifling free speech and media freedom.  Both enact industrial legislation to favour particular groups at the expense of others.  Both resort to deficit spending to appease their constituencies.  And both don’t have a clue about monetary justice.

Mandela fought a long hard fight for racial equality, and to be sure the dispensation ushered in was undoubtedly freer than anything under the Apartheid fascists.  But it is sad that no-one has been able to stand on the shoulder of this giant, and truly extend our freedoms beyond racial equality to genuine individual liberty.

Instead the next generation of leaders has taken us backward to affirmative action laws, backward to crony capitalism, backward to “national growth planning”, backward to onerous gun ownership laws, backward to pointless income redistribution and welfare statism, backward to government corruption, and backward to monetary debasement.

The mark of anyone’s greatness is, for better or worse, their legacy.  Not their legacy in some ethereal story-telling sense of myth and legend, but in a real tangible everyday sense.  In this regard Mandela will leave a number of lasting legacies, some more legendary than real, and some more perceived than actual.

Of all the wonderful lessons we can learn from Mandela’s life – his perseverance, his courage, his resilience, his forgiveness, his heart for reconciliation – one legacy that he and his generation of ‘freedom-fighters’ have not bequeathed to the next generation is a true love and understanding of individual liberty.

Mandela rightly will go down as a great figure of history, but even the great Madiba did not manage or even try to wrestle the prevailing orthodoxy among the African Nationalists away from state-led coercion to a republic of genuinely free men and women.

As a result, we as South African’s need to realise that the job is only half done, that tyranny lurks behind every dark corner of state control, and that Mandela’s cause is to be extended, not forever worshipped as the ultimate standard of liberty, but as a stepping stone to greater victories.

If South African’s fail to recognise this, then they are already making a date with tyrannical destiny.  The society that forgets to fight for freedom…dies.