I initially thought I would not write a piece on Nelson Mandela’s passing for a very simple reason. South African politics and society are far from my area of expertise, and since Mandela is one of the most famous and important people of the post-WWII world, there are going to be many, many people writing lots and lots of pieces that are much better than anything I could throw together.But here I am.
So what has driven me to add yet one more grain of sand to the great blog beach of Mandela remembrances? It is a desire to untangle the ironies of his life and death.
Of course most memorials to Mandela are laudatory. And rightly so. His contributions to South Africa specifically, and to the world more broadly, are simply undeniable.
But there have also been more critical observations, and also rightly so. No person is perfect, and we should never transform a human being into a sacred cow immune from just criticism.
But what I find interesting is how he is criticized by extremists on both sides.
For those on the Right, Mandela has always been a difficult pill to swallow. His African National Congress had communist members and was part of a coalition with communist parties and organizations. Mandela himself was a communist at one point. He not only fought to overthrow the right wing South African government that eventually imprisoned him for 27 years, but he was on the side of the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Many on the right will never forgive him for that.
But his stance makes perfect sense in retrospect. It’s easy to look back now and wonder why anyone would have supported the Soviet Union during the Cold War. But for nationalist leaders like Mandela, Ho Chi Minh of Vietnam, Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, Aung San of Burma, Muhammad Mussadiq of Iran, and countless others, what was the capitalist, “democratic” West, really?
For people all across the world, it wasn’t necessarily the forces of Democracy that had won World War II. It was the old line imperialists. France, Great Britain, Belgium, Holland, and others were not beacons of freedom. They were brutal, colonial scumbags. They were the ones who had conquered the world and shit all over it, slaughtering, raping, and pillaging their way to imperial grandeur at the expense of Asian, African, Indian, and mestizo peoples all across the globe.
What had the Soviet Union ever done to Africans or Latin Americans or most Asians?
And while the United States did not acquire many overseas colonies during the 19th century heyday of colonialism, it did kill and dispossess the Indigenous population of North America; it did continue to oversee its own system of anti-black apartheid in the South and parts of the West the day Mandela entered prison; and it did support brutal, ruthless, violent totalitarian regime
Yes, of course the Soviet Union was a totalitarian nightmare in its own right, with imperial and colonial aspirations and agendas of its own. But when the world is dominated by two big boots, and one is clamping down on your throat while the other is offering to help you walk to freedom, the choice is pretty simple.
And make no mistake; the American boot was indirectly clamping down on the throats of Mandela and every other black South African by staunchly supporting the apartheid regime. Lest we forget, as late as the 1980s, Ronald Reagan publicly backed the apartheid regime to the hilt.
Yet, despite all of this, Nelson Mandela is not now revered as a darling of the Left. Why? Because many leftists blame him for bringing a neo-liberal, free market economy to South Africa after he assumed the presidency.
Once taking office, Mandela did not turn South Africa into a socialist dreamland. To the contrary, many free market reforms were enshrined both, during the transition of South African governments, and during Mandela’s subsequent presidency. And the results have not always been pretty despite some real gains for the nation’s economy on the whole. For this, many leftists will never forgive him.
Is a lifelong struggle against racial oppression, including serving 27 years in a maximum security prison, enough to make you immune to accusations of being a sellout? I guess not, and perhaps rightly so. It’s a fair question. But I don’t think Mandela was a sellout, as some leftists contend.
As Simon Hooper points out in Al Jazeera, after more than a quarter-century on Robben Island, Mandela emerged still a committed leftist. In fact, just before his release, he issued a famous and much-cited statement advocating the nationalization of banks, mines, and various industries.
However, some within his own party perceived Mandela as being out of touch with the modern world after his long prison stint. For most South Africans he was George Washington and Mahatma Gadhi wrapped up in one, and therefor destined to be the first president of the post-apartheid nation. But some leaders in the ruling African National Congress worked to minimize his role in government, before and during his presidency. Thus, it’s important not to over emphasize Mandela’s individual power. Indeed, many of the difficult economic compromises made with the outgoing apartheid rulers were conducted by other ANC officials.
It’s also important to contextualize the times. Mandela was released in 1990 and elected in 1994. Perhaps the bigger obstacle to Mandela’s socialist goals was the shifting global economic landscape.
The Soviet Union had just collapsed. The Cold War was over and the capitalist democracies had won. Virtually every powerful nation was now advocating free elections and free markets. As African History Professor Stephen Ellis points out, Mandela’s proposals to nationalize industries were “greeted with total horror, because nobody, even on the left, by 1990 was advocating state ownership of industry. That was all associated with a brand of socialism that had failed.”
Indeed, the only remaining communist support pillars, China and Vietnam, were themselves privatizing and they advised Mandela not to nationalize industries.
And I haven’t even mentioned that the ANC and Mandela had to negotiate these transitions as South Africa occasionally teetered on the brink of civil war.
Perhaps Mandela could have done more to end the black-white economic divide that still plagues his nation. Perhaps not. While many on the Left are adamant that he failed in this respect, we should not overestimate one man’s power to fight against a global economic system. And either way, he remained a serious critic of Western imperialism throughout his life. For example, he spoke out against the U.S. invasion of Iraq and urged Americans to take to the streets in protest, noting “If there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America.”
Nelson Mandela was not perfect. There are surely grounds to criticize him. But dogmatic right wingers, who deem his leftism to be some form of original sin that can never be forgiven, come off as childish. And the leftists, who 
No one denies that Nelson Mandela is one of the most important people in the world since 1945. As such, his life deserves a subtle and nuanced analysis. Those who simplistically paint him as a saint of peace do him and us a disservice; they should be welcomed into a broader and more complex conversation about his life and legacy. But ideologues on the Right and the Left who smear him because he violated their dogma don’t deserve a seat at the table and should be left to their echo chambers.