The very presence of President Obama in Soweto speaking about Nelson Mandela yesterday was an eloquent symbol of the extraordinary interconnectedness of our histories and the ripples set off by Mandela's life and work across world politics. If the election of South Africa's first black president in 1994 was not the direct cause of that same process in the US 12 years later, it was certainly a catalyst and an inspiration, one of the threads that wove a new American reality and gave flesh to a possibility most would have still seen as impossible only a decade before.
South Africa's President Jacob Zuma also spoke yesterday of the many "seeds planted by Mandela" internationally, among others the peace that Burundi now enjoys.
The awareness of that interconnectedness in our various histories, but also, crucially, among people as individuals, Obama argued, was Mandela's real insight. It was one rooted in longstanding local cultural tradition. "There is a word in South Africa – Ubuntu," Obama said, "that describes his greatest gift: his recognition that we are all bound together in ways that can be invisible to the eye; that there is a oneness to humanity; that we achieve ourselves by sharing ourselves with others, and caring for those around us."
That sense of community is important to understanding the important social dimension of Mandela’s ideas and his passionate engagement in the struggle against poverty, but also in understanding how central the idea of reconciliation and compromise was to him, his pragmatism. “It took a man like Madiba to free not just the prisoner, but the jailer as well,” Obama argued, cleverly, but also with some justice, casting his hero in a mould not unlike his own – an idealist, but also a canny centrist politician with an appreciation of the balance of forces in society, of the limits of power. Not the radical his rhetoric sometimes suggests.
What gave Obama's speech in particular an unexpected and welcome edge, and may have caused an uncomfortable frisson among the dictators and authoritarian hard men like Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe also gathered there to pay homage, was that it was more than a paean to Mandela. It was a call to action, and a direct public rebuke to them and their kind.
“There are too many of us who happily embrace Madiba’s legacy of racial reconciliation,” Obama chided, “but passionately resist even modest reforms that would challenge chronic poverty and growing inequality. There are too many leaders who claim solidarity with Madiba’s struggle for freedom, but do not tolerate dissent from their own people. And there are too many of us who stand on the sidelines, comfortable in complacency or cynicism when our voices must be heard.”
Mandela would have approved. One can almost see him chuckle at their embarassment.