The matter of the anthem offered a case in point, Mandela said: the short term satisfaction of banning the despised old song might come at a dangerously high price, whereas the magnanimous act of retaining it could yield mightily valuable returns.Īnd so it proved. Strike a false note and you risked undermining the nation’s stability make the right gesture and national unity would be reinforced.
In a political context so delicate, Mandela pointed out, you had to be very careful with the messages you put out. The way to deprive the extremists of popular support, and therefore to disarm them, was by convincing the white population as a whole that they belonged fully in ‘the new South Africa,’ that a black-led government would not treat them the way previous white rulers had treated blacks. The main threat to peace and stability came from right-wing terrorism. Mandela was the quintessential political animal: he did everything he did with a clear political purpose. Not to understand this-to insist only on his admirable ‘lack of bitterness’ and his spirit of forgiveness-is to miss the bigger point that Mandela’s widely applauded saintliness was the instrument he judged to be most effective in the achievement of his political goals.The chief task the ANC would have upon taking over government, Mandela reminded his colleagues at the meeting, would be to cement the foundations of the hard-won new democracy. In fact, the entirety of the ANC’s national executive committee initially pushed to scrap ‘Die Stem’ and replace it with ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika.’ Mandela won the argument by doing what defined his leadership: reconciling generosity with pragmatism, finding common ground between humanity’s higher values and the politician’s aspiration to power. Not everyone in Mandela’s party, the African National Congress, was convinced when he first proposed the plan. Listen: John Carlin discusses Mandela's legacy on Late Night Live It was Mandela’s idea to juxtapose the two, his purpose being to forge from the rival tunes’ discordant notes a powerfully symbolic message of national harmony. The other is ‘Die Stem,’ (‘The Call’), the old white anthem, a celebration of the European settlers’ conquest of Africa’s southern tip. One is ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika,’ or ‘God Bless Africa,’ sung at black protest rallies during the forty-six years between the rise and fall of apartheid. Ever since Nelson Mandela became president of South Africa after winning his country’s first democratic elections in April 1994, the national anthem has consisted of two songs spliced-not particularly mellifluously-together.
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