Mandela Right man, right time

AS I write this, Nelson Mandela is still with us. But this is his fourth hospitalisation in six months and the prognosis for 94-year-old men with persistent lung infections is not good. How will South Africa do without him?

In practice, South Africa has been doing without the man for more than a decade - but psychologically, it is just now getting to grips with the reality that he will soon be gone entirely.

For all its many faults and failures, post-apartheid South Africa is a miracle. Although Mandela left the presidency in 1999, he is still seen as the man who made the magic work, and somehow the guarantor that it will go on working. If only in some vague and formless way, many people fear his death will remove that safety net.

Just in the past two weeks, however, the tone of the discussion has begun to change. On hearing Mandela was in hospital again, Andrew Mlangeni, one of his dearest friends and once a fellow prisoner on Robben Island, said: "It's time to let him go. The family must release him, so that God may have his own way with him."

That comment had a strong resonance in traditional African culture, which holds that a very sick person cannot die until his family "releases" him. They have to give him "permission" to die, by reassuring him that his loved ones will be fine when he's gone. So South Africans must now accept that they can get along without Mandela, and then he will be free to go.

People can argue South Africa is not doing as well as it should, but they can at least agree Mandela got the country safely through the most dangerous phase of the transition, and that they can carry on building a just and democratic society without him.

President Robert Mugabe, of Zimbabwe, of course, has always deeply resented Mandela being revered as the father of his nation while he himself is seen as a vicious tyrant who ruined his. So he seized an opportunity recently on South African television to accuse Mandela of having failed South Africa's black majority: he had been soft on whites.

The interviewer was Dali Tambo, son of Mandela's ally, the late Oliver Tambo. When Tambo became president-in-exile of the African National Congress he made Mandela's release from prison its highest priority.

Dali Tambo is another kettle of fish: a flamboyant man who has traded on his family name to forge a career as a TV interviewer. He has his own soft-focus interview show, People of the South, and recently persuaded Mugabe to give him a two-hour interview. During it, Mugabe dismissed Mandela as "too much of a saint".

"Mandela has gone a bit too far in doing good to the non-black communities, really in some cases at the expense of blacks," the Zimbabwean dictator said. "That's being too saintly, too good, too much of a saint."

Nonsense. What Mandela and his white negotiating partner, F W De Klerk, were trying to avoid in the early 1990s was a South African civil war that would have killed millions.

The 20 per cent white minority were heavily armed and had nowhere else to go. Therefore, a settlement that gave South Africa a peaceful (hopefully prosperous) democratic future had to be one in which the whites still had a future.

So Mandela and De Klerk made a deal in which nobody lost too much, rather than submit to a future that would make the civil war in Syria look like a tea party.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu said of the ailing Mandela last week: "The best memorial to Nelson Mandela would be a democracy that was really up and running: a democracy in which every single person in South Africa knew that they mattered."

That is still some distance away, but Mandela has laid the foundations. He was the right man for the job: a saint who also understood realpolitik.

Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries