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Media moment to marvel at - and now?

Thursday, February 11, 2010

THIS VERY MORNING TWENTY years ago a crescendo of media speculation climaxed in a media spectacle of historic significance.

After 27 years in prison, convicted of terrorist plotting against apartheid rule in South Africa, Nelson Mandela walked out of his “halfway house” (a bungalow in the grounds of Cape Province’s comparatively low-security Victor Verster facility – vastly different from his previous grim, often inhumane conditions on Robben Island) to be greeted by a crowd of at least 200 journalists.

There was little chance to stake out the scene in advance, since the government announced the release with very short notice, trying to outpace what one white-supremacist official described to me as “a foreign invasion” by overseas media. But despite poor sight-lines and a shimmering heat-haze, some classic images documenting this apogee moment in the struggle against oppression were nonetheless captured for the annals.

 

By the appointed release time of 3.00pm on February 11th (a Sunday in 1990) international coverage was jury-rigged in the form of a local TV feed direct from the prison gates – but the world was still kept waiting well over an hour more. Unbeknownst to reporters at the time, last-minute wrangling was going on inside. The authorities wanted to fly Mandela to Johannesburg and release him there. His then wife Winnie Madikizela-Mandela agreed to this, but organizers from the African National Congress wanted to celebrate his freedom, as he did, in the Cape Town area where he’d spent all his years of incarceration.

A huge rally was already amassing on that beautiful city’s Grand Parade. In an early presaging of matrimonial developments to come, Mandela over-ruled his wife, firmly grabbed her hand and said “Let's go to the Parade”.

The raised-fist pictures of the triumphant couple as they emerged have become a powerful (and now-poignant) record of that day, and so has Mandela’s defiant but not angry speech at the Grand Parade, repeating in part his exact words before he was sentenced at his 1964 trial. (The original, only fairly recently re-discovered recording is posted at a previous edition of THE MEDIA BEAT.)

   

 

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ANOTHER BIT OF DISJOINTED PLANNING came with an ANC spokesperson’s announcement that Mandela would (aptly) spend his first night of freedom at the official Cape Town residence of the veteran spiritual - and peace-making - opponent of apartheid, Archbishop Desmond Tutu. What the party didn’t know was that the Archbishop and his wife Leah Tutu were in Johannesburg for a grandchild’s christening.

The Archbishop had to hitch a ride on the BBC’s chartered plane, and in those 1990 days of limited communications, Leah had to stay on the ground in Jo’burg to instruct their staff by phone on preparing the house for the unexpected guest.

These days Archbishop Tutu is not bashful in voicing his criticisms of the current ANC government. It’s hard not to wonder what Mandela himself, now 91, feels about his country’s progress during these twenty years since he was released. He handpicked his first successor, Thabo Mbeki whose rule - despite its many promising aspects - will now be remembered for his disastrous AIDS policies, and (after a brief inter-regnum of a third, the caretaker Kgalema Motlanthe) the wily Jacob Zuma who outmaneuvered Mbeki now wears the Mandela mantle ... and a more different President (crudely populist and thuggish) it’s hard to imagine.

MANDELA DELIBERATELY AND EFFECTIVELY keeps his own counsel, apart from some occasional ex-cathedra intervention in national affairs as Father of the Nation. Rarely if ever does he criticize the party – he holds himself to the same essentially unquestioning loyalty he demanded of others while he guided his followers from behind bars.

All the same, Archbishop Tutu has told me that Mandela is “sorely disappointed” - and why wouldn’t he be, as Tutu himself naturally is? - that 34% or more of the country’s 50 million people still live on less than $2 a day, according to the World Bank.

For his 500-page autobiography Mandela chose the title Long Walk to Freedom. In many ways the short walk taking him out of prison (fifty yards, I calculated it to be) presented him with the greatest challenge of all, as he stepped from resistance into governing. The walk, even twenty years on, is still far from over.

 

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