This is Mandela's South Africa

Archbishop Emeritus Desmond says that former President Mandela would be saddened by what is going on in South Africa.

Mandela, who is 91, is understandably an absent figure in the current political landscape. Nonetheless, Mandela is not figuratively absent.

He is a symbol, a gesture, and a myth.

There is a distinctive element of religious recall in the manner that Tutu positions Mandela in his lament about South Africa and its loss of moral compass and values.

Tutu is not alone in apportioning a saintliness to Mandela. In some quarters it would be safer to diss Jesus than Mandela.

The need to set Mandela aside from the fallout that is our post-reality is a rehearsed consciousness.

The kind of rehearsal that supports the myth of Mandela to put distance between what is and what was supposed to be.

Mandela it is often said intended the other outcome. The one we have now is about greed and power mongering.

Nonsense.

South Africa is a compromise. A pact among devils to borrow further from Tutu's religiosity.

And no-one leaves a compromise with the devil intact or unaffected.

Mandela is that pact. Mandela the man and Mandela the movement (ANC) at the very least.

This country is the outcome of the failed transition away from racialized capitalist consciousness.

What characterizes the zeal (in religious and other terms) among the constructed black elite is the stuff of old.

Power and money.

Not much has changed because not much was intended to change.

Mandela navigated a minefield of compromises that positioned his movement into the main 'liberation movement' at the apartheid table.

Mandela was chosen because he offered and implemented a compromise.

Apartheid was rationalized. Sanitized. And containerized.

There was no revolution. No rapture with the past.

What appeared was the myth of reconciling and forgiving as state sanctioned mythology and policy.

Tutu was a major player in the reformulation of apartheid. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) contained the past into sound bytes.

The complexity of the past was stripped bare and the nation was offered a myth.

The book cover to that myth is Mandela, the rainbow saint who is all but dead (sue me/crucify me if you must).

In distancing Mandela from the now Tutu is doing a further disservice to the fight against apartheid.

I think it important to recognize that apartheid survived Mandela and his movement. I would press further to say that Mandela saved apartheid.

South Africa is still an apartheid state albeit a modernized version of the old.

What is most significant in the revised apartheid state is the manner in which white elites have joined forces with black elites for the purpose of fortifying the divisions of old.

This is the new and improved whiteness, a modernized apartheid where white elites look just like black elites.

This is the interchangeability of oppression. Racial color is not a constant.

Fanon warned us of this selling out. He spoke briskly about the anxiety of post-liberation discourse and the too often complicit interests of the liberation elite.

This historical moment is the outcome of Mandela's anxiety.

Mandela is South Africa. He and his made it so.

Inevitably Mandela will go in the flesh but his myth will always be around.

As for Jesus, he ain't coming back like George Michael says in his Praying for Time "'cause God stopped keeping score ... (when) ... his children crept out the back door .."

Tutu may like this kind of providential determinism.

Damn, I hope I am not going to hell.

Oh yeah, I'm already there! ;o)

Onward!


Tutu Image Credit