We publish here a living tribute to Comrade Nelson Mandela. We, as all in South Africa, are aware that he is critically ill and that, by the time this magazine is published, his immensely productive life may have ended.

Amandla! stands with his family, the ANC, his closest comrades, especially the surviving Rivonia Treason Trialists and Robben Island prisoners and the South African people, as well as millions of others around the world, to mark the life of a great man.

We say ’man’ intentionally. There are those who would wish us to see him as a God or a saint. We see him rather as a man of the people. His life above all reaffirms that people from humble origins can rise and achieve extraordinary things.

It is with this sense that the South African nation, insofar as it exists given its divisions and inequities, pays tribute to a man who has dedicated his life to our liberation.

Strangely in this divided nation, a nation still under construction, Mandela’s passing will be almost universally mourned.

We remember Comrade Mandela’s life for its dignity. This was not just a personal characteristic. It represented the dignity of all African people in the struggle against an oppressive system that attempted to deny them their humanity. And we remember his life for the care he demonstrated for his people and for the project of building a united, non-racial and non-sexist South Africa.

We, as South Africans, black and white, poor and rich, left and right, have cared for him in return. We have cherished his honesty and integrity, especially as we have witnessed their absence among the South African leaders who have come after him. He has been a visionary with a grand project.

But above all he has been a man of conscience, a man of virtue. These qualities have made him globally acclaimed because he led a nation at a time when they were absent among world leaders. He was not afraid to attack Bush and Blair head-on about the war on Iraq. About Bush he said: ’What I am condemning is that one power, with a president who has no foresight and who cannot think properly, is now wanting to plunge the world into a holocaust.’ For Blair he had these words: ’He is the foreign minister of the United States. He is no longer Prime Minister of Britain.’

He rose above the bitterness and resentment that could have plunged South Africa into a bloody civil war. He was self-sacrificing and could reach out to his enemies and cross many divides, in that he was great unifier and in many ways the architect of the New South Africa.

But for all this we must avoid myth making. Mandela was neither King nor Saint. He was not alone. The liberation struggle was a collective effort. Moreover, it was the power of the most downtrodden, the factory workers, the working-class women, the poor and the youth that eventually brought the Apartheid government, if not completely to its knees, at least to negotiate the terms of the end of their racist system.

Every struggle needs a movement with a leadership that can give political direction, take the difficult strategic and tactical choices. Mandela’s ANC came to predominate. Yet he was the first to acknowledge the role of a broad range of movements, from the independent trade union movement to the black consciousness movement, that made up the struggle for national liberation and the mass democratic movement.

And while Mandela was the one to initiate talks with the Apartheid government, he bound himself to the collective leadership of the ANC. He has always been an organisation man, at pains to explain that he was a product of the ANC, a man of the black, green and gold, while at the same time able to reach beyond organisational boundaries.

In the words of Fikile Bam, a Robben Island prisoner from the left-wing 1960s National Liberation Front:

’Mandela had this quality of being able to keep people together. It didn’t matter whether you were PAC or ANC or what, we all tended to congregate around him. Even his critics – and he had them – deferred to him at the end of the day as a moral leader. Without him I can’t visualise how the transition would have gone.’

Millions of words will be spoken and written on Mandela, now and in the future. And we will struggle to do this legacy justice. The most difficult part will be to capture its contradictory nature.

For not all that is wrong with current day SA can be put at the door of Zuma or Mbeki.

The negotiated settlement that brought about democratic SA on the basis universal franchise will be regarded as Mandela’s greatest achievement. It avoided the path of bloodletting.

And yet it is those compromises with capital that are now coming apart at the seams. The unresolved social inequality has entrenched South Africa, in the words of Thabo Mbeki, as a country of two nations: one white and relatively prosperous, the second black and poor. Mandela’s legacy will also include the fact that SA is more divided than ever as a result of inequality and social exclusion.

The great unifier could undertake symbolic acts of reconciliation to pacify the white nation. But the nature of this reconciliation required sacrifice – it was contradictory with any fundamental redistribution of wealth and done at the expense of the majority of black people.

Mandela, despite his greatness, could not bridge the social divide rooted in 21^st century capitalism, where the wealthiest get richer while everybody else gets poorer. SA’s transition is taking place in a period in which power has become embedded in the global corporation, enabled through the rules of neoliberal globalisation. Reconciliation required the abandonment of ANC policy rooted in the Freedom Charter.

It is worth remembering Mandela’s far-sighted comments on the Freedom Charter as early as 1959:

’It is true that in demanding the nationalisation of banks, the gold mines, and land, the Charter strikes a fatal blow at the financial and gold-mining monopolies and farming interests that have for centuries plundered the country and condemned its people to servitude. But such a step is imperative because the realisation of the Charter is impossible, unless and until these monopolies are smashed and the national wealth of the country handed over to the people.’

However the comment didn’t end there. The next sentence reads:

’The breaking up and democratisation of these monopolies will open up fresh fields for the development of a prosperous Non-European bourgeois class.’

This contradiction also forms part of the legacy. A vision of handing over the national wealth to the people along with the development of a prosperous bourgeoisie. Mandela repeated these commitments when he was released from jail: ’Nationalisation of the mines, banks and monopoly industry is the policy of the ANC and the change or modification of our views in this regard is inconceivable.’

Yet it is the abandonment of nationalisation which was dictated by the needs of reconciliation, not just with the white establishment, but with global capitalism. In his own words, ’Private sector development remains the motive force of growth and development.’ His encounters with the global elite at Davos, the home of the World Economic Forum, convinced him that compromises were needed with the financiers. It was the late-night encounters with the captains of South African capitalism, such as Harry Oppenheimer, that reinforced his belief that there was no alternative but the capitalist road. And in 1996, in the face of a financial melt-down, Mandela was happy to go along with the adoption of SA’s neoliberal economic policy GEAR and to use his immense political weight and moral authority to declare it ’non-negotiable’.

In the words of Ronnie Kasrils: ’That was the time, from 1991–1996, that the battle for the soul of the ANC got underway and was lost to corporate power and influence. That was the fatal turning point. I will call it our Faustian moment when we became entrapped – some today crying out that we sold our people down the river.’

It is precisely this capitalist road that has proved such a disaster and which is undermining Mandela’s life’s work.

Mandela’s model of reconciliation has come back to haunt us as we continue the arduous task of uniting our people into one nation. The revival and acknowledgement of tribal authority, granting it increasing power and influence, undermine democracy and potentially reinforce ethnic and tribal division. Mandela used his considerable stature amongst rural people to bestow legitimacy on these largely discredited structures.

As we take stock of the great contribution of Mandela to our liberation struggle: we now have to focus on overcoming inequality and achieving social justice. In this struggle we will need the abilities of many Mandelas. We will need an organisation dedicated to mobilising all South Africans, black and white, for the liberation of the wealth of this country from the hands of a tiny elite. We will need a movement like Mandela’s ANC, a movement based on a collective leadership with the combined qualities of Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki, Ahmed Kathrada, IB Tabata, Fatima Meer, Albertina Sisulu, Chris Hani, Ruth First, Robert Sobukwe, Steve Biko, Neville Alexander and the many greats that led our struggle for national liberation. But most importantly, we will need the people who take their lives into their own hands and become their own liberators.

Is that not what Nelson Mandela has lived and fought for?

Amandla!