Nelson Mandela could neither cry nor blink fast

By Kipkoech Tanui

NINETY-FIVE years gloriously lived, just five short of a century.

Nelson Mandiba Mandela, the icon of South Africa’s battle with Apartheid, left behind a bewildered and stunned Africa.

The moral icon of the world, the grand old man who inspired many across the world and after whom hundreds of books and documentaries have been done, leaves behind a legacy neck and neck with that of Pope John Paul II.

Not that his death was unexpected, he had been on his deathbed for months, slipping into coma regularly. But Africa, nay the world prayed. His family held hands and ringed his bed, stung by the reality his days were running out fast, but buoyed by the love and respect the world showed him.

He too, like any African old man, imbued by grandeur of culture was wizened by painful lessons of the mortality of man. In one of his jokes about the expiry of his time, Mandiba talked about his first wish when he slips into the world hereafter. To paraphrase him, he once famously joked: “When I die, the first thing I’ll do on getting to the other side, will be to ask Govan Mbeki to guide me to the ANC registration desk.”

That was vintage Mandela, a man who lived both as a giant who was welcomed with red carpets and 21-gun salutes in world capitals, but who at the same time would battle with the challenges of life stoically and with the simplicity of the ordinary man.

When he was released from prison, he went back to the love of his life, Winnie Mandela, but soon the relationship slid to the rocks, scraping through many a iceberg in the love-bereft family ocean. Then he threw in the bombshell; he was lonely as Winnie was now an irregular visitor into their bedroom.

Few men in Africa would share such personal pain and sense of betrayal with their countrymen and women; not in this era where the truth like beauty varies from person to person. He did not even care that others would love and exchange knowing winks when they met him. Just like he faced a death sentence when he was dispatched to Robben Island, where he spent the next 27 years, Mandela faced the world and shared the travails of his marriage.

But that was not a rare streak in Mandela’s character for after he separated with Winnie, he took the hand of Graca Mandela, the wife of his late friend and former Mozambique’s President Samora Machel. Talk of the audacity of love and hope! Machel was not just a revolutionary like him but he too had been brutalized and finally killed by the South Africa’s Apartheid system.

When he came to Kenya on his release, at Nyayo National Stadium, there may have been a little gaffe as he posed for pictures with then President Moi, for he interchanged the buttons of his coat, and he looked like an old man just back from the initiation of his sons.

But that even few Kenyans noticed and if they did, they ignored it. What stood out forever was the message he brought to Kenya.

In his speech, he asked where the family of Kenya’s freedom struggle icons such as General China and Dedan Kimathi were. He pricked the conscience of the Kenyan leadership over how freedom fighters had been neglected. His words echoed the line in the forward of JM Kariuki’s book: “After the hunt (Independence) strength replaced speed”. In other words once the animal was killed and the sharing was taking place, those with bigger biceps chased away fellow compatriots and stuffed their stomachs with succulent meat as the rest watched from the bushes and the sidelines.

After the speech at Nyayo Stadium, relationships between Kenya and Mandela hit its lowest, rekindling memories of the days the East African nation had refused to fully severe links with Apartheid South Africa.

This was to come out in public one day when Mandela landed at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport. The freedom fighter refused to alight from his plane to be met by a junior government official sent to receive him as he transited JKIA. The excuse given by handlers was that he was tired and asleep!

At the Burundi Peace Talks convened by Moi at State House Nairobi later in the 1990s Kenya saw the other side of Mandela, the side tortured and desecrated by imprisonment and hard labour. When he took his seat next to Moi and Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni, cameras flashed and Mandela held the hands to his eyes. Moi stood up and ordered that the camera flashes be dimmed off.

Yes, Mandela could neither cry (as his tear glands were destroyed by the chippings from stones he cut in the Robben Island quarries as part of hard labour sentence) nor blink fast enough to avoid the flashlight.

Today, Africa weeps for and celebrates Mandela — the man, who was treated as a king but lived like a servant, one who was locked away to quietly slip into oblivion but reemerged, with clenched fist, a legend.

That was Mandiba, the man Africa will never forget. I treasure the moment a few of us shook his hands outside the home he was given by his peer, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, in Arusha as he brokered the Burundi peace talks. Into that house, only African presidents were allowed in, their bodyguards locked out… but not Mandela’s.

He brought honour and respect to Africa, hitherto seen as the sick and forgotten continent. If only there were 10 million Africans like him!

Rest in Peace Mandela!