Amatoritsero Ede<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cI come to bury Caesar, not to praise him\u2026\u201d So proceeds Mark Anthony\u2019s famous funeral oration in honour of Shakespeare\u2019s Julius Caesar who has just succumbed to a bloody palace coup. The speech is also a backhanded slap at the guilty conspirators, Caius Cassius and the brutish Marcus Brutus \u2013 both \u201chonourable men\u201d who, despite being politically ambitious regicides in this matter, ironically justify their murderous act by accusing the deceased of diseased ambition.<\/p>\n Although, unlike the fictional Caesar, Nelson Mandela escaped the political assassin’s dagger at the end and peacefully faded away in his sleep, his demise also inspired valediction as well as veiled malediction when his immortality is set against the corpses of those living, mostly sit-tight, corrupt or inept African leaders like Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe or Nigeria’s Goodluck Jonathan, who have the vision of maggots. That Valedictory speech was given by a real life orator with skills equal to that of Mark Anthony – \u00a0 no less a skilled public speaker than American president Barack Obama. He gave, “measure for measure,” a high tension Shakespearian delivery with all the appropriate crowd-cues and all the necessary rhetorical flourishes compared to Anthony’s.<\/p>\n However a down-to-earth Mandela would, of course, eschew comparison to mighty Caesar. But it must be said that he always displayed a political wisdom and regal carriage traceable to the dignity of his ancient African royal line. His post-apartheid \u2018inhuman\u2019 embrace of otherwise sworn apartheid-loving political enemies is definitely godlike if not regal. Mandela\u2019s inhumanity humanizes him to divine proportions. It is this supreme irony that is of interest here. How could a man named \u2018trouble\u2019 forgive his jailer, his tormentors, and centuries of apartheid brutality without bitterness? This, certainly, is not human.<\/p>\n I witnessed and still remember the convening of South Africa\u2019s unique Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) with bemusement. This was, as the world knows, after Mandela\u2019s release from twenty-seven years of political prison and, ascension to his country\u2019s presidency. He had lost his prime behind bars, was estranged from family, did not see his children take their first tottering steps or lose their first set of teeth to the tooth fairy, nevertheless he came out into the staggering light of freedom to leave the darkness behind him forever. He called for a truce and set up the psychological safety valve that was the TRC. He did not shout, \u2018give me my shorts, I want to riot!\u2019<\/p>\n Without the TRC the trauma, injustice and hurt of the apartheid years would surely have burnt the new South Africa to the ground. While the transition to democracy has not been without some post-apartheid hiccups, the TRC installed restorative justice through confession, contrition and a reciprocal forgiveness, and mid-wifed democracy in South Africa. This was all possible due to the ancient African philosophy of Ubuntu embraced by Mandela as an African elder-leader of the community. The African spirit of community required reconciliation and understanding preceded by penitence as respectively tough and shaming as it was to demand the former of victims and the latter from perpetrators.\u00a0<\/b>Compromise, \u00a0fellow feeling and reconciliation are germane to the age-old village-square domestic and communal conflict resolution style typical to the African continent before modernity.<\/p>\n Mandela\u2019s life reenacts the example of a need for acknowledging our common humanity as preached by such other heroic figures before him like Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King and other kindred spirits. It is witness to his wisdom and thoughtfulness that a man whose public and private life was mostly troubled and whose middle name, Rolihlahla, literally means trouble should urge humanity to embrace peace by the example of his own selflessness, non-racial politics and material sacrifices.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Example of Mandela Amatoritsero Ede \u201cI come to bury Caesar, not to praise him\u2026\u201d So proceeds Mark Anthony\u2019s famous funeral oration in honour of Shakespeare\u2019s Julius Caesar who has just succumbed to a bloody palace coup. The speech is also a backhanded slap at the guilty conspirators, Caius Cassius […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":238,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1723","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1723","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1723"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1723\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2050,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1723\/revisions\/2050"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1723"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}