Happy Birthday, Nelson Mandela

The Writer ON 18th July, Nelson Mandela will be 90 years old. It is always nice when someone lives to such a great age, but in Mandela's case, the occasion brings to his friends, joy of a completely different kind.

For one thing, he has no right to be alive at all. You do not spend 27 years in the jails of the monstrous apartheid regime and come back to enjoy a long life. Indeed, Mandela was nearly killed by tuberculosis and prostate enlargement during his incarceration.

He's also got permanent eye damage. Imprisonment also destroyed his marriage to a very beautiful woman, and made him a stranger to his children. All these can be a cause for an early death, and that he's overcome them to reach age 90 is a marvel.

I was thus very disappointed when I read in the South African press that the famous South African musician, Hugh Masekela, had said that he had "been saying 'Happy Birthday' to Mandela for over 30 years" and that, "quite frankly", he was "tired."

Of course Mr Masekela is entitled to his point of view; certainly he must have a good reason for complaining, as he did, that he'd been singing the praises of Mr Mandela for years "without acknowledgement". It would have been charitable of him, though, to show appreciation of the fact that when a person attains the cult status that has been awarded to Mr Mandela — without his say-so — people around him can find his admirers tiresome and thereby build a curtain around him that makes him appear remote to his friends. What can you do if messages sent to you are kept from you and filed away to save you from 'eye fatigue'?

If one penetrates the curtain and gets to Mr Mandela, however, one discovers a person of great warmth and empathy. I am one of the lucky few who have seen him at close quarters and what I found does go against the grain of the impression Hugh Masekela's statement gives.

In 1993, I went to see Mr Mandela in the company of the late Chief MKO Abiola, the Nigerian politician. (Abiola was to be jailed a year later by the Nigerian military dictator, General Sani Abacha, after Abiola had challenged Abacha when Abacha refused to allow the victorious Abiola to become President, following the annulment by Abaca's predecessor, General Ibrahim Babangida, of the June 12, 1993 election, which Abiola won).

At our meeting with Mr Mandela, he paid warm tribute to all the African leaders who had received him on his undercover mission across the African continent in 1962, that added to his reputation as the 'The Black Pimpernel' . Despite his lengthy incarceration, he remembered all their names and titles. For instance, he singled out for praise, "the Premier of Northern Nigeria, Alhaji Sir Ahmadu Bello, Sardauna of Sokoto", who gave Mr Mandela £10,000 sterling to help the ANC in its struggle against apartheid.

As a former radio journalist, I marvelled at Mr Mandela's ability to reel off the name and titles of this particular politician, for it used to beat even news readers with a script in front of them. Mandela not only remembered the Sardauna but distinguished him from "Alhaji Tafawa Balewa, the Federal Nigerian Prime Minister."

Anyway, when Abacha jailed Abiola, I wrote to Mr Mandela to brief him and ask him to use his influence with General Abacha to have Abiola released. Mr Mandela agreed to see me and one of Abiola's sons, and we went to his official residence in Pretoria, where we had lunch with him and the then South African Foreign Minister, the late Alfred Nzo. Despite the convention among African political leaders which strictly forbids their "interfering in the internal affairs" of each other's countries, Mr Mandela made three direct attempts to have Abiola released.

First, he sent Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, to talk to Abacha in Abuja. Abacha made promises to Archbishop Tutu but didn't keep them. But Mr Mandela didn't give up and sent his then deputy president, Mr Thabo Mbeki, to see Abacha again. Once more, Abacha spoke sweetly but kept Abiola in jail.

Despite these instances of what can be described as "humiliation" at the hands of Abacha, what Mr Mandela did next was to go to Abuja himself to see Abacha. He made a stopover in Abuja while on his way home to South Africa from a meeting of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) in Tunis.

To Mr Mandela's chagrin, Abacha tried to manipulate the meeting to his own political advantage by issuing a mendacious statement, while Mr Mandela was in the air flying back home, claiming that Mr Mandela had come to see him to discuss "the world economic situation". No mention was made of Abiola in Abacha's statement.

Realising that this would be a heavy blow to Abiola's family, which had pinned its hopes on him, Mr Mandela issued a dignified statement, expressly contradicting what Abacha's statement had said, and emphasising that he had travelled to Abuja at the request of Abiola's family to discuss the release of Abiola. Meanwhile, Abacha kept Abiola in jail.

But despite being treated with such disregard - some might say contempt - by Abacha, Mr Mandela's spirit is so indomitable that he didn't give up on Abacha and when, in November 1995, the Nigerian writer, Ken Saro-Wiwa, was condemned to death by an Abacha kangaroo court for agitating for a fairer sharing of Nigeria's oil resources with the people whose lands produced the oil (particularly Saro-Wiwa's own Ogoni people), and representations were made to Mr Mandela to appeal for clemency for them, Mr Mandela again contacted Abacha, asking him to spare the lives of Ken Saro-Wiwa and the eight other Ogoni activists condemned with him.

Once more, Abacha made promises and when Mr Mandela was asked by the press about his position on the Ogoni Nine, while he was attending a Commonwealth Heads of Government conference in New Zealand, Mr Mandela thought it unwise to criticise Abacha publicly while pleading with him in secret. The media misread his reticence as indifference to the Ogonis' fate and when Saro-Wiwa and the others were hanged by Abacha while the Commonwealth Conference was actually taking place, some newspapers descended on Mr Mandela and criticised his "inaction" severely. One British paper called him "the man who wasn't there".

I knew they were doing Mandela an injustice and I flew to Johannesburg to interview him about his stance. He was more candid with me than any politician I have ever interviewed. Ignoring the code of the Africa leaders' "trade union", whereby they don't criticise one another in public, Mr Mandela described Abacha as a "brutal dictator" who had set up a "kangaroo court" to murder Ken Saro-Wiwa and his fellow activists. He added that Abacha was a man who had no "regard for the facts", and he called on the Nigerian opposition to learn a lesson from the ANC's struggle and intensify their efforts to get rid of Abacha.

This was incendiary stuff of an unprecedented nature. The interview was disseminated widely — on the BBC World Service, in The London Observer and other papers. So explosive were Mr Mandela's comments that he was criticised by some members of his own ANC for ignoring diplomatic practice and giving vent to his true feelings about a fellow African head of state.

NOTION

But they didn't realise the importance to humanity of what Mandela had done. He was not deterred by the criticism he knew he would attract by breaking the "non-interference" taboo. By breaking it, he set a precedent whereby the 'sacred' notion that an African head of state may not publicly criticise a "brother" head of state who abuses human rights in his own country, was jettisoned for ever. Mandela's position no doubt contributed to the emergence, since then, of the "peer review mechanism" introduced into the charter of the African Union (AU), whereby the internal politics of African countries can be examined by their own "peers" and any shortcomings that are found exposed to the whole world.

Actually, it is not all that strange that some people in South Africa do not quite appreciate Mandela's place in history. After all, Jesus did tell us that a prophet is not without honour, "except in his own country".

Mr Mandela can rest assured that if some South Africans do not intend to retain the love they exhibited towards him initially, we in the rest of Africa will continue to do so. On their behalf, I say "Happy Birthday, Tata! (Father)"