Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface: Mandela and Mbeki: Two great lures for ‘Republicans’
- Chapter 1 What is ‘greatness’ exactly? The peculiarities of Mandela and Mbeki
- Chapter 2 What makes ‘Republicans’ Republicans? ‘We would still have chosen Frank and Lucille!’
- Chapter 3 When Mandela and Mbeki descend wildly into ‘novelistic’ fiction ‘Imagined communities’ and the stereotypes of Calpurnia and Julius Caesar
- Chapter 4 ‘Who first’ and who is the ‘martial captain’ of the class? Of the ‘commoners’ and ‘bourgeois’ people
- Chapter 5 ‘This thing of us is more than a comrades’ club’ The ‘medieval’ mentality of the ANC
- Chapter 6 ‘The Prince William inheritance’ of Thabo Mbeki ‘Oh by the way, I have decided that you will be my Deputy President’
- Chapter 7 ‘Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t’ ‘Hyphenation’, ‘dehyphenation’, and the ‘modern presidency’
- Chapter 8 Stuck on the wrong and right side of history Why Mr Mbeki lost his Presidency and why Mr Mandela did not
- Chapter 9 Reflections on the problems of paternal power and nostalgia Why Mr Mbeki was clearly a ‘patriarchalist’ and why Mr Mandela was clearly a ‘Republican’
- List of sources
- Index
Chapter 8 - Stuck on the wrong and right side of history Why Mr Mbeki lost his Presidency and why Mr Mandela did not
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 March 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface: Mandela and Mbeki: Two great lures for ‘Republicans’
- Chapter 1 What is ‘greatness’ exactly? The peculiarities of Mandela and Mbeki
- Chapter 2 What makes ‘Republicans’ Republicans? ‘We would still have chosen Frank and Lucille!’
- Chapter 3 When Mandela and Mbeki descend wildly into ‘novelistic’ fiction ‘Imagined communities’ and the stereotypes of Calpurnia and Julius Caesar
- Chapter 4 ‘Who first’ and who is the ‘martial captain’ of the class? Of the ‘commoners’ and ‘bourgeois’ people
- Chapter 5 ‘This thing of us is more than a comrades’ club’ The ‘medieval’ mentality of the ANC
- Chapter 6 ‘The Prince William inheritance’ of Thabo Mbeki ‘Oh by the way, I have decided that you will be my Deputy President’
- Chapter 7 ‘Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t’ ‘Hyphenation’, ‘dehyphenation’, and the ‘modern presidency’
- Chapter 8 Stuck on the wrong and right side of history Why Mr Mbeki lost his Presidency and why Mr Mandela did not
- Chapter 9 Reflections on the problems of paternal power and nostalgia Why Mr Mbeki was clearly a ‘patriarchalist’ and why Mr Mandela was clearly a ‘Republican’
- List of sources
- Index
Summary
Political figures … are dated people, victims of the recycling process of politics, doomed if they openly say what they truly think. (Gay Talese)
[Richard] Nixon's personal style was an embarrassing blend of the slick and the corny … I remember an awkward dinner at Henry Luce's [Editor-In-Chief of Time Magazine] apartment, when Nixon seemed not to realize there might be several different points of view among a dozen senior Time Inc. editors. He reacted sympathetically to the rigidly laissez-fair line of his first questioner, the most conservative man at the table, then tried to adjust to the more pragmatic conservatism of his second questioner, then realized with increasing discomfort that Luce was to the Left, so to speak, of the editors who had spoken thus far. In due course others emerged to the Left of Luce, but Nixon, instead of letting Time Inc. debate with itself (one of our chief hobbies), kept on trying to agree with everybody. Luce was always vexed when I cited this kind of expediency as a question mark about Nixon's character; he thought Nixon's ‘flexibility’ was well within acceptable political practice. Notwithstanding my question mark, I voted for Nixon with conviction in 1960 … I supported Nixon again in 1968. (Hedley Donovan)
OF NELSON MANDELA IT DOES NOT SEEM APPROPRIATE to regard his personal style as ‘an embarrassing blend of the slick and the corny’ or to say that there was in his character a ‘kind of expediency’. Unquestionably, Mandela performed brilliantly (satisfactorily) as a world statesman and got along well with his fellow countrymen (his ‘Republicans’) who, at all times, found it exceedingly hard to begrudge him anything, and who always spoke with high regard for his heroism. His life story was a straightforward narrative of individual achievement – his was a story of a ‘liege lord’ whose main attraction and appealing blend lay in his ability to bring about a nation in which enduring national love and reconciliation seemed achievable, and whose sense of morality always seemed very compelling in that it had the quality of charisma and legend (indeed, some even regarded Mandela as a saint). To use Spector Person's insights in ‘Knowledge and authority’, Mandela, courteous as always, was his nation's ‘secular version of the godhead’ – his authority consisted of miracle, legend, and moral power. (Never before has the importance of a leader been more pronounced in South African history.)
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- Information
- Mandela and MbekiThe Hero and the Outsider, pp. 269 - 306Publisher: University of South AfricaPrint publication year: 2012