{UAH} Disappointment in Successors to Nelson Mandela, a Revered Father of a Nation

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December 6, 2013

Disappointment in Successors to Nelson Mandela, a Revered Father of a Nation

By LYDIA POLGREEN

MVEZO, South Africa — Adam Bhasikile's day begins at dawn, always in the same way. Flanked by donkeys, she walks to the valley floor, collecting water for the family to cook, clean and bathe from the Mbashe River, which snakes around this hilltop village like a winding moat. It is an unending ritual that Nelson Mandela's mother, who gave birth to the future president here in 1918, almost certainly performed as well.

More recently, Mrs. Bhasikile passes something else on her walk: a sprawling complex with gleaming porcelain toilets, showers and faucets that gush water with a flick of the wrist. The complex includes a cavernous meeting hall, a tribal courtroom and a private residence for the village chief. And not just any chief — the man in charge here is Mandla Mandela, favored grandson of Mr. Mandela.

But the truck that fills the water tanks at the Great Place, as the hulking set of buildings is known, does not stop at Mrs. Bhasikile's house.

"That water is not for us; it is for them," she said with a disapproving grunt as she walked up the craggy hillside, 40 liters of water astride each of her three donkeys. As for Chief Mandla, Mrs. Bhasikile is unimpressed despite his pedigree. "He is not like his grandfather," she said.

The disgruntlement among Chief Mandla's subjects mirrors the disappointment many South Africans feel about the generations that have succeeded the heroes of this nation's liberation struggle. Mr. Mandela's death on Thursday in many ways is the end of the line for the cohort of leaders who carried the battle against apartheid from a lonely and seemingly hopeless struggle to an inevitable moral and political victory cheered by much of the world. Other lions of the struggle, like Oliver Tambo, Walter and Albertina Sisulu and Joe Slovo, have been dead for years.

Perhaps inevitably, the following generations of leaders have struggled to live up to their legacy. Mr. Mandela's successor as president, Thabo Mbeki, was roundly criticized for his resistance to broadly accepted methods of treating and preventing AIDS, a stance that added to the nation's death toll from the disease, researchers concluded. South Africa's current president, Jacob Zuma, has been under a cloud for years, investigated in corruption and rape cases.

Younger leaders like the firebrand Julius Malema have attracted a following among disgruntled, jobless youth, but his radical views and harsh criticism of older leaders got him expelled from Mr. Mandela's party, the African National Congress. And the children of some families deeply involved in the struggle against apartheid — the Mandelas, the Tambos and others — have largely shied away from politics.

"In all of the great liberation movements there is the problem of producing great leaders to take over," said William Gumede, an analyst who has written extensively about Mr. Mandela. "But in this case, there has really been a failure to pass the torch."

Mr. Mandela is often called the father of the new South Africa, and he leaves behind an impressive legacy, even if the future of his metaphoric child, the Rainbow Nation, remains uncertain. But the story of his flesh-and-blood family has been marked by missteps, tragedy and neglect — a legacy of Mr. Mandela's admitted failings as a husband and father amid the battle against apartheid and his decades of imprisonment.

His former wife, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, is a polarizing figure, as underscored when the bodies of two young men last seen severely beaten at her house 25 years ago were unearthed in Soweto this year. Their deaths were connected to the Mandela United Football Club, a thuggish group that she used as her security team. She would eventually be sentenced to prison twice, though she never actually served a term because one sentence was reduced to a fine and another was suspended.

Mr. Mandela's daughters with Mrs. Madikizela-Mandela have also suffered in the harsh glare of the spotlight. One daughter, Zindzi Mandela, has long been a fixture in the tabloid press, the subject of stories about her penchant for lavish birthday parties and her extensive personal debts.

One of Mr. Mandela's sons-in-law, Isaac Amuah, was charged with rape in 2010. One of his grandsons, Zondwa Mandela, has been implicated along with a nephew of the current president, Mr. Zuma, in a deal that stripped the assets of a gold mine while leaving its 3,000 workers unpaid.

Mandla Mandela, the eldest grandson, was at the center of a public battle with the more than a dozen family members in recent months over where three of Nelson Mandela's children, and eventually the leader himself, would be buried, leading to court-ordered exhumations.

And a separate squabble over a trust fund that Mr. Mandela set up for his descendants has led to a tense fight between two of his daughters and one of his oldest friends, resulting in a bitter exchange of affidavits in which the Mandela sisters are portrayed as impatient to get their hands on the money set aside for future generations.

Makaziwe Mandela, Mr. Mandela's eldest daughter and one of the relatives in the legal fight, told The Daily Mail in October 2010 that "I have none of the simple memories other children have with their fathers, the day we went swimming together, or for a picnic or camping. No, no, no, nothing." She continued: "I'll be sad when he's gone, but he hasn't been a constant presence in my life."

Two of Mr. Mandela's granddaughters are appearing in a reality television show chronicling their lives as young professionals and inheritors of the Mandela legacy. The show was widely mocked when it aired in South Africa.

Mr. Mandela was aware of his failings as a husband and father. "I led a thoroughly immoral life," he writes in his autobiography, without fully explaining.

"To be the father of a nation is a great honor, but to be the father of a family is a greater joy," Mr. Mandela wrote. "But it was a joy I had far too little of."

His children have often been at odds. When his son Makgatho died of AIDS in 2005, relations were so strained that some of his siblings were not allowed to sit with the body during the traditional mourning period, according to the book "Young Mandela: The Revolutionary Years," by David James Smith.

Unlike the descendants of Walter and Albertina Sisulu, another prominent family, Mr. Mandela's descendants have largely shied away from public service, mostly avoiding politics. One daughter from his marriage to Mrs. Madikizela-Mandela, Zenani, serves as ambassador to Argentina. And his grandson Mandla has reclaimed the Mandelas' place in the ruling family of the Thembu clan of the Xhosa people, to which Mr. Mandela belonged.

Mandla Mandela's rise was a great source of pride for Mr. Mandela, who wrote of the pain of his father losing his chiefdom after a dispute with colonial authorities.

But Chief Mandla has been surrounded by controversy. He decided to destroy the ruins of the hut in which Mr. Mandela was born and replace them with a replica, angering preservationists and officials at the Nelson Mandela Museum. His messy divorce fight with his wife, Tando, tarnished his image when she testified in court that he had abused her and cheated on her.

Chief Mandla's second wife — South African traditional law allows polygamy — gave birth in 2011 to a son, who was presented to Mr. Mandela as a great-grandson. But in 2012 Chief Mandla denied that the boy was his, accusing one of his brothers of fathering him. Meanwhile, he had taken a third wife, in defiance of a court order issued in connection with his divorce from his first wife. In the deeply traditional society here, his behavior has not sat well with residents.

Chief Mandla also quietly had the bodies of his grandfather's three children disinterred from a family graveyard in Qunu, where the elder Mr. Mandela grew up, and reburied them here in Mvezo. This was widely perceived as an attempt to ensure that his grandfather would also be buried in Mvezo, despite his expressed wish to be buried in Qunu. A judge ordered that the bodies be taken back to Qunu for reburial.

Mvezo sits in the poorest of South Africa's provinces, the Eastern Cape, almost entirely a so-called Bantustan during apartheid. These quasi-independent regions were homelands for blacks, who had no citizenship in the South Africa ruled by whites.

These areas were badly neglected, a legacy that remains throughout the Eastern Cape — in its dilapidated schools and hospitals, its crumbling roads, its isolated villages.

In his autobiography, Mr. Mandela described the leadership style he had learned from the king of the AbaThembu. "I always remember the regent's axiom: A leader, he said, is like a shepherd," Mr. Mandela wrote. "He stays behind the flock, letting the most nimble go out ahead, whereupon the others follow, not realizing that all along they are being directed from behind."

But few here see the younger Mr. Mandela as following in his grandfather's footsteps. "I must tell the truth, Madiba brought people together," said Noluzile Gamakhulu, a resident, referring to Mr. Mandela by his clan name. "Mandla is very far from the old man's way of doing things."

Of course, few people could measure up to the elder Mr. Mandela — a Nobel laureate and beloved figure. But the disappointment echoes a broader disenchantment with the inheritors of the liberation struggle. Victoria Msiwa, 84, whose grandfather was Mr. Mandela's teacher, said that the younger generation had spoiled the country, leaving her oddly nostalgic for the quiet certainties of the apartheid era.

"When I compare what we grew under to what is today," she said, her voice trailing off. "I don't make out a difference. People say we are free, but we cannot walk around at night."

Her tractor was stolen by thieves two years ago.

"Look at this, we have burglar bars, here in this rural area," she said. "The analysts can say if this is better. I am old. I am tired."

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Rehema
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