What Mandela meant to me: five South African voices

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/07/what-nelson-mandela-meant-to-me

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THE YOUNG BLACK MAN

Andile Ngcolomba knows his opinion is taboo. "Mandela may be considered a great man in many countries, but he meant nothing to me. Millions of South Africans think the way I do. They just will not say it.''

Born in the harsh Cape township of Khayelitsha and raised there by his single mother, Ngcolomba, now 23, is part of the generation of poor, black South Africans who in theory had the most to gain from growing up under majority rule. Instead Ngcolomba and thousands of others in his age group have struggled through a poor education system or dropped out of it into unemployment and the temptations of drugs, alcohol or crime.

"In my mind, Mandela is a guy who manipulated our grandparents with propaganda. They died but he became famous. Look at how we live: has anything changed?'' he asks, offering a tour of his home. It is a leaky three-room breeze block house in a street that no one has bothered to name. He shares it with his unemployed elder sister and his domestic-worker mother, whose meagre earnings have never stretched to buying a carpet, or plaster and paint for the walls.

The image of Mandela as a universal icon of forgiveness is foreign to him. "I do not see that we have forgiven the whites. Mandela manipulated us into giving in so that the country could continue to be run in the same way,'' says Ngcolomba who dropped out of school the year before Matric, the equivalent of A levels.

"We are supposed to have free education. But the reality is that if you want to go to a decent school you have to go outside the township which involves enrolment fees and transport costs that our families simply cannot spare.''

He says that race still determines quality in the state sector with "white schools'' (those in areas dominated by whites) being the best, followed by "coloured schools'', attended by children from the fairer-skinned racial majority of the Western Cape. "My mother sent me to a coloured primary school in the city. That is why I speak good English and Afrikaans. But when I moved to Matthew Goniwe, a secondary school in Khayelitsha with only black teachers, they were hostile. I annoyed them by asking questions and pointing out that the science lab should be unlocked and used. 'You think you are clever because you come from a coloured school,' they said. They marked me down and told me I would never pass Matric in their school.

"I enquired about going to Cape Town High School – a decent state school outside the township, with up-to-date textbooks that would give me real prospects. But that was going to cost my mum an enrolment fee of 800 rand, plus the travelling expenses. That is how the government that Mandela created keeps us here, locked in poverty. You really have to be incredibly smart and unconventional in your thinking to break away.''

The majority of young men in Khayelitsha are unemployed. But Ngcolomba spent six months working as a warehouse cleaner for a supermarket chain. The job paid him 300 rand a week. ''Our bosses were Boers and they called us 'darkie' and names like that. I complained and was told I would be sacked if I made a habit of speaking out.''

He says the "Rainbow Nation'' is a myth. "Mandela gave us the word 'freedom' but there is no such thing. The word was put there to keep us quiet.''

THE 'COLOURED' COOK

Several of Veronica Daniels's friends said they would tear up their ANC membership cards after Nelson Mandela's death. "They are unhappy because we are still poor. But I will not tear up my card,'' said Daniels, a cook at a pre-school centre. "The reason people are upset with the ANC is that the politicians of today did not listen carefully enough to the words of Mandela.''

Daniels, a 60-year-old black woman classed as "coloured'' during apartheid, was working as a restaurant cook in February 1990 when Mandela was released from prison. "The boss said 'your father is coming out' and he brought his television to work. That day Mandela sent the message that we are all one family and that there would be equal education. We all cried and, later, at home in the squatter camp we sang and celebrated as hard as we could.

"He had not sat in prison for nothing. He came out and he opened doors, and he opened our eyes. Over time, privileges changed but we South Africans did not know what to do with our freedom. We cannot blame Mandela for that,'' said Daniels, married to Henry Lawrens, 50, a disabled former builder. She earns 2,700 rand (£200) a month and the couple live with eight other family members in a neat three-bedroom house built by an Irish charity in Mandela Park, on the edge of a shack settlement in Hout Bay, south of Cape Town.

Born in Port Elizabeth in the Eastern Cape, Daniels was brought to Cape Town by her mother, a domestic worker, when she was five. "It was the time of dom pas [passbooks]. My mother stayed at her employer's place. She left me with a coloured family who taught me Afrikaans and gave me the name Daniels. When my mother came to visit once a month, she spoke English and we answered in Afrikaans.''

Daniels started working at the age of 14 in a factory making shock absorbers for cars. She qualified for "coloured'' housing and felt she had been abandoned by her mother, who had remained "black'' and lived in a hillside shack in Hout Bay.

She reconciled with her mother in 1979 and lived close to her in a succession of shacks that were periodically razed by the authorities. "When the demolishers came with their dogs they would make us say a sentence that meant '88 small potatoes roll around the cellar'. If you could not say it in Afrikaans, you were considered a kaffir (black). Your shack was smashed up and you were taken and dumped a long way away. I always used to have my mother and some other blacks hiding in my place."

Daniels, who has three daughters and seven grandchildren, said that those who complained about South Africa today had forgotten the past. "Today the children can be educated – that is the greatest and most wonderful change to have come about thanks to Mandela. We still have apartheid, though. It will never go away in a country like South Africa.''

THE DROPOUT RADICAL

Lesiba Tloubatla was at a crossroads in his life when Nelson Mandela was released from jail in February 1990. "I was a dropout radical, 18 years old and leading a student movement in Limpopo Province. As I watched him come out of prison on television, I was ready for war. I was disappointed when he told us we should forgive.''

But Tloubatla, now 42 and studying for an MBA in his spare time, was inspired by Mandela. "His charisma and his determination to believe in what you want to achieve were a driving force for me,'' said the senior civil servant who was born in Limpopo and is the eldest son of an office messenger.

In 1990, Tloubatla's parents moved to Mamelodi, near Pretoria, leaving him in charge of his five siblings. He learned the hard way that freedom implies responsibility. "I impregnated a woman, and after that, my father told me he would no longer pay for me to finish school.''

Tloubatla got a job as a petrol pump attendant and, soon afterwards, the first of three "miracles involving white people'' happened in his professional life. "Mandela had a message for each of us. The one destined for people like me was: forgive the past and work hard to realise your dreams. The one he sent out to whites was: look around you and give something back. The whites who helped me were Mr van der Merwe, the owner of the Total petrol station in Silverton: he gave me the opportunity to study while working. Then there was Skalk van Wyk who was the other top student on my public administration diploma course. He was already working part-time in government and he took my CV and that's how I got my first job, in March 1997, as a clerk in the department of labour. Much later, in Cape Town, there was Jan du Plessis, who noticed me at a conference and pointed me in the direction of a position that was opening up.''

Tloubatla says that ordinary South Africans have translated Mandela's words into action to much greater effect than the politicians who followed. "Most people do not like the present ANC leadership. It has neglected the need for social and economic upliftment. It has failed to compensate people for the suffering they endured under apartheid. Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) has been dismal because it has helped the few.''

Now the director of the human resources development directorate at the department of health of the Western Cape, Tloubatla points to the irony that his own professional progress has been down to hard work and gestures from kind whites.

"There is something wrong with that. BEE is for people with political connections. You have a few successful blacks who have gone for it, sure. But what about all the millions of black South Africans who have been getting poorer while the whites have stayed the same, or become richer?

THE YOUNG WHITE MAN

As a white South African man, Rudolph Trümpelmann, 23, counts for little under black economic empowerment (BEE) rules. "Mandela did not want BEE. He wanted to fight hate with love. Nothing will change with Mandela's death because today's politicians have forgotten him already. They are just after power and money,'' he says.

But Trümpelmann, a student of computer animation, is not hostile towards efforts to lift up the non-white majority. "There need to be better opportunities for the lower classes,'' he says. "As a white person, you just have to find your way around the system,." Trümpelmann rents a room with his girlfriend in a house share in Cape Town. His divorced parents pay his fees but he works as a waiter for spending money.

"I love South Africa because it is open, people are nice, the weather is good and it is not too civilised. It is my country but I will have to go abroad for anything from 10 to 30 years, to start my career and get established, then come back. That is what whites do. And when they come back they run their own businesses so that they do not have to compete in the BEE environment.''

Trümpelmann is not interested in politics and rejects the idea that he should bear any moral pressure just because he is a white South African. "Mandela to me feels like he belonged to a different time. It is difficult for me, honestly, to feel any connection with him, except that we are both South African. As time goes by more and more black people in this country never experienced what he lived with, as in 'blacks off the train' or 'it's 5pm so everyone get off the streets'.

Trümpelmann grew up in semi-rural areas – "not on proper farms but there were always chickens around'' – and the black staff would call him klein baas' (little boss)."It is still like that in small towns. If I as a 10-year-old am feeding the cows with a black employee who is 30 or 40 he will call me klein boss. It is not something I find odd. It is not a racial thing so much as a measure of respect for the employer and his family.''

Trümpelmann's parents divorced when he was nine. As a result, he moved around the country – staying at times with his father, a university lecturer, and at times with his mother, a social worker mother, and often changing schools. "I was mainly at Afrikaans state schools where they played soccer and the pupils were 50-50 white and coloured. Hockey was my sport so I would go to the English school to play, and it was mainly white.

"You do not think about race much when you are at school because you are all thrown together so you just get on with it. Now, if I think about it, most of my friends are white or coloured. If you go out partying and people cannot afford it, then you are just not going to become friends. I think Mandela imagined people would mix more. But money is what stands in the way.''

THE EXILED ACTIVIST

Whenever Joy Sapieka burned the midnight oil in 1980s London, it was on behalf of campaigns against apartheid and for the release of Nelson Mandela. "Those were heady days. You never counted the hours. It was all about reconciliation. It was so important," she said.

"But if I look at what Mandela became after his release, his fate was out of his hands. The qualities he stood for – inclusiveness, reconciliation and forgiveness made him God-like. In the world we live in, he had to be packaged. Gandhi never became a brand but Mandela became someone, something that everyone wanted to touch. The low point was when he was photographed with Mel B of the Spice Girls. It is a big pity that his advisers let that happen. It obscures his profound life journey."

The child of Jewish parents, who had come to South Africa from eastern Europe through the East End of London, she grew up in the wealthy Sea Point district of Cape Town. Even though her grandfather had been a campaign manager for the Communist party in the 1948 South African elections, Sapieka's immediate family was conservative. "We could see Robben Island through binoculars from the living room. But at home we did not talk about Mandela or communism. They were dirty words. I could not stand it," she said.

Her only ambition was to leave the country. "At the University of Cape Town we demonstrated against Bantu education, friends were arrested, there were spies everywhere. In those days you had three choices: you put your life on the line, you turned a blind eye to apartheid, or you got out."

Sapieka moved to London in 1974 and worked for a range of organisations supporting the anti-apartheid movement. Twenty years later, in 1994, she set foot inside South Africa House for the first time, to vote. "It was so emotional. We had got our passports back so we could vote. It was weird going into the bowels of that building."

It took her a further seven years to move back to South Africa and Cape Town where, now 60, she lives with her architect husband and works as an arts publicist. "It was hard coming back because people's lives here had been so eventful that no one really cared what you had been doing in London. Yet the struggle against apartheid had defined many of our lives even over there."

The hardest thing, she says, was realising that the top prize in the struggle against apartheid was for South Africa to be able to become a country like any other. "We had these two great icons full of goodness – Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela – and they gave their lives so that we should be free to be greedy and divisive, and have politicians who are only interested in our their own aggrandisement and comforts.''

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