Nelson Mandela won the battle but we are still fighting against inequality

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/13/nelson-mandela-battle-war-inequality

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I was born on 16 February 1989, a year before Nelson Mandela was released from jail. Six years later I became a pupil at a school that had been reserved for white children only under apartheid – which ended just two years earlier in 1994. Time and again my parents and everyone around me told me how fortunate I was to be part of the first generation of black South Africans to enjoy opportunities denied to countless generations before me.

The same happened when we moved from the township to suburbia later that year. And again in 2003 when I changed from a state school to a private one. It was clear to me at the time that I owed this all to Mandela.

Although many white South Africans do not approve of the African National Congress or Mandela's successors as president, I have never heard any of them speak ill of Madiba himself. Not even the ones I consider racist. If anything, they are the first to sing his praises and to panic every time he is admitted to hospital. Many white South Africans, young and old, have predicted civil war and economic destitution "when Mandela goes". They credited him with keeping them safe, even though he has been out of the political arena for over a decade.

Many black South Africans, including my family, feel similarly. They idolise Madiba, as I did. And from the way the former president is seen in other countries, one would even swear that he was responsible for ending apartheid single-handedly.

It was only when I went to university that I started to meet people who did not entirely agree. I remember my first (and last) ANC youth league meeting in 2008. Having arrived early, the person sitting next to me asked what I thought of Mandela. Wanting to seem sufficiently grateful, I began to sing his praises as I had routinely done in the past. I was stunned when he expressed clear disapproval. What he went on to say shocked me at first. He said Mandela was the perfect bluff for South Africa – "a false image of the South African reality". "South Africa is not a rainbow nation where people live in harmony and have equal opportunities," he said, adding that he saw Mandela as the symbol of many broken promises for him and his family.

The rise of populist leaders in the ANC, many of them critical of Mandela, showed how widespread this sentiment has become. Former ANC youth league leader Julius Malema, with his "shoot the Boer" songs, quickly rose to fame because his words resonated with many disillusioned young South Africans.

Even Winnie Madikizela-Mandela has been known to criticise her former husband. At a lecture she gave at Wits University in 2009 she argued that it was fitting for her ex-husband's statue to be in Sandton (one of Johannesburg's most affluent suburbs) as opposed to Soweto (South Africa's largest township) as Mandela had only kept the promises that he made to white South Africans. She pointed out that most black South Africans are still living in the same shackles of poverty as they did under apartheid.

It was around this time that I started to reconsider my feelings about Mandela. I had to face the fact that while I was attending formerly white schools, poverty had kept many of my cousins and other black peers in the same schools that my parents had to attend under apartheid. While I was relocating to the leafy streets of suburbia, most of my peers of colour were still trapped in the townships. While my mother was qualifying as a medical doctor and my father as an accountant, the majority of my peers' parents were still working in the same menial jobs.

While I was indirectly grateful to Mandela for my fortune, many of my compatriots were waiting for him and his government to address the misfortune that they inherited from apartheid. For those like me, Mandela became a symbol of the change and opportunities in "the new South Africa" but for many he became a symbol of the lack of change and the lack of opportunities in post-apartheid South Africa.

I realised that although much has been done to eradicate poverty and address inequality, it is not enough. The reality is that opportunities have been created for an elite few and not the masses. Despite the efforts of those such as Mandela, we are not yet a rainbow nation where people of all races live together in harmony and enjoy the same freedoms and opportunities. While Mandela deserves to be celebrated as the hero that he is, the battle he fought is far from over.

Nelson Mandela and his comrades may have won the fight against apartheid but they have not yet won the war against inequality.

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