Orin Gordon
The one time I saw my hero Nelson Mandela, I wasn’t supposed to be in the room. In 1997, at the Commonwealth summit in Edinburgh, I slipped into his press conference with Tony Blair, the host prime minister. I was covering the Caribbean for the BBC. Mandela, then president of South Africa, wasn’t part of my beat; but I had to see the great man in person.
Hugh Masekela’s pore-raising and plaintive Bring Him Back Home became a global anthem. After his release in 1990, Jamaica’s Carlene Davis updated Masekela with Welcome Home Mister Mandela. His biographical tome, Long Walk to Freedom, occupied a prominent place on my bookshelf.
In 1999, I stood in the small cell on Robben Island where Mandela spent most of the 27 years of his imprisonment. Your bath/shower/toilet room is probably bigger. I couldn’t wrap my head around how he managed personal and national reconciliation with the people who physically and psychologically abused him, locked him up and labelled him a terrorist.
However, the longer I stayed in the country, the more I came to realise that many Black South Africans were disappointed in Mandela—from lower middle-class Sowetans to well-heeled professionals. In five years in office, they said, he hadn’t done any rebalancing of the inequalities of apartheid.
Mandela felt that he needed to reassure the fearful that the end of apartheid meant neither retribution nor redistribution. When he was growing up in an all-white community, Francois Pienaar, the Afrikaner captain of the South Africa rugby union team, heard talk of civil war whenever the terrorist was released. They stocked up on food and water, and “prepared for armageddon”.
When Pienaar led South Africa to victory at the Rugby World Cup in Johannesburg in 1995, Mandela walked out to greet him in the Springboks’ cap and rugby shirt, apartheid’s most potent sporting symbol. It was a powerful moment. White South Africans rallied to Madiba. The rainbow nation, as Archbishop Desmond Tutu described them, would sing in unison the world’s most beautiful national anthem—the Xhosa language Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika.
However, of all of the pieces of ordnance that minority rule left, Mandela did not defuse the most explosive—apartheid’s bloody land grab. It’s still the case today that 80 per cent of Blacks own only four per cent of privately-owned land. Whites comprise eight per cent of the population but own 75 per cent.
The apartheid government forcibly evicted Black and Indian landowners and banished them to smaller and inferior lots, homelands and bantustans. For decades, governments approached the issue with caution. Indian South African journalist Verashni Pillay, whose family was dispossessed in the 1960s, described it this way.
“What infuriates me is that not a single white person has had their land taken without compensation by our democratic government in thirty years. But millions of black South Africans lost theirs to the apartheid government, including my family, a wrong that has never been fully addressed.
“Many white people got to keep the land that was taken during forced removals in the sixties (never mind the earlier land grabs) and yet some still complain and make themselves the victims. It’s like we’re living in the upside-down.”
President Trump has embraced the upside-down. It led to the Oval Office roll-the-tape pantofarce when he met with President Cyril Ramaphosa at the White House. Ramaphosa’s government led passage of a law that allowed seizure of land without compensation, subject to judicial review. It wasn’t radical stuff, but the dug-in absolutists on South Africa’s far-right who Trump embraced don’t want to give up anything.
South Africa has one of the world’s highest rates of homicide. Almost 20,000 people were killed in the last nine months of 2024. The overwhelming majority of the victims of violent crime are Blacks. Trump pushed a falsehood-laden claim of “a genocide of White farmers”. Farm folk killed among the 20,000? Thirty-six. Owners? Seven. Black and White.
It’s unclear whether the closed-door meeting that followed changed Trump’s mind, but it may have undone three decades of slow, cautious movement towards righting a grievous historical wrong. The apartheid bill came due on Mandela’s watch. In declining to take payment from the start, he has made restitution more difficult today.