South Africa in the Shadows

Do we really ever get a straight story with race? Mandela, South African President's ties to despots and terror reasonably draws critics from Outside. But inside South Africa the post Mandela unspoken story is the terror against women in that country. m/r

South Africa in the Shadows | FrontPage Magazine
 By Daniel Greenfield On December 6, 2013

“People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them,” James Baldwin wrote. Few men have had as much history trapped in them as Nelson Mandela.

To those outside South Africa, the country has been reduced to Nelson Mandela just as it was once reduced to apartheid. Mandela was the ending to a story that everyone thought they knew. With his death, the story comes perilously close to losing its meaning.

The history trapped in Mandela escapes with his death forcing both those inside South Africa and those outside it to come to terms with all the complex realities of history packed away into one man’s life.

Like Gandhi, Mandela became an iconic figure who appeared to encompass the moral of his own story. The fictional Nelson Mandela has appeared in dozens of movies. He has been played by everyone from Danny Glover to Sidney Poitier to Morgan Freeman. And each of those movies has made the real man and the real South Africa that he leaves behind in death seem that much more unreal.

Western liberals like simplistic stories and Mandela was their happy ending. His very existence freed them from the need to learn anything more about what happened after apartheid. By knowing him, they knew, as Paul Harvey would say, the rest of the story. Mandela freed them from knowing history.

Everyone knows the history of South Africa and no one knows it. The dynamics of a troubled past that were reduced to a happy ending built around one man are still playing out in South Africa. Even as the mourning for Mandela goes on, one child is raped every three minutes in South Africa and three children are murdered every day.

If there is anything that the world ought to mourn, not only today, but every day, it is a horrifying reality in which a South African woman is more likely to be raped than to learn to read, a quarter of the men admit to having raped and men with AIDS believe that they can find a cure by raping a baby.

Troubling facts like these defy the easy inspiration of the happy ending. They remind us that history does not stop the way that a film script does. There is no moment when the crowd cheers, the camera pans up and the audience is free to leave the theater and look no further because the story has ended.

South Africa’s story did not end with apartheid. It does not end with Mandela’s death. South Africa remains in twilight. The credits do not roll. The happy ending has not come.

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