“I feel my great-grandfather still fully alive in my blood. Of all of them, he, I believe, lives most vibrantly in my veins.” – Nikos Kazantzakis, REPORT to GRECO
“I feel my great-grandfather still fully alive in my blood. Of all of them, he, I believe, lives most vibrantly in my veins.” – Nikos Kazantzakis, REPORT to GRECO
So it begins. Life without the great Nelson Mandela and our awakening to him still fully alive in our blood. The Madiba within. His final and most poignant gift to us all. You could see him in Barack Obama’s outstretched hand to Raul Castro at the memorial service. A conciliatory gesture on a world stage that only Madiba could induce.
And while a frenzied media-painted mourning view spreads before us in an endless vista of iconic hagiography, I don’t think Madiba actually cares what we say about him.
“I would like it to be said that ‘here lies a man who has done his duty on earth’. That is all”, he commented on the MSNBC documentary ‘Headliners and Legends’.
To me, acting on him living vibrantly in our veins, is all that matters now.
Today, the Madiba I carry within me, most vividly feels his unerring belief that education is the key to freedom. “That’s what education does. It makes the world personal” says one of the characters in Cormac McCarthy’s seminal play, ‘The Sunset Limited’.
Madiba knew that.
“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world,” he said in an address on 16 July 2003. The statement’s poignancy made more powerful by it being spoken in a planetarium – where we gaze up at the endless potential of the cosmos and somehow see our own.
I can appreciate Madiba’s unending drive to give kids the gift of looking up and recognising their endlessness through education. “Never, never and never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another”.
Legendary words in his inauguration speech. Madiba clearly understood that the indignity of internalised inferiority is best prevented through learning, because the acquisition and application of knowledge unleashes a sense of your own worth.
Ultimately, his own personal experience taught him that nothing better breeds the quiet fury from being seen as ‘less than’, and the wherewithal to transcend this, than a good education. Which is why one his first actions as president was the call for all learner dropouts to return to school.
Education was Madiba’s passion. Everyone who really knew him knows that.
Just look at the work of his most beloved project, The Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund. Who do you think inspired talk-show legend Oprah Winfrey create a young women’s educational institution here? And every big corporate CEO will tell you that a call from Madiba always meant you were about to help fund another school.
Even while incarcerated on Robben Island, Madiba sourced international funding for island inmates to further their studies.
“No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love”, he wrote in Long Walk to Freedom.
So it’s tad ironic that in the South Africa grieving for him, generations of children are being taught nothing much at all, by one of the worst performing public education systems on Earth.
Last year we came last in the global Standard Chartered Development Index, one of whose key indicators is the standard of public education; and recent studies show that we have the lowest maths literacy in the world.
In the Eastern Cape where Madiba hails from, only 3% of Grade 9 learners scored above 50% in a basic maths assessment. A staggering 85% had marks less than 30%.
Doomed to not having the skills to truly be free by the ineptitude and corruption of a post-Madiba Department of Education where patronage secures you a post, millions in funding go missing, teachers’ training is in tatters and blunders abound.
The recent nationwide rain is not the sky weeping for Madiba. It is Madiba crying for our kids.
As I write this, he within me recoils.
He is livid. He is sad.
He wants us to stop talking about him and do something about freeing the children of our land. Even as the global goodwill gesture express chugs through South Africa for a week, my Madiba finds it all a little disingenuous.
Most of the leaders at his memorial are guilty of one type of basic human rights violation or another – invasions, drones, genocides, violent suppression of dissent, anti-poor economic policies, education spending cuts, putting energy companies before people and environment, indebting our children and our children’s children to bankers who are paying themselves fat bonuses right now.
Indeed, the Madiba I love trusted the open honesty of kids playing with him, much more than a global elite fawning before him. And I know in my heart of hearts that for future generations to glimpse a glimmer of his legacy of freedom within them, their education comes first.
“The greatest glory in living lies not in never failing, but rising up every time we fall.” Perhaps now, his deeds and words on Earth, and the vibrancy of our Madiba within, will help us rise and truly set our children free.
