Jayne Dowle: Farewell to colossus who puts today’s self-serving ‘statesmen’ to shame

How do you begin to describe a man who changed the world to an 11-year-old? Where do you find the words to do such a colossal figure justice?

I told him that Nelson Mandela was a very good person who made his country a better place. And that he fought for everyone to be treated as equal regardless of the colour of their skin.

As an obituary, it was hopelessly inadequate. I hope that it gave Jack a start, though. How ironic, I thought, that the news of the death of a boy born in a mud hut in Africa should be received on an electronic device by a boy born into an easy life in another century.

I hope that in time Jack will come to fully understand the significance of that moment. In a few years, when he is sitting around putting the world to rights, I hope too that he will be able to assemble some context about exactly who Nelson Mandela was.

Our conversation took me right back to my own younger years, when I did spend a lot of time doing sitting around putting the world to rights.

However, as a student, his struggle and imprisonment did not touch my heart. I saw the ANC posters on common room walls. Waved my arms around at the college bop to The Specials singing Free Nelson Mandela. And of course, having achieved an A-level in politics, I prided myself on my basic grasp of the injustices of the apartheid system in South Africa.

To be honest though, I was more preoccupied with struggles closer to home. I came from Barnsley. My dad had been on strike at the steelworks in Sheffield. The police had run through the streets of my birthplace chasing miners with batons. The political situation in South Africa seemed a long, long way from home.

My middle-class friends made placards and went on marches to demand the release of Mandela. I stayed in my room and felt guilty because I was enjoying a privileged education whilst lads I went to school with were dragged from their beds and arrested for trying to save their jobs.

It is only now with hindsight that I understand. Mandela’s fight was in South Africa; his beliefs went global. In the famous four-hour-long speech at his trial, he said that he cherished “the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities”.

It is easy to take the ideals behind these words for granted now. Most of us, despite our differences, would strive to achieve them. Yet 50 years ago in segregated South Africa, this was absolute dynamite. It is not until we process the beatings and the murders and the systematic intimidation of individuals that we really comprehend.

And it is not until we recognise what he achieved, and what he went on to achieve by legacy, 
that we can begin to come to terms with why he was so important.

Mandela was 71 when he was inaugurated as South Africa’s first black president in 1994. He inherited a country riven with internal strife. In many ways, his work was just beginning.

Yet he managed to pull together the disparate forces, and even persuaded black South Africans to support the previously-reviled white Springbok rugby team at the World Cup in 1995. That he could inspire an entire nation into forgiveness, even when it came to sport, said much about his embrace.

His ability to engage with all, regardless of creed or class, reminds us that if anyone could walk with kings, yet not lose the common touch, it was him. Rudyard Kipling’s words are apposite, but they remind us of a colonial past which children of Jack’s generation simply cannot comprehend.

My son is piecing together his understanding of the world. There are still some very large holes. Yet when he forms a clearer picture of who Nelson Mandela was, he will realise that he is much more than a dead politician. He influenced not only political understanding, but also popular culture.

Without Mandela’s famous “black power salute”, would Jack and his friends really be going around Barnsley bumping fists and calling each other ‘man’? The emancipation he fought for inspired generation after generation of musicians and artists and film-makers to speak their own minds and influence others.

However, it is not until we look around us and see some of the self-serving figures who now pass for world statesmen that we recognise the lasting impact of the man.

They are uttering fine words on his passing, but too many of our so-called leaders can’t even find the courage to resign when they have done wrong. Mandela though, he was fully prepared to die for what he believed in. Now he has finally gone to rest, how many would say that today?