Rainbow nation has lost its bedrock

IT'S almost 15 years since Nelson Mandela ruled South Africa, and his painful descent into infirmity had been all sadly obvious.

IT'S almost 15 years since Nelson Mandela ruled South Africa. The old man's painful descent into infirmity and ill-health has been all too sadly obvious recently.

But when he died yesterday his country and the lives of its 52 million people changed forever.

For Mandela, even out of power and in his dotage with the ravages of age taking their terrible toll, was the perceived guardian and guarantor of the brave new Rainbow Nation that rose from the defeat of white rule and apartheid in 1994.

To say most South Africans, black and white alike, slept a little easier knowing that Mandela, even out of office, was there, is not to overstate things.

He was, in a country still deeply affected by its violent, racist past and a host of other challenges bearing down on it, not unlike a security blanket, a symbol of reassurance when so much else seemed to be going awry.

Now South Africa has to face up to the prospect of life without this icon of our times, whose magnanimity and plain human decency to those who so viciously oppressed him and his people for so long stands as a shining light to the history of the modern world.

It's not going to be easy. Nearly two decades after its epic first democratic election in April 1994, when apartheid was formally over and the groundwork laid for a new society where race would not matter, South Africa is in trouble. And it's in trouble because those who have followed the great man have failed to live up the hopes and expectations created when Mandela, against all expectations, managed to lead his country relatively peacefully from white-minority to black-majority rule.

Increasingly, South Africa is mired in a debilitating cycle of gross corruption and maladministration at the very highest levels of government; violent crime that makes it among the most dangerous places in the world; and the unfulfilled expectations of impoverished millions who hoped for so much when apartheid was overthrown but have received so little.

Mandela's greatest achievement, of course, remains largely intact, though increasingly under pressure. In 1994, South Africa was on the brink of a racial apocalypse. It was being torn apart as the white-minority regime sought to defend itself against the onslaught of Mandela's African National Congress guerillas.

Even the most optimistic of analysts before that "freedom" election thought it unlikely that Mandela would be able to achieve the reconciliation that would halt the country's slide into a full-scale race war. But he did.

It could all so easily have been so different. Tens of thousands could have been killed in a racial conflagration. Mandela, working with the last white president, FW de Klerk, stood against what seemed to be the inevitable, going to seemly incredible lengths, such as taking the trouble to visit Betsie Verwoerd, the widow of apartheid's architect and high priest Hendrik, to have tea with her to convey the message of reconciliation and a non-racial future.

He did it again in a momentous gesture at the end of the Rugby World Cup in Johannesburg in 1995, donning a Springbok jersey and cap to present the trophy to captain Francois Pienaar, thereby taking the wind out of the sails of the white Afrikaner community to whom rugby is a religion.

"We cannot ignore the past. We cannot forget about apartheid. But we must all learn to forgive and to look forward to the future, not look backwards to the past," he told me when I interviewed him in Johannesburg on the eve of the April 1994 election.

"For the sake of the future we must all, white and black, come together as South Africans. Only on that basis can we build a new country for everyone."

Given his long decades of brutal incarceration as a prisoner of apartheid, it could not have been easy for Mandela to be so generous. But it is a mark of the greatness of the man that he was.

Not for him the backbiting pettiness and grubbiness that we witness these days from some of our political leaders in Australia. Mandela was in a different class. He would neither demean nor diminish his opponents.

In a situation in which strict racial segregation had been imposed for almost 50 years, Mandela realised that to halt the descent into what looked like an inevitable race war, he had to be bigger than that if he was going to achieve reconciliation.

The South Africa he has left behind is a vibrant democracy where the rule of law still prevails despite increasing challenges to its institutions by rampant corruption, and a seemingly unstoppable spiral of violence and crime that poses a constant threat to lives.

Mandela was no saint. His cosying up to leaders such as Libya's Muammar Gaddafi, the architect of the Locherbie bombing, reflects poorly on his judgment. So do countless other ill-considered forays into foreign affairs as he was celebrated around the world.

But on the bedrock issue of achieving relative racial harmony and leading South Africa to becoming a parliamentary democracy with one of the world's most liberal and tolerant constitutions, with the rule of law firmly entrenched, he cannot be faulted.

Shortly before his death, new questions arose about his membership of the underground, hardline, Stalinist South African Communist Party, even as he was the leader of the ANC in its guerilla insurgency to overthrow white rule. There have been accusations that he aligned himself with Soviet communism.

He may well have done, if only to secure what he saw at the time as support for the anti-apartheid struggle. But it all seems irrelevant now, other than to historians.

The big question now is whether his epic achievement will endure, for Mandela's legacy has been ill-served by the leaders who have followed him, lesser men and women who have unremittingly betrayed the leader to whose ideals they seem to pay no more than lip-service.

That is why Mandela's death will be viewed with such apprehension by so many: as long as he was around, even as a sickly man in his 90s, he seemed to guarantee that no one would tinker with the democratic foundations of the new South Africa.

Now he has gone, South Africa has been left a very different place.