Martin LeFevre: Mandela, Obama, and Greatness

“Invictus” is the latest in Clint Eastwood’s streak of good to excellent directorial forays in the autumn of his career. Though a bit lumbering, predictable, and sentimental, it’s worth two hours of your life, if only to ponder the arc of Nelson Mandela’s political and personal life.

The most notable line in the movie comes when Mandela, played by Morgan Freeman, invites François Pienaarthe, captain of the all-white-but-one, apartheid-symbolizing, Afrikaner-elite Springbok rugby team, to meet him in the presidential office.

‘Madiba,’ as his admirers call him, has a political masterstroke in mind. Walking the tightrope “balancing black aspirations with white fears,” Mandela hopes to unify the re-minted South African nation through the Rugby World Cup, which was held in Johannesburg in 1995.

“How do we inspire ourselves to greatness, when nothing less will do?” Mandela asks the Pienaarthe character, played by Matt Damon.

Despite 27 years in confinement, Mandela spoke of forgiveness toward one’s enemies, stirring the Springboks to achieve much more than they thought they could, and at least temporarily unifying the country.

The new president, not long from his 27 years on Robben Island, inspired Pienaarthe to lead his mediocre rugby team to victory. The Springboks weren’t expected to even make the quarterfinals, yet beat a team in the finals that stood in a class by itself, the ironically named New Zealand All Blacks.

Mandela also spoke to Pienaarthe of what sustained him during his imprisonment. It was, improbably, the Victorian poem “Invictus,” whose lines “helped me to stand when all I wanted to do was lie down.”

Anyone who has asked, or is asking, whether there is anything but darkness operating in one’s life, and in this world, feels to some degree what Nelson Mandela felt year after year in that tiny cell. “Out of the night that covers me, black as the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be, for my unconquerable soul.”

Now another World Cup is taking place in South Africa, this time for a sport of much wider reach and appeal. But just before Madiba’s highly anticipated arrival for the opening ceremonies, his beloved great-granddaughter, Zenani Mandela, who had just celebrated her 13th birthday, was killed in a car accident.

Even those who steadfastly believe that nothing more than “the bludgeonings of chance” are the cause of this latest, most inexplicable blow to Madiba, are struck by the cosmic unfairness of it.

Beyond the personal tragedy, the Football World Cup is as important to Mandela and South Africa internationally, as the Rugby World Cup was to him and the nation fifteen years ago.

A little history. Mandela feels a deep debt of gratitude toward Castro’s Cuba, since it was instrumental in defeating the attempt by the CIA and apartheid government of South Africa to bring down the new Angolan government in the mid-‘70’s. Their defeat in the late ‘80’s drove a key nail into apartheid.

More recently, as George Bush Junior prepared to invade Iraq, Mandela made this famous statement: “What I am condemning is that one power, with a president who has no foresight, who cannot think properly, is now wanting to plunge the world into a holocaust.”

But even in the United States, where Mandela’s allegiances and alliances, not to mention some of his statements, have been controversial, the greatness of the man is undisputed.

Madiba hasn’t been able to initiate a process to redress the deep economic divide in South Africa however, where the gap between rich and poor, essentially along racial lines, is as wide as anywhere in the world, and crime and violence have exploded in recent years.

Nor has his creation of “The Elders,” a consultative body made up of such notables as Desmond Tutu, Kofi Annan, Gro Harlem Brundtland, Jimmy Carter, Li Zhaoxing, Mary Robinson, and Muhammad Yunus, been able to make a difference in the trajectory of the human crisis, despite “offering their collective influence and experience to support peace building, [to] address major causes of human suffering and promote the shared interests of humanity.”

However well intentioned and experienced these elders may be, radical change will not come from the above, but from below; not from the old, but from the young; not from political and religious leaders, but from ordinary people reaching for greatness.

Can Barack Obama, capable of inspiring so many during his campaign, reach beyond the tar pit of American politics, and take inspiration from Nelson Mandela’s life? Does he have the seeds of greatness in him?

As Madiba has said, “If there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America. They don't care.”

Mandela has achieved greatness; Obama has not, and I’m afraid cannot. Mandela is in Lincoln’s league; Obama is in Carter’s.

If Obama doesn’t reach higher, he’ll be a one-term president, and usher in something worse than Bush (as Carter did with Reagan). So the real question is, can the unduly self-assured Barack learn humility?

Whatever happens at the geo-political level, as the world shrinks and darkens, we would all do well to take to heart the closing lines of “Invictus,” which sustained Madiba all those years in prison.

“It matters not how strait the gate, how charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.”

- Martin LeFevre is a contemplative, and non-academic religious and political philosopher. He has been publishing in North America, Latin America, Africa, and Europe (and now New Zealand) for 20 years. Email: martinlefevre@sbcglobal.net. The author welcomes comments.

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