South Africa

Maverick Life, South Africa

Extract from ‘Best White’: Desperately Seeking Mandela

Extract from ‘Best White’: Desperately Seeking Mandela

REBECCA DAVIS’ new book, ‘Best White (And Other Anxious Delusions), published by Pan MacMillan, is a collection of humorous essays that has been described by Lauren Beukes as “frank and indecently funny”. Here, 100% for free and gratis, we bring you an extract. And afterwards you should buy the book immediately, of course.

I received the news that Nelson Mandela had died while I was in a nightclub. And not just any nightclub, either. It was the kind of grim establishment that causes you to wake up the next day, peer blearily at the stamp on your wrist, and be seized by a compulsion to plunge your entire arm into hydrochloric acid to obliterate the stain.

uTata didn’t struggle for that.

In retrospect, I’d do it differently. I’d be in a place of solitude and introspection when I got the news, cradled by the austere majesty of nature. Silence, and a wide sky of stars. I’d light a candle, or something, and stare out over this beautiful but tortured land, and muse on the weight of history and the fragility of human life.

Instead, I’m afraid I turned to my friend Roy and said: “Shots. For Madiba.”

Then I hailed a taxi to take me home. My driver was an old white man. I felt sure that we were about to experience a moment of bonding that I’d carry with me in my heart for the rest of my days. It would probably end with us gently crooning the national anthem together, lost in our own thoughts.

Nelson Mandela is … dead,” I slurred, turning the words over in my mouth to try to make sense of them.

He looked at me in his rear-view mirror. “Mandela was a terrorist,” he said definitively.

I wish it had all happened differently. These moments always seem freighted with a kind of urgency and significance that your real-world circumstances almost never live up to.

But sometimes, just rarely, they do. There was a video that went viral in the immediate aftermath of Mandela’s death, which showed two foreign tourists who were told of the news while they were queuing for the Robben Island ferry.

Did you come especially for this day?” a journalist asks them, off-camera.

They look confused. “For … uh … this tour?” one asks.?

Because of the passing away of Mandela,” the journalist says.

Yes,” the other replies confidently, but you can tell she didn’t grasp the real meaning of those words. “We came just to see what he went through.”

They talk a little more, about tickets for the ferry, and the meaning of Mandela to them. But the tourists are still discussing him in the present tense.

How does it make you feel that you’re here on this day?” the journalist persists.

Well, it’s a magnificent day!” one replies, beaming. “It’s sunny, and it’s nice!”

It’s clear that they’re beginning to get a bit surprised by the length of the interview. Is this what passes for news in South Africa?

The journalist gives it one last push.

Maybe a bit more specifically, how does it feel to be here just a few hours after his death?”

There’s a pause.

Wait, wait, wait,” one says, still smiling, but more tentatively. She cups her hand to her ear. “We missed what you were saying before. Did you just … say …”

That Mandela died,” confirms the journalist briskly. This is why people hate journalists.

Huh?” says one, literally. Her mouth falls open.

Haven’t you heard?” says the journalist. “You didn’t know?” The camera is still rolling. This is why journalists shouldn’t be allowed out in public. She gives a small laugh of awkwardness. “He died last night.”

The tourists turn away, instantly overcome. The journalist continues to press them on how they feel. They’re crying now.

It’s easy to see why the video became a brief internet sensation, despite its voyeuristic intrusion on a moment of grief. Their response is so natural, so unfeigned and so genuinely heartsore. They’re not even South African.

But I’m sure there must be other people who watched it and thought: Man, that’s the way to find out. Ideally not while having a camera shoved in your face, of course. But to be actually queuing to visit the place where Mandela spent 18 of his 27 prison years confined to a tiny cell? To be already hyped up on the poignancy of what you’re about to see and then hear that this behemoth of freedom is dead?

That’s a moment. Those tourists will be telling that story for the rest of their lives. I generally have to lie about the nightclub thing.

I feel like the question of where you were when you heard of the death of a global icon used to carry a lot more significance. My mother can still tell you about the moment she realised JFK had been assassinated. It’s not a classic anecdote. It’s not like she was in the White House. She was sitting alone reading at a pavement café in Paris, but that still sounds sort of glamorous and 60s-ish.

Nowadays, 90% of the time I’d be forced to answer the question of “Where were you when you heard …” with: “On Twitter.”

I’ve never had a good historical moment. I was watching TV at home when I found out about Princess Diana dying. I was sitting in a kombi at a petrol station in Hout Bay with my friend Tarry, eating chips, when I heard about 9-11. I was drinking beer with my brother at a dive bar in North London when we learnt that Michael Jackson was no more, though I’m not entirely sure where would constitute a meaningful environment for that news. A theme park? A chimp sanctuary?

My friends Faith and Bianca were at the UK’s most famous music festival, Glastonbury, when news broke about Michael Jackson. A woman they’d been talking to turned to Bianca and said, earnestly: “You are my Diana moment.”

That’s a bit weird, obviously, but there’s something about these times that really makes you want to commune with total strangers. Your own friends and family just don’t cut it. You want the desperate alienation of modern life to fall away, for a second, and be replaced with some form of mass catharsis.

The days following Mandela’s death were busy ones for journalists. I’m not sure why, because it wasn’t like there was much actual news. I suppose we were all just desperate to capture that moment: the one anecdote, the one quote, the one photograph that would perfectly encapsulate the enormity of the nation’s loss. As if anything could ever come close.

On the morning after he died, I went to a press conference at a smart Cape Town hotel given by Mandela’s frenemy FW de Klerk.

I found myself alone in a lift with a woman who worked at the hotel. Her name badge was upside down.

Your name badge is upside down,” I said. I’m not usually the kind of person who points out this sort of thing to total strangers. It was just that her upside-down name badge struck me as so poignantly emblematic of the sort of day it was.

She looked at me, and looked down at her name badge. I prayed she would say something like: “Doesn’t the whole world feel topsy-turvy today?”

She silently adjusted it.

Later that day I stood on the wind-blasted Grand Parade with friends, hoping to cry. I felt in desperate need of it. I craved that moment of collective release. But the prayers went on too long. The speeches from politicians seemed insipid and uninspiring. There weren’t as many people there as I’d hoped, and nobody seemed to be publicly weeping. There were no Pyongyang-like scenes of devastation; just a bunch of Capetonians standing around nodding polite ‘hellos’ to people they hadn’t seen in a while.

I tried to focus on the specifics of Mandela’s extraordinary life. The years when authorities tried to efface him altogether from the South African consciousness: his words forbidden to be quoted, his image forbidden to be shown.

Asimbonanga, as the song goes. We have not seen him. I still couldn’t cry. I began to suspect that there was something wrong with me if I couldn’t just sit quietly and contemplate Mandela’s magnificent sacrifice and be moved to tears. Wasn’t that evidence of some fundamental lack? Did I even have a soul? Why couldn’t I be more like those noble Robben Island tourists?

Where I eventually found that electric sense of connection to the moment was in the free musical memorial to Mandela at the Cape Town Stadium. I still find it hard to describe without sounding like I’m pitching the concept for a cheesy mid-90s beer ad.

Okay, so we’ll have interracial lovers kissing, and Xhosa dudes singing in Afrikaans, and a white oke singing in Zulu, and South African flags flying as far as the eye can see and just everyone hugging and crying and stuff!” On paper, it sounds excruciating.

But I will remember it until I develop Alzheimer’s.

Nowadays it seems increasingly unfashionable to discuss Mandela without being seen to problematise his legacy. To disdain the manner in which he was packaged as a cuddly teddy bear to soothe white fears; to condemn his over-conciliatory attitude during the negotiations to dismantle Apartheid. Much of this is undoubtedly valid, though the backlash has happened with bewildering speed.

A few months after Mandela’s death I visited Qunu, his birthplace. I wasn’t there on a pilgrimage. I was there to interview former miners who had developed lung disease and struggled to obtain any financial compensation.

I don’t know what I was expecting Qunu to be like. Actually, that’s not true. I know exactly what I was expecting it to be like.

There is a lovely road that runs from Ixopo into the hills,” Alan Paton’s 1948 novel Cry, the Beloved Country opens. “These hills are grass-covered and rolling, and they are lovely beyond any singing of it.”

In my mind I think I had managed to conflate Ixopo with Qunu, despite the fact that the two places aren’t even in the same province. There were grass-covered hills, and they were quite lovely. But the day was bleak and overcast, and what the hills were alive with was less the sound of music than the evidence of desolate poverty.

In a tiny house, I interviewed a man hobbled by disease contracted on the mines. He thought he would be able to work as a miner for a few years and then buy a tractor. Come back to Qunu, get some cows, be a farmer. Provide for his wife and kids. It’s what Mandela would have wanted.

Now he is too ill to work. Even if he could, his chances of finding a job in this area are minuscule. As he spoke, his five children jumped up and down on a single bed they all share at night. From his house, you could see the home where Mandela spent much of his retirement. It was still closed for mourning.

I drove away feeling sad and tired, and about a million miles distant from that magical night at Cape Town Stadium where everything seemed tantalisingly possible.

On that grey afternoon, it was not Asimbonanga that stuck in my head. It was Senzenina: What have we done? DM

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