@sir_arthur_strebe-grebling wrote:
After de Klerk ended apartheid and Mandela was elected president, he did well to avoid the country falling apart, by convincing white peopole that they had a future in South Africa. But other than that, he was a worse than ordinary president. He did little to resist the drift to cronyism and corruption, was a poor executive, and never deployed his talents to tame Mugabe or ease the horrors afflicting the rest of Africa. He preferred to see out his office meeting celebrities and raising dubious money.
That's not me saying that, it is the Guardian.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/05/nelson-mandela-obituary
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/10/mandela-coverage-banality-of-goodness
Amazing that it takes the Guardian, the second-most left-wing media outlet (not quite as socialist as the BBC), to cut through the hyperbole and state the truth.
Actually, I think the first link sums up quite nicely why he should be considered a 'great' leader:
"So why use the word great? Perhaps it was Mandela's appreciation of politics as theatre, combined with his talent as the great conciliator. Many will have their own stories of the "Madiba magic" at work. For this writer, it was a small episode that took place on the steps of the civic centre, under a fluttering flag of the Boer republic, in a dusty village in the middle of the giant scrubland known as the Karoo. The date was 15 August 1995.
The place was Orania, Northern Cape, the last refuge of the Afrikaner fundamentalists who fled the approach of modernity with the great trek of 1835-42. The occasion was a tea party. Mandela was the guest, the host was Betsy Verwoerd, the 94-year-old widow of the notorious President Hendrik Verwoerd, whose killing in 1966 had brought no pleasure to his opponents imprisoned on Robben Island – in Long Walk to Freedom, Mandela asserted that neither he nor the ANC had ever supported political assassination. One moment of that extraordinary meeting stands out for me, overwhelming all the other extraordinary events of post-apartheid South Africa.
It came as Betsy, bereft of her glasses, struggled to read a statement to reporters gathered on the steps of the community hall. Mandela, sotto voce, prompted her in Afrikaans, reading over her shoulder. Once finished, she smiled her thanks up at the black man towering over her. He smiled fondly back.
To appreciate that moment, one needs a particular understanding of the South African story. To the world, South Africa has long been literally a black-and-white issue, the goodies and baddies easily identifiable by the colour of their skin. But that was always an over-simplification, qualified from the early days of the anti-apartheid struggle by the likes of Fischer, the Rev Beyers Naudé and Slovo, and compromised more recently by the reform movement under De Klerk, who saw the necessity of letting Mandela take the country forward in the election of 1994.
Another way of understanding South Africa is to recognise it as something of an Old Testament story, a tale of people struggling to do right by their gods and failing time and time again. In the second half of the 20th century, these people, exhausted by the struggle with themselves and against one another, had need of a unifying figure to give them a vision of nationhood.
Mandela saw the need, donned the mask that the role demanded and gave his life for his people. There lies his greatness, and hence the tears that flow at his death, in a much beloved country."
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