The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

construction of Nelson Mandela has moved through different phases, from born leader to
sacrificial hero to Messiah, culminating in symbolic father with paternal authority in the
public sphere. 265
Part of the discursive consolidation of Nelson Mandela’s image as the nation’s father
involved the dislodging of Winnie Mandela. She had been the quintessential African
woman, the “first lady, suffering wife, [and] assertive African woman”. She had become
the “dignified spectacle of injustice against Blacks”. But in addition, she was also Nelson
Mandela’s “vocal proxy”, the “photogenic symbol of her incarcerated husband”. As the
ANC became dominant in the public sphere in the 1990s, however, Winnie Mandela was
perceived to have become too independent and unpredictable, with too many floating
“uncontainable meanings”. She was deposed because she was discursively unmanageable
and could not be absorbed as “self‐effacing first lady” into Mandela’s image as the
nation’s father. 266 This image of the pater familias was a gendered one, in which Mandela
acquired the position of near‐sexless patriarchal icon in the narration of the new South
African nation. 267
Perhaps the key concept used in narrating Mandela’s life and in connecting his biography
to a history of South Africa, conceived as processual, has been the ambulating metaphor of
the ‘walk’. Long Walk to Freedom gives us an epic journey ‐ a grand life of chronological
motion and ultimate progress ‐ of leadership, survival and triumph. Simultaneously, the
notion of ‘walk’ here also refers to South African history, conceived within a master
narrative moving from resistance to reconciliation and the building of a new nation. After
an arduous journey, the nation itself has overcome. The connection between Mandela’s
life and South African history through the notion of a ‘walk’ has its origins in the
265 Desiree Lewis has made the point that with Mandela’s own literal family disintegrated, he has
nevertheless been accorded a “credible father image without constantly evidencing literal fathering”.
See Desiree Lewis, ‘Winnie Mandela: The Surveillance and Excess of “Black Woman” as Signifier’,
Southern African Feminist Review, Vol 2, No 1, 1996, p 10.
266 Desiree Lewis, ‘Winnie Mandela’, pp 8‐10.
267 Obviously, this image was tempered slightly by Mandela’s relationship with Graça Machel, widow
of Samora, proven ‘first lady’, and a credible ‘woman of substance’.
282