Exorcising Mandela’s ghost

We need to honour Madiba’s significance through more than just one day of charity and attend to deep structural change in our society

We are disparaging the legacy of Mandela by the many self-absolving acts that tend to categorise Mandela Day. I have been inundated with requests to make donations — food parcels, blankets, visits to orphanages — to mark Mandela Day. These initiatives, though important, miss an important part and obscure the real legacy of Mandela as a man who devoted most of his time to fighting structural injustices. 

The manifestation of our society’s deeply structural inequities is glaring. Homelessness, poverty, sexual violence, and a general sense of alienation and powerlessness cannot be ignored. Mandela Day calls on individuals to do what they can in their personal and collective capacities to offset some of the effects of structural inequities. Herein lies the problem. 

Shifting the burden of addressing the deeply structural ills by over-emphasising individual agency feeds into the Western logic and tactic of deflecting responsibility and the cause of the many catastrophes that plague our world. Within this frame, individuals are advised to recycle and compost to reduce waste sent to landfills, give to the poor, drive e-vehicles, eat a plant-based or low-meat diet, and practice self-care even in toxic environments. 

The events of Mandela Day are part of this broader frame that puts primacy on individual action while ignoring how systems and structures shape our realities, behaviours, and attitudes towards each other and the environment, in the first instance. Think of the 10 million tonnes of food that go to waste every year in South Africa; this number accounts for a third of the 31 million tonnes of food that are produced annually in South Africa, according to Statistics SA. This is no accident, but an almost inevitable consequence of a world that prizes materialism and consumerism.  

The rapacious and extractive prevailing economic paradigm of capitalism and its attendant scaffoldings are at the centre of the interconnected catastrophes of epistemicides, poverty and economic inequalities, and climate crisis that individual “good action” disconnects. The radical version is to connect, at the root, what produces these catastrophes. The “early” Mandela understood the interconnectedness of these crises and embarked, along with others, in the radical fight for structural change. 

For good or bad reasons, the legacy of Mandela is becoming irrelevant to younger generations, particularly to those who were born or grew up after the institutional dismantling of apartheid in 1994. The Gen Zs, according to the recent report by Flux Trends, find it hard to connect with activism and political spaces. In the US, for example, this group uses social justice as a filter for where to work. In South Africa, this trend is different.  Because of the high unemployment rate in the country, “financial freedom and alignment with personal values are more of a priority than social justice”, according to Flux Trends.  

Young people are disproportionately affected by the rising unemployment in South Africa. According to Statistics SA, there is a 45.5% unemployment rate among young people (aged 15-34), in contrast to the national average of 32.9% in the first quarter of 2024. This phenomenon will only reinforce Mandela’s legacy as a “sell-out” who compromised too much in talks with the apartheid regime. 

With growing poverty and inequality, young people are increasingly understating Mandela’s positive contributions in the annals of history and pretending that his efforts have no bearing on their contemporary struggles and fight for justice. Here I use “Mandela” to represent all those who have gone before us and made notable contributions to the dismantling of oppressive systems. We see this attitude in noble protests led by young people in recent times who boldly and unashamedly claim that #We Are Not Our Ancestors. This and other cognate articulations have been present in recent youth-led protests like the #BlackLivesMatter, #FeesMustFall, #EndSARS, and the recent #RejectFinanceBill2024 protests in Kenya. 

These fights are not new fights, even though young people often want to frame their struggles as new. This is partly because they are unencumbered by previous generations’ nostalgia for figures like Mandela or Nat Turner in the US or simply a wilful ignorance of not understanding history.  

While we as young people do not need to live in the nostalgia of previous generations, we cannot afford to only look forward in our fight towards the liberation of all people and the planet from greed and unruly extractive practices. A liberatory decolonial approach is to maintain a solid thread between the struggles of today and that of our ancestors. This is a sure thing that will remind us that the fight to end the oppression of historically marginalised communities has not been won yet, while still recognising the immense contributions of our ancestors on whose imperfect and bruised shoulders we stand. 

To make progress against the headwinds of structural and systemic oppression, we must exorcise Mandela’s ghost and free him from the neoliberal trappings of the West that thrive on fragmentation and an over-indexing on individual agency as the panacea for structural ills. 

For Mandela to maintain his relevance today as arguably the most influential leader of the 20th century, he must be commemorated as an icon who fought to bring about deep structural change in our world. Madiba is not merely a figure who inspires individual good action of giving to the poor and the disadvantaged once a year, irrespective of how these individual actions might make us feel absolved of our complacency in systems of oppression. A commitment to deep structural change  is what will help young people make three multidimensional moves as they pick up the baton and continue the fight: backward and forward acknowledgements, upward and downward remedies, and lateral or side-by-side solidarity.

The first move is to balance the need to look back and look forward so that we are not stuck in the past but also do not take an ahistorical view that ignores the struggles we have inherited from our ancestors or paper over the need for redress. For the struggle of younger generations to have the needed force, they must acknowledge the past in all its complexities and forge a new future from that place with all the lessons learned.  

The second is to engage in both upward and downward remedies. The latter is the immediate need to do what we can as individuals and collectively to address the material crisis of the persistent and deep poverty, inequality and unemployment that disproportionately affects black people around the world. The former — the downward remedy — is to dismantle oppressive systems and build equitable (economic) systems that put the social and ecological at the centre. Here I am reminded of another of our ancestors, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, that “there comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in”. And that point is now. 

The third move is the lateral one of standing side by side in a Pan-African movement to resist oppression of all kinds in a way that transcends geographies. Elsewhere, I have argued that our liberation hinges on a unified response to the multitude of oppression we face in different parts of the world; he Marikana Massacre of 2012 in South Africa, the #EndSars ​​​​massacre in Nigeria in 2020, and the recent killings by security forces of young people in Kenya who were protesting against the finance bill are all underlined by neo-colonial impulses and forces that continue to oppress black people beyond national boundaries. This requires black people to stand side by side with each other to resist oppression of all kinds — this is the positive picture of what Mandela Day symbolises. 

Akanimo Andrew Akpan is a senior consultant at Reos Partners. He is a member of the African Centre for Epistemology and Philosophy of Science, University of Johannesburg. The views expressed here are his and do not reflect those of any of his associations.