After reading yet another article by Stanley Uys wherein he tries albeit unsuccessfully to dispute the fitting comparison between Jacob Zuma's rise and rise to the union buildings with that of Paul Kruger's, made by Martin Meredith in his book Diamonds, Gold and War I was forced to regress a bit to address an old and laughable piece of naivety by this writer (i.e. Mr Uys).
I want to take everyone down memory lane to a time when Mr Nelson Mandela wasn't a commercial entity that he has become nowadays. This is a period when he had just taken over the reigns from Oliver Tambo in 1991 at the Durban National Conference. Of course, to us in the ANC, Mandela was already known as the father of the nation and as young men and women who had by then not seen Mandela live until his release in April 1990, we used to sing jubilantly, "Nelson Mandela, hhayi! hhayi! Ubaba wethu...".
To us he was already an icon and we always knew that he would be catapulted to succeed Oliver Tambo upon his release and the retirement of OR (as Tambo was affectionately known in exile). Tambo had been regarded as a true statesman and was internationally revered as a builder of bridges and had he not suffered a mild stroke in 1989, he could very well have become our first Black president.
So when his health put paid to such wishes on our part, Mandela who was a logical choice became the ANC president. By virtue of his elevation to the ANC presidency, Mandela was thus tipped to become our future state president after the all inclusive or first democratic elections in 1994. Our white counterparts through the media wrote a lot of negative press about Mandela and such was the animosity shown towards him that the then British Prime Minister, Mrs Margaret Thatcher around 1988 or there about once called Mandela a terrorist.
Fast forward to the current day icon that Mandela eventually became in the eyes of his fiercest critics, after a series of commercialisation successes, some people now want to own and claim Mandela as their entity. It is hypocritical of the media and people of Stanley Uys' ilk to now want to own Mandela yet back then they called him a criminal in reference to his 27 year jail time in Robben Island. They questioned how this country could be run by a "jail bird" and terrorist as some quipped. All manner of his fabricated unsuitability was brought to the public domain but since we knew better, (i.e. as to what the man represented and/or stood for) we went to the polls and defied the media plus the doubting Thomases to give Mandela a thumbs up.
During his tenure, Mandela went on to become a conciliatory president and quelled the fears of those who thought that he was going to drive all Whites to the sea, unlike Uganda's Idi Amin had done to the Indians during his presidency. Of course reconciliation was a necessary exercise although in the end it was done to the detriment of Black people since the oppressors were not willing to make sacrifices.