THE TRAGEDY OF JACKIE SELEBI'S DEATH.

At the height of Jackie Selebi's unimaginable personal pain, political humiliation and judicial conviction, whilst he was behind bars - lonely, ill, abandoned by the world as he had come to know it, and almost despairing of life itself in a Pretoria jail - I wrote a tribute to him under the title "The tragedy of Jackie Selebi", which appeared on Politicsweb of 07 February 2012.

In the article, after lauding Selebi's great, undoubted personal qualities and immeasurable contribution to the anti-apartheid struggle, I pointed to his glaring failings, flaws and his fall-from-grace tragic situation of being a jailed criminal in democratic South Africa he fought so hard and for so long to bring about.

Writing and saying something positive at the time about Selebi was frowned upon and seen as fraternizing with the criminal, Mafia world of alleged mobster Glenn Agliotti.

I ended the article by declaring that Selebi was "...like one of those deeply flawed but transformational heroes from Thomas Carlyle's "On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History".

I further quoted Carlyle when he declared about his heroes that "...their heroism lay in their creative energy in the face of difficulties, not in their moral perfection".

I was reminded of this quote from Thomas Carlyle today upon hearing the sad breaking-news announcement on radio of the passing on today of Ambassador Jackie Selebi, which news was broken by Lindiwe Zulu, the Minister of Small Business Development.

Today, in the wake of Selebi's death, it has again become commonplace to sing praises to Jackie Selebi, although his bitter haters retain their loathing of him as before.

As in life, in death Selebi is becoming a divisive figure, with the divisions to continue in debates about the essence of his legacy.

Immediately following the news of Selebi's death, Twitter and Facebook were abuzz with messages of heartfelt condolences and commiseration, on the one hand, but also with messages expressing hardnosed ambivalence about the legacy of Selebi, as well as with outright condemnation of his moral standing in our society, owing to his conviction by our courts for corruption, on the other hand.

The vehemence and tone of some of the condemnatory messages following the death of Selebi caught me by surprise, given that Selebi's body was hardly cold. Some of the condemnatory messages sounded as if they had long been prepared, memorized, rehearsed and canned for this specific, sad occasion, like a dagger which is kept sharpened and at the ready for the right moment.

They sounded like they were ready-made and were just re-heated in the micro-ovens of political hatred and racial bigotry for today's instantaneous public propaganda consumption. There was surprising but unmistakable velvet elocution in some of the condemnatory message on radio broadcasts, and some boastful and self-indulgent cadence, in the mist of death.

If death is often a surprise and always comes unannounced, how come the Jackie Selebi haters' condemnatory wailing appeared so effortless and flawless?

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