Nonetheless, the possibility of Mandela, the mysterious uber-revolutionary superhero of our childhood, as President of our country was so intoxicating that we imagined all the questions being raised about the televised negotiation process, about the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA) and other aspects of the nation-anticipated, by those less trusting of the ANC, would be resolved under a new government.
Gazing at this poster, these memories and desires were projected onto the central figure. However, this is not what the poster suggests. Rather, the Mandela of the election poster is a grandfather Mandela. His much-cited longing for children’s voices and the sight of children while incarcerated is suggested in the poster’s image. That is the only link – and a very tenuous one – to his imprisonment evoked in the poster. In other words, we can remember his prison experience only for the longing he had for children, his own and others. The poster is his promised delivery from this decades-long yearning. However, the metaphor does not hold. He cannot be compensated for the loss of time with his children, as individual narratives from his various children will remind us before and after we vote.
Yet both Mandela as terrorist and revolutionary Mandela are remembered by different segments of the electorate; some just have to work harder to hold on to an image of Mandela that resonates. The contrast between the grey, smiling Mandela and the bright-eyed children also speaks to a future.
If children are the face of the new South Africa that we had to imagine in early 1994, the relationship to our past was not entirely clear. We had to think of race as colour (superficial difference) but not of race as power (i.e., the racism of the past and present). In other words, the invitation to Black audiences was one of escape, a counterintuitive one. However, wanting to escape from apartheid was something radical movements had long taught us to do. We grew up on the slogan “freedom in our lifetime”, even though everywhere around us was evidence of the power of a brutal apartheid state. Indeed, what made it possible for the oppositional slogans “each one teach one” and “freedom before education” to co-exist in the 1980s was this capacity to imagine the impossible as inevitable. To even entertain, as a young Black person under apartheid, that freedom was so urgent that it would arrive in your youth provided you gave the struggle your all. That you would still have time for education after was immersion in the counterintuitive. In my late twenties, a chosen family member, himself Caribbean and Black British, would ask me how it was possible to live through apartheid and keep pushing through. Coming from a person whose life’s work is humanising enslaved and indentured people from previous centuries, rendering their contribution to British and global culture visible, it was a hard question. In some senses, he knew the answer. In another, telling him we heard “freedom in our lifetime” so much that we believed it was Greek to him. It was counterintuitive given what he knew about the power of the apartheid state and its allies in Reagan’s America, Thatcher’s Britain, Israel and the dishonest European banks that bankrolled Pretoria.
So, when the poster invited us to make an imaginative leap, this was an exercise we were so accustomed to, we missed how the ends had shifted. The future suggested in the poster is not a post-race, post-patriarchal, post-capitalist one. It is an innocent future that matters, a co-created future that rests on innocence, innocence from racism as institutional violence too, which is to say an invisibilisation of racism. The poster suggests a future where quality of life transcends race as power, even as it evokes race as colour in its visual vocabulary.
The “better life” rests on the bright faces of the children around Mandela and on the voters prioritising them and the future, muting the past. It requires that we believe a future free of institutionalised white supremacy is possible if we vote ANC, and in that moment it still is. It is discursively compelling and visually arresting. But many of us will vote for revolutionary Mandela because of the very past and present of white supremacist wounding that the poster avoids. Our memory will exceed the call to aspiration. We will take the imaginative leap that we are well-trained in biographically, and that has been a crucial part of being Black in the world, transmitted across generations; enabling us to survive slavery, genocide, conquest and now, at last, apartheid.
That was March 1994.
I wrote the first, shorter version of this chapter in March 2015, a few weeks away from the anniversary of the first South African election. I fleshed it out two years later for inclusion in this book. Anniversaries are not just cause for celebration; they can also be moments to pause and reflect. I was twenty-one years old, four months into my second degree when I voted in 1994. Much ink has been spilt on what this moment meant for many who could vote legally for the first time. The snaking voting queues have become as iconic as pictures of Mandela with children, beyond that first one. We have been told repeatedly of how virtually no violent crimes were reported on that day and we imagine optimistically that none were committed that day. Given the constant onslaught that apartheid was on the body and psyche, and with these kinds of narratives and visual prompts, it is understandable why aspirational tags such as the “miracle” or “dream” transition gained currency.
Escape.
Newness.
Relief.
Possibility.
Even as I revise the chapter extensively in April 2017 – sceptical of the vision on that poster, aware of how prophetic its most dangerous promise was, having barely mentally survived the brutality with which #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall were met – still, with heart and head overflowing with disillusionment at contemporary South Africa’s devastating Black poverty and maddening misogynist violence, there is a little spark of nostalgia for 1994; for what we could have been, for what we hoped for. It is a devastating awareness, this living memory for who we were in April 1994.
Hope.
Rising to the occasion, Archbishop Desmond Tutu would dub us “the rainbow children of God”, in a phrase I have revised my stance on many times since the 1990s. Initially raging against it as obscuring race by reducing it to mere difference without hierarchy, I have come to wonder, after Gayatri Spivak’s work on how the centre mutates and appropriates radical critique in order to sustain itself, about whether it is not useful to distinguish between what Tutu coined and how it moved into the mainstream parlance.
Given Tutu’s consistent opposition to apartheid terror, his treatment by the apartheid state as a dangerous person, why is it so hard to imagine that Tutu was referencing rainbow as exists in global Black thought? What if it is not Tutu’s formulation but its appropriation into rainbowist nationalism that is dangerous? When Ntozake Shange, African American feminist poet, essayist, activist and novelist, wrote the iconic choreopoem For colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow was enuf, a text that remains a global Black feminist classic several decades on, “rainbow” was not avoidance of race, difference and the violence of hierarchy. It was a direct confrontation of violent hierarchy, an attempt to imagine how difference might work for a decolonial project of recognition. When the LGBTI movement embraces rainbow metaphorically, it is a gesture that refuses co-option, erasure and a deliberate political move to try to make difference link with freedom rather than annihilation. Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition emerged out of an unapologetic civil rights investment, confronting rather than avoiding difference, and attempting to create a world in which difference was not divisive. It is an ambitious project.
Tutu’s biography suggests that he was gesturing intertextually to these diverse traditions of investing rainbow with meaning. However, he did not have full control over how that concept would travel. Increasingly, I wonder whether Tutu’s rainbow is an attempt at remaking, not avoidance or flattening of difference. He has remained a most troublesome figure for the project of rainbowism – seeming to be its biggest proponent in giving it a language, and heading its most powerful instrument, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), but also constantly undermining the premises of the rainbow nation: its gender power, its deepening poverty, its violent masculinist leaders, corruption, criticising not only the easy-to-fault presidents, but Mandela too on a few counts. He repeatedly breaks rank to endorse reproductive choice