The late great Ray Charles reportedly told film director
Taylor Hackford that he didn’t want the biopic Ray he was making to be a “whitewash” of his life, but to expose
the blemishes as well. It certainly made sense from an artistic standpoint,
since no one is without faults, and critics and filmgoers would know it was a only a glossed-over version of reality, and finding it less “entertaining” as well. Being a history buff, I was
eager to watch Peter O’Toole and Richard Burton go toe-to-toe in the 1964 film Becket when it was released on DVD some
years ago. But I was deeply disappointed by the deceptive portrayal of Burton’s
Thomas Becket; the reality was that Becket was no “saintly” character regardless
of what the Catholic Church calls him. He was a complex character who at the
time was probably more reviled than revered in England, and it was only after the
shock of his rather undignified “martyrdom” that his reputation was revised.
That brings me to the passing away of Nelson Mandela, no
doubt a majestic figure of recent times. Mandela was actually in prison for
most of his revolutionary life as a member of the African National Congress,
but he became a potent symbol of the oppressive nature of Apartheid. It is
interesting to note that former South African president and ANC member Thabo
Mbeki wrote a letter in which he condemned the “personality cult” that some
were cultivating in the ANC, noting that Nelson Mandela himself had not sought
the notoriety that he was given during his imprisonment. However, he proved to
be useful as a symbol against Apartheid internationally; Mbeki also noted that
the ANC was able to use the South African government’s “persecution” of
his wife for the same public relations effect.
Like many martyrs for a cause, Nelson Mandela only gained in
stature the longer he remained in prison. His prison stay also seemed to have mellowed
the revolutionary spirit that had caused him to be viewed as a “terrorist”
prior to his imprisonment; already quite old when finally released, he
certainly seemed less “demonic” to fearful white South Africans once Apartheid
officially ended, and his relatively moderate policies as president—criticized for
that reason in some quarters—suggested that he was the right man at the right
time, at least for whites.
I observed in the Seattle
Times a sidebar story that was intended to expose
the “myth” of Mandela, or at least reveal that he was capable of “human”
foibles. However, most of these were in regard to his personal habits; there
has been no suggestion that he was power mad or brutal in his exercise of it.
The same cannot be said of his former wife, Winnie Mandela, who equally shared
in the myth of his “saintliness”—perhaps even more so.
There was a recent biopic on Winnie Mandela’s life starring Jennifer Hudson, which
received the decidedly “rotten” score of 15 percent by Rottentomatoes.com, which grades a film by an average score derived
from a select number of film reviews; that the audience rating was a much
higher 60 percent only suggests that people who bothered seeing the film were probably
already predisposed to the film’s deliberate distortion of her life. This distortion
goes far beyond the glossing-over of Winnie Mandela’s career of adulterous
relationships while Nelson Mandela was in prison, and continuing after his
release. It wasn’t a well-kept secret that their reunion was less than happy, and that was the principle reason for the break-up of their marriage.
The nimble sidestepping becomes even worse by largely
ignoring not just her convictions for fraud and theft in recent years, but her
involvement in brutal revenge killings during the 1980s in Soweto, when she
regularly used her personal influence to "persuade" the thugs in her employ to
commit various human rights atrocities (like “necklacing”—literally burning
victims alive) that made Apartheid crimes seem benign in comparison. It is also
suspected that her “influence” was involved in the mysterious deaths and
disappearances of various anti-Apartheid political rivals during that time.
However, Winnie Mandela’s standing in the world and “cult of
personality” was such that even though she was eventually convicted for
orchestrating the murder of a 14-year-old boy accused of being a police informer, she
was only “fined” in the case, and would receive a “suspended sentence” for the later
fraud conviction. It seems that the need to turn her into a global "heroine" is such that anything is forgivable, or deniable.
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