Tradition vs medicine: Is it time to let Nelson Mandela go?
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As the Father of the Nation lies dying, debate over how to ensure that he can die with dignity has led to a clash between traditional African cultural beliefs and modern medicine.
There is poignant irony in the way Nelson Mandela‘s life is ending. He used to talk of the inspiration he drew from the poem “Invictus” by William Ernest Henley.
It is a poem about dignity and courage in the face of death and talks of “being the master of my fate.”
Now, it seems, his fate lies in the hands of his family – which is already riven by internal feuding over matters of inheritance – and his clan, who all face some painful dilemmas.
It is likely that the issues at stake may conflict with the traditional beliefs in which the clan is steeped.
“It is going to be a very tough decision,” a former colleague of Mandela’s told Channel 4 News. “It is ancient versus modern. His family have their heads in two worlds and the government’s in the same boat.
The arrival of the Thembu elders at his hospital bedside suggests the traditional chiefs may now be reconciled to the need to end medical intervention and let the man who everyone knows by his clan name, Madiba, move on, to join the ancestors.
Mandela’s former colleague said the elders will probably have come to Pretoria from Qunu in the Eastern Cape to perform a traditional farewell to Madiba, the son of the counsellor to the Paramount Chief of the Thembu.
Following a family summit in Qunu on Tuesday, the Archbishop of Cape Town, Thabo Makgoba, prayed with Mandela’s third wife, Graca Machel, in the hospital last night.
The words of the Archbishop’s prayer were posted on his Facebook page. He talked about honouring his legacy; he talked about the “end”.
“Grant Madiba eternal healing and relief from pain and suffering,” the prayer said. “Grant him, we pray, a quiet night and a peaceful, perfect, end.”
A palpable sense of trepidation hangs heavy in the air, as South Africans read between the lines and have attempted to decipher coded messages from family, friends and the government over recent days.
One of Mandela’s oldest friends, Andrew Mlangeni, who had spent years incarcerated on Robben Island with him, was quoted, two weeks ago, as saying: “The family must release him so God can have his own way with him.” He suggested that it may be time for the family and the country “just to let him go.”
To say this was brave as it breaks a cultural taboo. In Xhosa, it is considered an act of “ubuthakathi” – or witchcraft – to discuss someone’s death in this manner, or as tradition would have it, “to kill a living person.”
But South Africans, who have faced a number of health scares with their beloved Madiba over the past two and a half years, have become more philosophical and accepting of his mortality.
Makaziwe, Mandela’s eldest daughter, appeared, this past weekend, to have rejected Andrew Mlangeni’s invocation. She told CNN: “In our culture, the Thembu culture, you never release the person unless the person has told you ‘please my children, my family, release me.'”
In traditional culture, the family of a dying person must release them so that they can surrender to death.
Makaziwe continued: “These people who want to talk about, you know, releasing him: he hasn’t said we should release him and we haven’t come to the end yet. It is only God who knows the end.”
From what little we know about Mandela’s fragile state, it would not appear that he is necessarily capable any longer of instructing his family.
If the family and the clan is indeed now reconciling to the idea that aggressive medical intervention should be stopped, it could avoid a situation similar to that of Israel’s former Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, who has been lying comatose for seven years.
Some younger South Africans are fed up with all the talk of tradition. “Madiba globalised us and now, as his end nears, we’ve gone myopic,” one said. “We South Africans are old enough, mature enough, to sit around our father’s bed and accept the way things are and let him go. Madiba himself said: ‘The future is in our hands.’ Now it is. Time to move on.”
“The passage towards death is a difficult journey,” an ANC activist told Channel 4 News. “This country needs to celebrate his life, rather than let his death become a source of conflict. There is thing that we all unite on: all of us love Mandela. This nation will sink into deep mourning when he finally leaves us, no matter how prepared we think we might have been.”
The penultimate stanza of Henley’s poem, Invictus, provide a clue as to how Mandela himself viewed death; he often cited the poem, whose Latin title means “Unconquered.”
“Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the Shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.”
Follow Jonathan Miller on Twitter @millerC4