Before you bury someone you need to dig up some earth – some dirt, as it were. In the case of Nelson Mandela it’s other people who get dirty. And some fabulous dirt it is too.
There’s a poster going around made in the 80s by the FCS, the Federation of Conservative Students from England. It asks for the hanging of Mandela and all other ANC members – because they are, as the poster puts it, “butchers”. It’s been said that David Cameron was a member of the FCS. That is probably not true; it’s been long known that Cameron wasn’t, let’s say, really into politics as a student. What is true that he went to South Africa in 1989 and had dinner and wine, as an emissary of the SNI, with members of the apartheid regime.
Now of course everybody was always a friend and admirer of Mandela. Not a new phenomenon: during Bush’s presidential campaign Dick Cheney was asked why in 1985 he voted against a House resolution to call for the immediate release of Mandela from prison. Cheney played it down, called it “trivial”, and said that Mandela of course was a “great man” and that nobody was ever in favour of keeping him in prison. Well, almost nobody.
Joe Conason wrote at the time that the conservatives relied on “cultural amnesia”. That’s a prescient statement – this amnesia certainly has extended itself to the whole of apartheid in South Africa. We can see that on just the most trivial level: who remembers “Sun City” (which also introduced a mainstream audience to rap), who remembers the controversy surrounding Graceland. To say nothing of the question just who *didn’t* try to get in with the racist regime.
Conason writes of a speech given by Kissinger in 1976 in which he called “racial justice on the African continent an imperative of our own moral heritage.” A strange idealistic vision, almost moral, coming from the Realpolitiker. Kissinger was ultimately denounced by House Republican leader Robert Michel – who later was Cheney’s mentor. So there really is a lot of digging to do.