'Brand Mandela' – how to control the value of a legend
Mandela comics, coasters, and clocks aside: How does South Africa celebrate its most celebrated man on his 90th birthday?
from the March 12, 2008 edition
Page 2 of 3
So with Mandela's 90th birthday coming in July, his advisers and foundations face the quandary of how to celebrate the most celebrated man in the country.
Last week, the Mandela foundations started by calling the local media to the launch of "Nelson Mandela at 90: The Celebration."
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Chattering journalists and dignitaries immediately hushed when the lilting baritone – as recognizable here as the face connected to it – filled the theater. It was just a recording of Mandela speaking about his country, and in purely journalistic terms, it wasn't saying a heck of a lot – but the crowd was reverent. It was Mandela, and that was enough. When the man himself arrived, the audience stood and applauded – as respectful a group of journalists as you're apt to find anywhere.
"This is the man who led South Africa from the brink, from a horrible situation to a place of hope," Mr. Collings explains. "All South Africans have a huge amount of affection for the man."
It's been almost two decades since televisions across the world showed Mandela walking free from 27 years in prison, much of it spent on notorious Robbin Island. At that point he already had international stature as a hero and symbol. The scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. has called the "Free Mandela!" posters the "most ubiquitous" of the competing antiwar and antiracist slogans of the 1970s.
Activists across the globe memorized the end of Mandela's 1964 defense statement: "I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die."
But at the time, Mandela's face was largely unknown – photographs or broadcasts of him were forbidden, so posters were graced with decades-old images, or artists' renderings.
Now, 14 years after the end of apartheid, with a presidential term and Nobel Peace Prize behind him, the former freedom fighter's face is not just a South African icon but a global one. And despite a diminishing public presence, his mystique is strong.
Four years ago, Mandela announced that he was "retiring from retirement," saying he wanted to move on to a quieter phase of life: "Thank you for being kind to an old man, allowing him to take a rest, even if many of you may feel that after loafing somewhere on an island ... for 27 years, the rest is not really deserved."
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