The political figure Cyril Ramaphosa most wants to emulate, he has said on several occasions, is Nelson Mandela. He aspires to govern by consensus, he says, not by diktat, and when it came to coaxing agreement from unlikely people, Mandela was the true master.
Inviting a comparison between his own leadership and Mandela’s is a dangerous business for Ramaphosa. Mandela was in so many ways starkly different to him, and the juxtaposition reveals Ramaphosa’s limitations.
For one, Mandela often practised the principle of governing by consensus in the breach. Part of his genius was his ability to adapt to circumstances. He was shapeshifting and pragmatic. One moment he would govern by consensus, the next as an aristocrat; it depended on what he thought was necessary at the time. The most important political decision Mandela made was to begin talking secretly to the apartheid government in the mid 1980s. He told nobody. He knew he would never get consensus for what he wanted to do, so he acted alone.
Ramaphosa, by contrast, never acts alone. For him, moving only once there is agreement is sacrosanct. He is wedded to a single way of exercising power in a way Mandela never was. But there is a more revealing difference between the two men.
Mandela delighted in telling anyone who would listen the story of his first day of school. He did not have the Western clothes required to attend classes and his father took a pair of his own riding breaches, cut them at the knee, and tied them around little Nelson’s waist with a rope. And so a young boy went forth into his future in his father’s clothes.
What Mandela shows in this story is his innate predilection for symbolic thinking. He thought in metaphors. The story of his father and his school clothes is one of literally hundreds of examples. The point is that he took his taste for symbol and metaphor into public life. His gift was not for detail, nor still for process. His gift was to embody, in the image of himself he chose to project, what he wanted people to feel about themselves and their times.
And so when he went into hiding in 1960 and became “the black pimpernel”, he took off his lawyer’s suits, grew a revolutionary’s beard and donned a trench coat. The image of him on the run was to become the most powerful image in black politics in the early 1960s; he understood that paying attention to that image was not some vain, superficial preoccupation; it was the heart of the matter.
Nearly a decade later, when he discovered that his wife, Winnie, had been jailed and would soon stand trial, he wrote her a letter from his own prison cell, counselling her on how to confront her ordeal. What he offered her for inspiration was the trial of Jesus, not because he thought either he or she was a god, but because he understood the formidable symbolic power of martyrdom.
I offer these examples because the last few weeks of politics in SA have shown what a different leader Ramaphosa is. He is an enormously skilful negotiator. I was lucky enough to be a minute-taker at Codesa in 1992 and watched him run circles around his opposite numbers in the National Party. He also has an acute sense of reality, a quality that should never be underestimated in one who exercises authority; he is probably more aware than any other head of state in SA history of the limitations of his power.
But what Ramaphosa does not have is Mandela’s genius for symbolism. In the face of the moral panic about violence that consumed SA earlier in September, he could offer only a stiff, uncomfortable persona. A leader skilled in the art of spectacle would have gathered these heightened feelings and transformed them into something of his own making. He would have been there in central Johannesburg, on the ground, channelling the pain, embodying it.
Ramaphosa does not have the wherewithal to do that. In his box of tricks there is cunning and patience, but there is not the artist’s capacity to make something new. Mandela had that capacity in abundance. He used it to save us from ourselves. Ramaphosa should take more care in claiming from whom he takes inspiration.
• Steinberg teaches African studies at Oxford University.
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