Nelson Mandela is free! The word rustles like a breeze through the townships, whispered in awe, shouted in triumph from mouth to mouth, from shack to box-house. Did you hear? People wipe their eyes in wonder, greyheads laugh, babies squawk, dust rises from under the feet of young comrades running the streets with the black, gold and green banner. In the veld small boys with bobbing loincloths whistle shrilly and hurl twirling sticks at recalcitrant beasts. By noon they will take the shade under a thorntree to tell tall tales, each in turn a proud Mandela.
In Qunu of the green hills the clan will be sprucing up the graves of Nosekeni and Henry Gadla Mandela. This is where 'Buti' must come to sleep the night and cleanse his hands before the slaughtering of the sacrificial ox. Napilisi, his nephew, says: "All I know is he was put in prison because he wanted equal salary for all." In his wayside store, Makgatho is trying to capture his father's image on the television screen the way one attempts to net a butterfly. (Makgatho is a son by his first marriage.)
Nelson Mandela has been released! Old women lift their skirts to step up to the memory of a youth of rhythm and stomp. The reeds bend with the light. Old men marvel at the trembling of history and drown in thick beer this day, and the hump of accumulated days scarred with the pain of poverty. On Robben Island, in Pollsmoor and Victor Verster and Zonderwater and Brandvlei and Barberton and Diepkloof and all the other hell-holes of humiliation, prisoners bang their tin plates and chant: "Man-de-la! Man-de-la!" And in the quieter quarters of dehumanization the politicals stand taller to look the warders straight in the eye. Old guards remember and talk softly to their old wives. Torturers put a finger under a sweaty collar; they are thinking about changing their addresses. Security experts pore over the store of tapes and secret photos with which they hope to blackmail the leader: Mandela with Coetzee, Mandela with Viljoen (Cabinet ministers), Mandela with De Klerk, Mandela laughing with his head thrown back, Mandela relieving himself, Mandela in tears.
Poets are biting their pens. Yuppies, caught in a traffic jam, wind down their windows with a bronzed hand to shout: "Mandela!" Cabinet ministers take medicine, and look at one another in distrust. It is hot on the beaches; sun-reddened farmers from the interior squat attentively around portable radios. On the mountain slope above Cape Town harbor, hobos wipe their stained mouths; one bum reminisces with the toothless grin of timelessness: "I remember the day King George came to town . . ." Burly men in khaki garb snarl insults at their mocking laborers. Behind closed shutters a hit man thoughtfully oils his rifle. Maybe the earth is heaving, the sea swollen with expectations. Old dreams pour forth.
We have liberated Mandela! Grown fighters sob. Professionals plot new allegiances. Ancient companions review their splattered lives. "Now the problems start." His wife is working out which dress to wear for what occasion. Go-betweens are offering two minutes, four minutes, three smiles and a nod, dollops of his availability, for a price. In Havana, Moscow, Lusaka, London -- wherever silence caught up with the exiles, some people will remember to visit the places where the bones of tired strugglers are moldering in foreign soil, to whisper: "Yes, it's nearly finished now. Soon we shall be going home."
All over the world children wriggle out of their mothers' wombs, screaming at the light, to be named Nelson Rolihlahla Madiba Mandela. In African capitals students wave hand-printed placards defying rot and corruption, and perhaps imperialism too. Miners straighten their backs and wipe their brows. In glittering salons of the Organization of African Unity, bureaucrats try to get a grip on events as they sip at small cups of coffee and feed the prayer beads in a trickle through their fingers. There are holes in the carpets.
Musicians weave the magic mantra of Mandela into their melodies in Wolof and Swahili. Pygmies along their forest tracks, Bedouins in their encampments wrapped up against the winds of the sun, hunters along the flanks of simmering volcanoes--all invent the past and the limitless future stretching all the way to freedom of a man who once lived and who was called Mandela.
Nelson Mandela is free! The news reverberates around the globe. Jesse Jackson and Margaret Thatcher and Helmut Kohl and George Bush screech and scratch to get a morsel of the glory. In Warsaw and Berlin and Accra and London the lost and scattered children of South Africa, and some from Azania, the broken warriors expelled from the movements, are getting drunk and obnoxious. In India a fat wrestler changes his name to that of Mandela so as to draw larger crowds to the fairgrounds. In New York a trembling hand writes: "Dear Mister Mendalla, my husband is lamed, we don't need much, I have no-one else to turn to . . ."
The powerful of the world issue bloated statements, and confidentially ask their ambassadors: "How long will he last?" On Caribbean islands, in a swirl of rum spat out and cigar smoke, he is incorporated into the Voodoo pantheon to unite forces with Legba and Victor Hugo and Toussaint L'Ouverture and Baron Samedi. Mummified dreams are being dusted down. In Japan a new doll comes on the market with the features of the world's oldest prisoner. In Peru the Shining Path guerrillas cheer and shake their bitter machetes. Somewhere in Cambodia a political commissar gives Mandela to the Khmer Rouge as example and justification. In Western cities young revolutionaries with feverish eyes and death at the throat, shout: "Mandela!" hoping that this revolution at least will not be aborted in blood.
Old gulag inmates taste the salt on the wind, and sigh, and are bothered by something in the eyes. In poorhouses, in hiding places, in dungeons, in old age homes, people murmur: "So it hasn't been for nothing after all." An impresario is putting together talent for a sing-along. In Korea and Finland they spell his name wrong. On French television, marathon talkers miraculously find a second breath. People swell up with self-satisfied indignation as they use Mandela as a battering ram to get at the adversaries.
Literary agents are sending urgent faxes. Lovers suddenly break down and start sobbing in the hollow of their beloveds' shoulders. The night has become small. A Hollywood mogul is hollering instructions down the line to offer him any effing price he wants, as long as it is for ex-clu-si-vi-ty! Multinational bosses reassess strategies and instruct their minions to have advertisements of welcome published immediately. A child writes a birthday card and mails it to Nelsin Mondale, South Africa. Obsequious secretaries silently enter offices to place files on leather-topped tables. Smirking presidential advisers twirl non-existent mustaches.
An old man emerges from prison. He went in an activist, he comes out a myth. He worries about his prostate gland, his notes. A horizon lights up, he brings hope, and he never knew the world, nor the soft caress of empty days under drifting clouds. If he ever did, he no longer remembers. Perhaps there is now a little more sense to our dark passage on earth. He has kept body and soul together with pride and the impossibility of love. He will succeed. He will fail. He lives. He will die. Nelson Mandela is opening a door.