Mandela

[amberdreams]

I just got home from seeing the film and goddamit I'm still in tears and I don't even really know why. It wasn't over sentimental, it didn't try and make him some sort of unrealistic glorified hero, it treated Winnie Mandela with a lot of sympathy and even a kind of tenderness, even while showing quite clearly the results of her anger and the violence she helped along.

Maybe it was because I remember so much of this - I remember those school kids getting massacred (I was at school myself at the time which made it resonate even more), I remember boycotting South African food, singing Free Nelson Mandela, crying when they released him. I don't know. It did feel a bit strange and somehow a bit wrong to be watching a film about something that touched my life, however remotely. Stupid for a middle class white girl to feel involved in a black vs white struggle hundreds of miles away, but that was where Mandela's power lay - in making the whole world want to get involved.

It probably wasn't even a great film but fuck it. Idris Elba totally made me forget he wasn't really Nelson Mandela, and now I think I'm extra sad because the real person is dead and I know this will sound really stupid, but I miss him. Where are the world leaders with that kind of integrity but who are willing to put on a rugby shirt and dance when their team wins the World Cup?

I'm going away now to try and get a grip.

Comments

[roxymissrose.livejournal.com]

I'm extra sad because the real person is dead and I know this will sound really stupid, but I miss him.

No, no, I think most of us felt this way. He was a leader, the kind that come along all too rarely.

[amberdreams.livejournal.com]

Thanks, it's good to know I'm not totally daft.

[mangacat201.livejournal.com]

Missing him has to be the single most common characteristic in the world. In fact, he was lauded shortly after his death to be the only politician in history to be missed, so you're in good company after all.
I'm glad that the film seems to have done his life justice as far as a motion picture can, I hope to get the chance to watch it too.

[amberdreams.livejournal.com]

I don't know if it's a great film but it is a good one, worth seeing.

[reapertownusa.livejournal.com]

None of that sounds ridiculous at all, and given that I can't generally watch any documentary, or half of the time even the news, without at least tearing up that doesn't seem off to me either.

It does, though, make me feel bad on account that I have to admit that I don't really anything about Mandela. Of course I know the encyclopedia basics, but he was out of the news before I was old enough to start watching the news and the events were too recent to have studied as history so I know tragically little of his story even though I'm rather obsessed with Africa...just not South Africa.

I've met some folks from South Africa, even took a writing course along with a gal who's family had owned a farm there. But they've all been rich white folks that I've met from that country and I have to admit they rather turned me off from that portion of Africa. But I will most certainly have to see the Mandela movie and do some reading.

[amberdreams.livejournal.com]

What I liked about this film was that it didn't try and sugar coat the actions of either side - white or black, or demonise either. It had the feel of a documentary in that sense, while obviously focusing on the two main characters of Mandela and his wife Winnie.

I wouldn't say I know a huge amount about it all, but because South Africa was part of the Commonwealth, news here did focus on events over there and there was huge public outcry at the actions of the Apartheid regime. Which is something so fundamentally wrong both morally and humanely that it is hard to find any good to say about a people who allowed it to happen, let alone supported it.

Also Mandela was one of those people who inspires by example not just words - his genuine forgiveness of the people who harmed him personally and the way he then took that into politics and reconciled a whole nation is something so rare it is awesome in the true sense of the word. He was a flawed man and so a true human being.

Ack. What I'm saying is - yes, read about him, read about S Africa, it is a story everyone should know about.

[reapertownusa.livejournal.com]

I’m really glad to hear that they did do a good job with the film. With amazing people like that it would be so easy to paint them as perfect, which really does a disservice to their story.

That’s true, I suppose even at the time it would have been covered more on the news in the UK. It still seems odd that it wasn’t discussed when I was in school, but thinking back I guess outside of a few specialty courses, most everything was America, America and a dash of western Europe. We studied segregation in the south, and while the Apartheid would seem thematically appropriate to incorporate there it happened on a continent that was outside of our history coverage zone.

I’ve always been interested in Gandhi, and it sounds as if the two shared many traits in common. That kind of true forgiveness means all the more as an example when coming from someone who is obviously flawed - it doesn’t leave any excuse for the rest of us.

I will most certainly be doing that. Actually, I got a new (old) map book for my birthday and was looking at Africa - several of the countries that I’ve been particularly interested in didn’t exist when the book was printed. I have a lot of reading to do.

[amberdreams.livejournal.com]

Africa is complicated. I've never really been to Africa proper, the closest was a visit to Eygpt which is the same continent but not really an African country. My uncle was a Jesuit missionary in Rhodesia through it's troubled times into independence and becoming Zimbabwe, and so I did learn a little bit about that country from him.
Have you read Alexander McCall Smith's Mma Ramotswe series of novels? I'd recommend those for some light relief!