2 - Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu as Global Citizens

Summary

It is not an overstatement to call Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu fathers of postapartheid South Africa. Their greatest contribution to South Africa lies in their establishment of credible moral narratives and frameworks for open societies. I shall discuss Mandela in the first part of this chapter; the second part engages Tutu. I take to heart Mandela's conception of cosmopolitanism as a “bounden duty”; this is where I locate his vision of South Africa. The same can be said of Tutu.

Although many critical observers of South Africa expected that Mandela's economic reforms should have been targeted to benefit the dispossessed majority population, very few deny his stature as a global icon of morality in South Africa. He bequeathed the country enormous moral capital. Capital is, by definition, something that is capable of yielding profit when duly activated. This implies that the economic and social benefits that many people might have believed would come with Mandela's presidency were implausible to realize. But the groundwork has been laid, and, if properly harnessed, could transform South Africa. Writing about Mandela and the idea of moral capital, John Kane discusses four main sources of moral capital: “cause, action, example, rhetoric/symbolism.” In Kane's view, “the real key for Mandela's success lay in the combination of the last two.” Kane argues that Mandela's skillful use of the first-person plural in regard to the challenges facing the new society is a testament not only to his rhetorical mastery, but also to his belief in the reconciliation exemplified by his own life. He forgave his jailers. His rhetoric and example would be meaningless had they not aimed at a universal, ethically justifiable goal.

Mandela as a moral icon and his contributions to South Africa have to be understood as lineaments of a larger moral inquiry. Dan D. Lazea and his coauthors interpret Mandela as a cosmopolitan, and his cosmopolitanism is moral. For these scholars, Mandela achieved this recognition by “becoming a world symbol of moral integrity and political resistance.” He recognized the necessity of universal values of diverse ethnicity, and overcame “powerful dichotomies opposing universal and parochial values and commitments.”