With all due respect to my comrades in South Africa, “Breaking News” about Nelson Mandela being rushed to hospital is taking on the spectacle of breaking news about Lindsay Lohan being arrested.
Let me hasten to declare that I have as much respect, admiration, and affection for Mandela as any non-South African can possibly have. In fact, my abiding regard for him has compelled me to repeatedly lament the way everyone from family members to politicians have been treating him more like a national mascot than an elder statesman in recent years:
No doubt you are aware of politicians and celebrities making pilgrimages to Mandela’s home for a photo op with him, which invariably looks like a snapshot from a South African version of Weekend at Bernie’s.
(‘Is Nothing Sacred? ‘Being Mandela’ – the Reality-TV Show.” The iPINIONS Journal, March 18, 2013)
Mandela has been taken on four death-defying rushes to hospital since December, including most recently on Saturday. And worldwide concern, bordering on hysteria, has attended each occasion – complete with vague, funereal reports aimed at assuring all that he’s still alive. The 94-year-old Mandela is reportedly suffering recurring, suffocating bouts of pneumonia.
But all of this public attention on his every dying breath strikes me as just another betrayal of the dignity and discretion that once defined his life. What’s more, nothing demonstrates the hysteria attending this latest rush to hospital quite like multitudes running to the nearest church to pray for him.
Mind you, I have no doubt that they are praying for him – to hold death at bay, yet again – only out of unconditional devotion to their beloved Madiba. Indeed, it’s a testament to his inspired leadership that, 14 years after he retired from politics, even a dying Mandela offers South Africans greater hope for their future than any of their current leaders.
On the other hand, I am among those hoping – not necessarily for him to die, but for him to be spared any more indignities. After all, it’s painfully clear that the most loving and respectful thing anyone could have done for Mandela months ago was to have him committed to hospice care.
In hospice, health professionals could help him live out the rest of his days in peace, quiet, and dignity. This, in effect, is what recently retired Pope Benedict XVI, who is reportedly withering away at an even faster pace, is doing; while Mandela’s family members are propping him up for photo ops and reality-TV shows, in which he invariably looks like he’s, well, already off in another world.
Now, lest you think I’m being too dispassionate, or even macabre, consider that no less a person than his longtime friend, Andrew Mlangeni, was just quoted saying the following in an interview published under the instructive headline, “It’s time to let him go:”
You [Madiba] have been coming to the hospital too many times… The family must release him so that God may have his own way… Once the family releases him, the people of South Africa will follow.
(South Africa Sunday Times, June 9, 2013)
So here’s to letting Mandela go: no more to hospital, but to hospice. And you can be sure that, when he dies, the ANC will put on a state funeral that will make the one the Vatican puts on for the pope seem modest and irreverent.
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