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On Friday evening, a warm glow of self-satisfaction will spread through Hyde Park as tens of thousands join Nelson Mandela in celebrating his 90th birthday.
Will Smith will introduce a concert featuring Queen, Annie Lennox, Simple Minds, Razorlight and many other artists, while Bill Clinton, Gordon Brown and Oprah Winfrey will join the celebrities at a dinner in honour of the great man.
The older musicians and politicians will remember when London last hosted a concert in his honour in 1988. Mandela was still in an apartheid prison on Robben Island then. Twenty years on, his friends have much to congratulate themselves on. "Free Nelson Mandela," sang The Specials in the Eighties, and he was freed and became president of his country - and the nearest the modern world has to a saint.
Yet for all his courage, Mandela's silence on the repression in Zimbabwe is destroying his reputation. The South African trade union movement has been implacable in its opposition to Robert Mugabe. Archbishop Desmond Tutu has called on African leaders to stop letting arms reach Zimbabwe and to tell Mugabe's Zanu-PF party to quit.
From Mandela, however, there has barely been a squeak of protest against the rigged polls and stuffed ballots; nothing at all about the rapes, mutilations, starvations and murders. The best and as far as I can see only criticism Mandela could manage came in a speech in 2000 in which he condemned African "tyrants who cling to power". He didn't have the guts to name Mugabe but coyly told his audience that "everybody here knows who I am talking about".
Tellingly, no Zimbabwean acts had been booked to play at his birthday concert at the time of writing, and no Zimbabwean dissidents had been invited to his birthday party either.
Mandela's friends say he's too old to campaign but that cannot be true: the proceeds from the Hyde Park concert will fund his continuing campaign to raise money for African Aids victims. His enemies say he's a hypocrite who doesn't believe in universal human rights and sees the oppression of black people by other black people as somehow morally superior to the oppression of blacks by whites.
The best way to prove them wrong would be for Mandela to take the stage on Friday and say that he did not spend decades as a political prisoner to see a new terror spread in the name of African liberation.
Think of the impact Mandela could have in Africa if he were to denounce the Zimbabwean elections as a brutal fraud. He must surely despise Mugabe. Why not use his fame for one last good cause and let the world know it?
All those years ago, The Specials sang: "Are you so blind that you cannot see?/Are you so deaf that you cannot hear?/Are you so dumb that you cannot speak?"
Mandela may be frail but he's not blind, deaf or dumb. You've still got a voice, man: use it.
Reader views (1)
Well done, Nick, for saying what so many of us have been thinking for a long time now. In a country where it is easier to insult Jesus Christ than Nelson Mandela, I would have expected a lot more saintliness from the great man. He has been totally silent on Mugabe-- and worse, his friends and allies in South Africa have actually BLOCKED the UN's efforts to do anything about the murderer Mugabe! This is rank hypocrisy, and unworthy of the idolatry we foist upon the sainted Mandela.
Come on, Nelson-- justify all those statues of you us Londoners have to keep paying for (although now Red Ken is gone, that may change). Speak out!
- Stephen Cass, London, UK, 25/06/2008 13:40
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