Ukraine is “pregnant” with its Nelson Mandela

It would seem that the autobiography of Nelson Mandela, a man from a different century and another half of the globe has nothing to do with Ukrainian reality. Why two lawyers have initiated and financed the translation of this book, and later one of them, having become the government commissioner for ethno-national policy, have been touring the country with his former partner in a law firm, persuading Ukrainians that they badly need to read the story of the person who became in his country “an equivalent of Washington, Lincoln, and Gandhi rolled into one”?

The answer is simple: in a strange way the book Long Walk to Freedom is not about South Africa of the previous century, but also about present-day Ukraine. In Mandela’s unhurried narration about his long life we can see, like in a black mirror, a story about our colonial past, our desperate struggle for freedom, about the temptation of hatred as a way to hell, and the ability and wisdom to accept another one as another one, not distorted oneself.

A year ago, when Madiba passed away for the better world, Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa, a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature wrote, “Mandela is the best out of all imaginary – and innumerous these days – examples that, unlike many people think, politics is not only a dirty and direct thing, which helps wheeler-dealers to get rich, and debauchers – to survive, doing nothing; it is an activity that can also improve life, substitute fanatism with tolerance, hatred – with solidarity, injustice – with justice, egoism – with common good, and that there are politicians, like this South-African figure who leave their country and the world considerably better than they were before they came.”

Nelson Mandela brings back the faith in politics for us, thirsty for real reforms, real new Ukraine, for which we have been paying an incredibly high price for a year, and therefore have almost lost faith in a possibility of an evolutionary path. He reminds that the way to freedom can never be short. That this way is not just about overcoming obstacles and getting rid of shackles, but, like in Coelho’s Alchemist is maturing and shaping of those who will later be able to make the country really free. One of the conclusions we made during our discussions about the first black president of the South African Republic was, “If Mandela won at the age of 30 or 40, we would have surely have another Fidel Castro, and the history of South Africa would be absolutely different.”

Another interesting comparison that emerged during the discussions of Madiba’s biography is that the mission of current leaders of the Ukrainian state can be compared with the mission of the last white presidents of South African Republic, Pieter Willem Botha and Frederik de Klerk, to bury in a peaceful way the agonizing UkrSSR and help the Third Ukrainian Republic to be born. We shouldn’t forget that this is an honorary mission: de Klerk won the Nobel Peace Prize, like Mandela, or rather they shared this most prestigious award “for their work for the peaceful termination of the apartheid regime, and for laying the foundations for a new democratic South Africa.” We have also mentioned that Nelson Mandela’s phenomenon would be impossible without the maturity and organization of African National Congress (ANC), with which Madiba’s entire life was connected and which practically brought up in its ranks the counter-elite which came to power in South African Republic in the 1990s. The fact that this counter-elite, after coming to power, didn’t “throw the whites to the sea,” like Mandela’s radical opponents offered, but started to build South Africa for everyone: black, white, Hindu, colored, is proof of the political wisdom and maturity of this organization. The lack of a Ukrainian analogue of ANC indicates that, unfortunately, so far we haven’t got a systemic, well-organized counter-elite, which would be able to found the country anew and radically break ties with the Soviet past.

What was disappointing? Having academic background, I made a stake on presentations in universities, being sure that namely student audience would respond to the genial story of the great African. Maybe it was my ill luck, but part of the leading higher educational establishments refused to hold such an event in their walls, explaining this by the exam period. In other universities the audience turned out to be poorly prepared for the perception of the book. I had an impression that instead of being traditional centers of love of freedom, passionarity, and creative ideas, the leading Ukrainian universities are gravely ill with bureaucracy, conservatism, and indifference. Like our mass media are incurably provincial: no nationwide mass medium in Ukraine, except for Den, felt the scale and symbolism of the event and wrote at least a few words about the first week of great Madiba in Ukraine.

But they should have. I think contrary to medicine laws Mandela lived a very difficult and rich life, he spent 27 years in prison, had tuberculosis, and lived till the age of 95 only because he was waiting for someone to pass on the baton of the struggle for freedom. And the fact that the South African leader died, when the Revolution of Dignity started in Kyiv, is deeply symbolical for me, because I believe that we Ukrainians have taken from Mandela the baton of leadership in our struggle for freedom. That is why Mandela’s testament sounds especially topical today: “The truth is that we are not yet free; we have merely achieved the freedom to be free, the right not to be oppressed. We have not taken the final step of our journey, but the first step on a longer and even more difficult road. For to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others. The true test of our devotion to freedom is just beginning.”

P.S. Within the framework of Nelson Mandela’s week in Ukraine the initiators of the translation of Madiba’s autobiography, Hennadii Druzenko and Oleksii Honcharuk, together with translator Vasyl Starko launched Long Walk to Freedom in Kyiv, Sumy, Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Odesa, Khmelnytsky, Kamianets-Podilsky, Shepetivka, Lutsk, and Lviv, having held a total of 15 presentations.