MANDELA’S MANDATE

“We have not taken the final step of our journey, but the first step on a longer and even more difficult road.”

As the few that never used to get start to get, they will forget how it felt like not to get and get consumed by getting more and more. They will abort the mission because of the comforts, is what I hear Mandela say in the above quote. The idea was never to be happy with inclusion but to level the playing field, agitate for it, fight for it and let it be the ideal for which we are all willing to die. Mandela seems to suggest that, we are going to get to the newly attained freedom and take more than we need, accumulate excesses and get consumed by greed, where we don't know when to stop. We collect and collect until we cannot collect anymore and then we outsource storerooms to keep our collections that we can no longer hold with our own two hands. We have to avoid greed and remember the work of a democratic and free South Africa in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. This is the utopia we are working towards. The trap is greed, watch out for it! There has always been a warning sign, something about overcoming the maze of excesses being much like a camel attempting to go through the eye of a needle. Sounds impossible to overcome, which means it’s nothing to aspire towards. The famous trio: Power, Wealth & Fame trips over many great people, we see it in how country presidents struggle with it, we saw it with King Solomon with his 700 wives and 300 concubines, he was suffering with the burden of power, he didn’t know what to do with it. Power is not for the faint hearted, it is the stuff of refined character, only the pure in spirit can do it justice and Mandela was there, perceiving differently and clearly. I believe that is why he was so widely celebrated, he illuminated the light that the world needs.?

Mandela’s generation had to overcome death, actual physical death, they took a decision to become casualties fighting for this freedom, their most potent tool was their physical lives. To show that they were truly taking a stand and to demonstrate their revolt, they needed to be willing to die and many of them died indeed and Mandela lived to tell the story that this was indeed the ideal they agreed they would die for. Their lives were the prize they were willing to pay and to a great degree, we are not having to pay with our lives, at least not yet. They already paid the prize, we shouldn’t be made to pay with our lives again. We are paying with comforts, big jobs and big salaries. The prize we are paying is overaccumulation of stuff, that is not the game we are playing! We need to work towards a clear mandate of a just and fair society where all people have equal opportunities to thrive. If we are not yet there, we have not yet arrived.

“Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission. Fulfill it or betray it.” Franz Fanon

I put it to you that, our mission is clear, we must build “a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities.”?