In 2009, as millions of people watched Morgan Freeman play Nelson Mandela in Clint Eastwood’s Invictus, a sizeable number of those people tried to figure out how Mandela could have been involved in the 1995 Rugby World Cup when they so clearly remembered him dying in custody in the 1980s.
That phenomenon, dubbed the Mandela Effect by writer and ghost-hunter (no, really) Fiona Broome, is now fairly well-known, accounting for a variety of clear but entirely false memories, from widely misremembered movie lines (nobody ever said “Luke, I am your father”) to completely irrelevant but bizarrely specific details. It turns out I am one of many people who could swear that the Pokémon character Pikachu has a black-tipped tail.
I suppose it could have been called anything. Had Broome been sharing her ghost-hunting techniques at a different conference in the early 2000s, and had the topic turned to memories of classic films rather than South African politics, she might have noticed that a startling number of people were sure they’d seen Ingrid Bergman say “Play it again, Sam” (Bergman didn’t) and we might now be talking about the Bergman Effect.
Today, however, the Mandela Effect has a very specific resonance and meaning; because today is Mandela Day, a thing quickly becoming its own sort of false memory, succumbing to its own Mandela Effect.
Of course, Mandela, memory and meaning have become a distinctly fluid mix, even without help from the quirks of cognition.
Mandela now belongs to history, and history is a constant negotiation between interested parties. Sometimes, these are trained professionals engaging in a sensible and healthy reappraisal of how the past looked and what it meant. Increasingly, they are vandals, whipped into a froth of self-righteousness by whichever media scratches their itches best, armed with the breastplate of personal grievance and the sword of online anonymity, and sent forth to turn it all to ash so that nobody will believe anything and will therefore be entirely vulnerable to whichever shiny man in a shiny suit steps up to claim the ash heap.
In South Africa, both have been busy with Mandela’s life. Just recently Jonny Steinberg added to the library of respectable biographies written in good faith. Whooping outside, there are the Twitter historians, insisting that the real Mandela — a radical who wanted to give back the land — was murdered by the apartheid regime, and that the man who walked out of Victor Verster prison was an actor, reciting reconciliatory, compliant lines written for him by PW Botha and FW De Klerk.
Mandela’s cautious, compromised, pragmatic first attempt at nation building has become a performance of orgiastic consumption watched by a citizenry alternately ignored and mocked by Mandela’s former comrades.
In the middle, however, there is a growing group, neither historians nor idiots, who find it increasingly difficult to swallow the economic compromises made by Mandela, and who therefore can’t stomach the Tata-Madiba-Of-The-Rainbow-Nation caricature so beloved of the South African corporations that benefited from those compromises.
And that’s just the ones who care enough to have an opinion. Increasingly, I suspect, Mandela simply means nothing to a growing number of citizens. Today’s 20-year-olds were five or six when he retired from public life, which means that, for at least a third of South Africans, he is no more real than any likeness on any crumpled banknote or weathered bronze statue.
No wonder, then, that Mandela Day seems to grow fainter every year. But perhaps that was always going to happen, as his memory — curated, debated, reframed and in some cases invented — slowly but relentlessly detaches from political and historical reality.
To be fair, it’s not as if the organisers of Mandela Day have much of a choice. For most of the second half of the 20th century, Mandela was the ANC and the ANC was Mandela, and for the past 15 years, the ANC has been a clogged porta-loo standing in the veld where a school was once going to be built.
Mandela’s cautious, compromised, pragmatic first attempt at nation building has become a performance of orgiastic consumption watched by a citizenry alternately ignored and mocked by Mandela’s former comrades.
Once, he said he was willing to die for his beliefs. Today, the only people who die because of what the ANC believes are the poor, either because they’ve been shot by Bheki Cele’s police or because there’s cholera in the water or because they’re 40 and have never had a job and the despair is too much to bear.
No wonder, then, that Mandela’s memory — or at least the easily accessible version, the version you can hand out with branded water bottles at corporate fun-runs — is being quarantined in a context-free bubble of generalised benevolence and positivity; the sort of faint glow we half-feel when we stumble across a yellowing mention of Florence Nightingale — less a historical fact than a vague sense of someone who almost certainly did something good, though the specifics escape us just at the moment.
All of which is why I suspect that, should Mandela Day survive another decade, it will celebrate a life well on its way to being entirely reinvented by the Mandela Effect, as we clearly remember a news broadcast about him winning a rugby match for the Springboks, or carrying a lamp through tents full of wounded soldiers, or delivering armfuls of puppies to orphanages not yet built ...
I suppose there are worse ways to be remembered. But if you don’t like those, there are plenty more where they came from.
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