To begin with, proponents of decolonisation almost never acknowledge one basic fact - that most poor and working-class students have suffered the indignity of being miseducated for twelve years of their lives. South Africa’s schooling system ranks consistently amongst the worst in the world and by the time these students enter elite universities, they are hopelessly prepared for academic life and struggle to cope with the unrelenting institutional demands. But instead of acknowledging these difficulties as areas for personal development, like Aesop’s fox they conclude that the grapes must be sour because they are unreachable.

The most compelling thing about Mandela is how he endured those years of solitary confinement and other torture without ever surrendering to the racist vampires. In him people see the infinite capacity of the human spirit to resist and to conquer. Do we not for the same reason identify in literature with characters like Prometheus? And in history with people like Paul Robeson, Kwame Nkrumah, Ho Chi Minh, Nat Turner, Toussaint Louverture, Kenyan freedom fighter Dedan Kĩmathi, Zimbabwean resistance leader Mbuya Nehanda, and martyred Chilean poet and singer Víctor Jara?

All these figures are heroic because they reflect more intensely in their individual souls the souls of their community. Their uniqueness is the uniqueness of the historical moment. They make history even as history makes them. They are torches that blaze new paths. Each torch has been lit by the fire of the masses, and every time the flame seems to fade, the great ones turn to their people for more energy.

Mandela has been such a torch for the South African people. The people of South Africa are reflected in Mandela.

In Mandela, people around the world have been applauding the courage, the endurance, the resistance, and the spirit of the South African masses. People around the world, particularly Africans and those of African descent outside Africa have seen themselves reflected in the struggling South African masses. Or put another way, Mandela is to black South Africa’s struggles what black South Africa’s struggles are to the democratic forces of the world in the twentieth century. Indeed, South Africa is a mirror of the modern world in its emergence over the last four hundred years.

Racial oppression carries within it many forms of denial— economic, political, cultural, and psychological. Who does not see themselves reflected in the mirror?

South Africa is me. South Africa is you. South Africa is all the black people of the Earth. South Africa is all the workers of the world. South Africa is all of humanity in its struggles to save itself. If that struggle for the recovery of a sense of human community is led by South Africa’s masses through their political organizations, like the South African Communist Party, and the Pan-African Congress, it is equally true that Nelson Mandela has been its leading symbol.

Whether they achieve that kind of empowerment or not will depend on the extent to which they can resist being pressured by the West to accept the Kenya solution. In 1962, Jomo Kenyatta was released from eight years in prison, and he proceeded to negotiate away everything that the Kenya Land and Freedom Army (the Mau Mau) had fought for. Colonial structures were left intact, and Kenya under Daniel arap Moi became one of the most repressive states in the world, a neocolony completely and pathetically dependent on the West. Kenyatta lost on the negotiating table what had already been won on the battlefield by the Kenyan people.

Black South Africa cannot accept, or indeed afford, to replace the 1910 neocolonial arrangement run by a white minority with a perpetual neocolonial arrangement run by a Black Minority. The history of the last four hundred years calls upon them to overthrow the triple burdens of colonialism, neocolonialism, and racial oppression and to start on a sentient march toward justice for all.