This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

4th August 2007

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THE WORLD THAT MADE MANDELA by Luli Callinicos (STE Publishers) 

As a rule, people don’t like to mix tourism and politics – after all, the former is primarily a leisure activity, while the latter is a daily source of frustration and even anxiety. At times, it can’t be helped, such as when global politics interferes with travel plans (ask anyone who booked a visit to the USA starting on September 12th 2001); at other times, it may add curiosity value to a destination (the same traveller might find it very interesting if he or she deferred the trip to coincide with next year’s American presidential elections). Generally, however, we like our holidays apolitical, thank you very much.

This is a short-sighted view. Political developments define history. History informs culture. And all tourism is a form of cultural experience, whether you’re trying to elicit a smile from a guard outside Buckingham palace or gazing at the ruins of Machu Picchu. Political intrigue from long ago is more romantic, having been largely forgotten but leaving behind an aesthetically appealing legacy: the cathedrals and castles of Europe, the Great Wall of China.

The events of recent history, on the other hand, do not yet have this gloss – the many horrors of the twentieth century are too fresh. Nevertheless, each year millions of tourists visit Nazi concentration camps, Pol Pot’s killing fields, the atomic bomb blast sites in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Berlin’s Checkpoint Charlie, gateway between East and West in the days of the Communist Bloc.

Likewise, many visitors to South Africa come here not despite our apartheid history, but because of it; that is to say, the international profile of the (ongoing) struggle for freedom from racial oppression is such that people want to find out more about it and, perhaps, vicariously share in it. A unique brand of ‘cultural tourism’ has thus developed in this country – a phenomenon at the heart of which, it could be argued, is the icon who celebrated his 89th birthday last week.

Certainly, this is the premise underlying Luli Callinicos’ The World that made Mandela. The book was launched in 2000, documenting and formalising the nascent Mandela Heritage Trail, which contains 70 “sites of significance” relating to the great man’s life. The first print run sold out, and a reprinted version is now available. In hardcover and at nearly 350 landscape pages, it is by no means a traveller’s guide to be tucked into a backpack or the cubby hole of a car (nor is the Mandela Heritage Trail likely to be completed physically by any budding pilgrims; it stretches from Cape Town to Komatiepoort and, indeed, one of the sites is South Africa House on London’s Trafalgar Square).

Rather, it is a coffee-table affair: lavished with photographs – there must be nearly a thousand – the pages are not overly text-heavy. Although the book’s rich archive of images will reward and enlighten the casual browser, however, more patient readers will find in the text a fairly thorough account of twentieth-century South Africa. Callinicos is first and foremost an historian, and in lively prose she renders a vivid and detailed narrative (which, it must be said, I read with some bias having seen on the imprint page that it passed under the expert eye of Ivan Vladislavic) of both Mandela’s life and the life of the world around him.

Indeed, the book occasionally ceases to be ‘about’ Mandela, especially when it describes events and places that he was not directly involved in because he was in prison. There is, for instance, Phefeni School, representing the Soweto uprising of 1976; Rocklands in Mitchell’s Plain, where the United Democratic Front (UDF) was launched in 1983; Mbuzini, where Mozambican president Samora Machel was killed in 1986, and which Callinicos uses to allude to the SADF’s various cross-border incursions that restricted the involvement of South Africa’s neighbours in the liberation campaign; or the Steve Biko Garden of Remembrance, paying tribute to the black consciousness hero and others who died in detention. Of course, Mandela did visit these places subsequent to his release in order to unveil statues and memorials – and there are shots of the ageing leader smiling as he ‘gave his benediction’ and commemorated the various contributions to the struggle.

Along with other pictures taken after 1990, and the photographs by Peter McKenzie of the sites on the Mandela Heritage Trail as they look now, these images have a startling effect when placed side by side with the book’s visual record of the apartheid era: one is reminded that the best features of contemporary South Africa could, quite legitimately, be described as 'the World that Mandela made'.

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