Robert Henderson: Mandela – The long walk to a myth 'Looked at coldly, the role Mandela played since he stood down as President has been purely that of a PR tool . . . The Western media had created a fabulous figure who could do no wrong and, like the emperor with no clothes, the crowds he drew, acting often enough in the manner of teenagers screaming at pop groups, could either not see there were no clothes on this emperor or were constrained by fear of pointing out the unfortunate fact.'

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Mandela – The long walk to a myth

The shrieking sycophancy of the British media as they respond to Nelson Mandela’s death was as predictable as the sun rising in the East in these politically correct times.  To judge him from these panegyrics it would be thought that Mandela was an unblemished character suited only for a  secular version of sainthood. Amongst the vast cache of hysterical idiocy offered up I award the palm for incontinent emotional excess to Peter Oborne of the Telegraph for a piece entitled   “Few human beings can be compared to Jesus Christ. Nelson Mandela was one”

(http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/peteroborne/100249502/few-human-beings-can-be-compared-to-jesus-christ-nelson-mandela-was-one/)

The state of South Africa now

Back to reality.  Mandela was a man with a messy private life and a public life  which after his release from captivity in 1990 was accompanied by a great deal of hullabaloo but little improvement in the general conditions of life for most of the population.  The indignities of apartheid were removed but violent crime soared, corruption ballooned and the lot of the poor did  not substantially change.  That is not to pretend that apartheid was preferable to what exists now for the large majority of the population – the indignity of formal legal inferiority is a tremendous burden and its removal counts for much –   but rather to question whether the  present  general circumstances of South Africa are  substantially better than what existed before the end of apartheid.

The South Africa that Mandela leaves behind him is a mess. Violent crime is probably the worst problem and it is rising with the official South African figures showing murders  rising from 15,609 murders in 2011/12 to 16,259 in 2012/13 and  attempted murder rising from 14, 859 to 16, 363 . . .

http://livinginamadhouse.wordpress.com/2013/12/08/mandela-the-long-walk-to-a-myth/