‘Looking back, I know that I was not a man that day’: Nelson Mandela and the Ambiguities of Tradition in South Africa

This article examines what Nelson Mandela’s autobiography alludes to as ‘Xhosa tradition’ and its ambiguous relationship with African nationalism in the first half of the 20th century. I contrast Mandela’s qualified embrace of tradition with the more directly negative attitudes towards ethnic customs in general among the Eastern Cape nationalists of his generation. I argue that, unlike his comrades, Mandela retained a critical embrace of tradition because in it he recognised the seeds of democracy, traces of ‘accumulated suffering’, and the pleasure of celebrating difference. Tradition for Mandela has a critical relation to modernity – a sort of strategic distance from which vantage point modernity can be called out on its failed promise of universal freedoms. I use Hannah Arendt’s notion of citable pasts to argue that the past for Mandela is neither smoothly transmissible nor totally invented in the present, but it is captured in fragments of narrative or citations. To make this argument I offer a critique of both common-sense and constructionist notions of tradition.