JOHANNESBURG — The nasty family squabble over where three of former President Nelson Mandela’s children, and eventually the leader himself, will be buried drew to a close on Thursday morning in a small village on the Eastern Cape. But not before it had thrown into relief the perhaps inevitable disputes over the revered leader’s legacy — both the financial legacy, which his family is wrestling over, and more broadly, the political legacy of how Mr. Mandela will be remembered and how his story will guide the country he led. Mandla Mandela, the former president’s eldest grandson and heir as tribal leader in the region, held a news conference in his compound in Mvezo saying that he would cease his legal battles to have the bodies kept there. In 2011, he moved the bodies to Mvezo from another small village, Qunu, where the rest of the Mandela family wanted them and where the anti-apartheid leader is said to wish to be buried himself. By late afternoon, the bodies were reburied in Qunu. “The battle within the family is a battle that is going on politically, as well,” said Justice Malala, a political analyst and former publisher of the newspaper The Sowetan. “Who does Nelson Mandela belong to? To the African National Congress or to the country?” The Youth League of the governing A.N.C. drew criticism just last week for showing up outside the hospital where Mr. Mandela has been battling a lung infection since June 8 with a truck plastered with election posters — South Africa will have national elections next year. Before that, the opposition Democratic Alliance drew fire for billboards in Cape Town and elsewhere showing Mr. Mandela embracing the party’s former leader, Helen Suzman. And no less a figure than Mr. Mandela’s ex-wife, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, took a swipe this week at South Africa’s current president, Jacob Zuma, for an incident earlier this year in which Mr. Zuma and other A.N.C. leaders visited the ailing Mr. Mandela to have their photos taken with him. Mr. Zuma said he found Mr. Mandela “in good shape.” But the images showed a clearly ailing man, almost unresponsive as the politicians beamed on all sides of him, prompting complaints from the family that they had exploited his fragile state to be seen in his company one more time. “I honestly cannot put in words how hurt the family was,” Mrs. Madikizela-Mandela said in an interview with Britain’s ITV this week. “It was one of the most insensitive things for anyone to have done.” This week, the battle over Mr. Mandela’s legacy shifted from politics to family. The fight over the grave sites was both an intimate matter and a public struggle over a national landmark. Mandla Mandela claimed his rights as Mr. Mandela’s eldest male heir to decide such important considerations, but the anti-apartheid leader’s wife, Graça Machel, and daughters, along with a coterie of grandchildren, were having none of that. At stake was the future. Mr. Mandela’s grave site is certain to become one of the country’s main tourist attractions, and the village where he rests will reap the benefits. Mr. Mandela’s relatives, led by his eldest daughter, Makaziwe Mandela, asserted that Mandla Mandela was interested only in the money that would come from the grave site. At his news conference Thursday, Mandla Mandela asserted that they were the ones fighting over control of companies set up by the anti-apartheid leader — and were therefore the ones interested in money. “This is the very family who has taken their own grandfather to court for his money,” he said. The flare-up within the Mandela family was merely the most recent one. A limited edition of Mr. Mandela’s handprints, inscribed with an image of the African continent, are at the center of a legal dispute between Mr. Mandela’s two eldest daughters and some of his closest surviving allies from the struggle against white minority rule. The handprint paintings — of which an estimated 1,000 were made, each signed individually by Mr. Mandela — are the most valuable items in a series of artworks that Mr. Mandela started 10 years ago. The collection includes sketches from Robben Island, where Mr. Mandela spent 18 years in jail, but it is the handprints that have become most valued: they sell for over $10,000 each on the private market, according to art dealers who trade in the work. But two of his daughters — Makaziwe Mandela and Zenani Dlamini, South Africa’s ambassador to Argentina and Paraguay — and several of his grandchildren brought a lawsuit to remove directors from the boards of two companies set up to disburse the proceeds from the artwork. The most prominent director is George Bizos, a lawyer who defended Mr. Mandela during the Rivonia trial of the early 1960s, which ended with Mr. Mandela being jailed for 27 years. And there have been other episodes that have unsettled South Africans. Makaziwe Mandela started a “House of Mandela” wine label. And two of his granddaughters have appeared in a reality television show called “Being Mandela,” about their materialistic lifestyle, as well as starting a clothing line called LWTF, an acronym for Mr. Mandela’s autobiography, “Long Walk to Freedom.” The legal suit over the Mandela trusts has divided Mr. Mandela’s family and highlighted a delicate issue in South Africa: Who should control Mr. Mandela’s image, and how much they should profit from it? Such financial squabbles, as ill-timed as they may be while Mr. Mandela lies near death, are likely to fade against the larger issue of who will control his political legacy. “For the A.N.C., it’s not ‘Vote for us on the basis of what we are doing,’ it is ‘Vote for us because of Nelson Mandela and what he did,’ ” Mr. Malala said. “This will all continue into the election next year and maybe the one after that. And then it will become history.”
Posted on: Fri, 05 Jul 2013 06:30:37 +0000
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