In South Africa, Nelson Mandela is everywhere. The country’s currency bears his smiling face, at least 32 streets are named for him, and nearly two dozen statues in his image watch over a country in flux.
Every year on his birthday on July 18, South Africans celebrate Mandela Day by volunteering for 67 minutes – by painting schools, knitting blankets or cleaning city parks – in honor of Mr Mandela’s 67 years of service to the country as an anti-apartheid activist. Leader, most of which is behind bars.
But 10 years after his death, attitudes have changed. The party Mandela led after his release from prison, the African National Congress, is in serious danger of losing its absolute majority for the first time since he became president in 1994 in the first free elections since the fall of apartheid. Corruption, incompetence and elitism have tainted the ANC
Mr. Mandela’s image – plastered across the country by the ANC – has been transformed by some from that of a hero to that of a victim.
To enter the courthouse in Johannesburg where he works, Ofentse passes a 20-foot statue of a young Mr. Mandela as a boxer. He said he deliberately avoids watching it for fear of turning into a “walking ball of rage”.
“I’m not a big fan of Mandela,” said Mr. Thieb, 22. “There are a lot of things that can be better negotiated when it comes to providing freedom for all South Africans in ’94.”
One of his main gripes about the economy is the lack of jobs. The unemployment rate among South Africans aged 15 to 34 is 46 percent. Mr. Like Thebes, millions more are underemployed. He studied computer science at university level, never graduating. He said selling funeral policies to court staff was the best job he could find.
A maze of courtrooms with marble pillars and fading signs was recently closed due to water shortage across the city. A few days ago, the court was closed due to power cut. Black spots are common across the country.
Faith in the future is falling. Seventy percent of South Africans in 2021 say the country is headed in the wrong direction, up from 49 percent in 2010, according to a recent survey published by the country’s Human Sciences Research Council. Only 26 percent said they trust the government, down from 64 percent in 2005.
In most places, Mr Mandela’s name is associated not with these failures, but with victory over injustice. From Washington to Havana to Beijing to Nanterre in France, there are Mandela statues, streets or squares. This week, the South African government plans to unveil another memorial in Kunu, his ancestral home in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province.
But when news of the new Mandela memorial popped up on his social media feed, 22-year-old researcher and aspiring filmmaker Onesimo Sengimbo rolled his eyes.
“Maybe older people are still buying it, but we’re not,” Ms. Cengimbo said. “It’s a bit annoying that when it comes to elections, they’re not really doing anything different, they’re showing Mandela’s face again.”
During the tumultuous transition from apartheid, Mr. Mandela was one of many leaders whose families fought for the freedom of colored children. But after he triumphantly emerged from prison in 1990, toured the world and led the country to democracy, he became a solo hero.
On the playground, children jumped rope and sang, “There’s a man with gray hair from afar, his name is Nelson Mandela.”
It left an indelible mark on those who had the chance to be in his presence.
In a staff area in the basement of the Sheraton Pretoria hotel, Selina Papo scanned a wall of photographs of VIP guests until she found a black-and-white picture of Mr Mandela in 2004.
“He was like gold,” Mrs. Papo laughed. About 20 years ago, she said, she was among a group of domestic workers who greeted Mr. Mandela with a song of praise in the lobby. The memory is still so vivid that she bursts into song and dances two steps.
Mrs. Papo, 45, lived through Mr. Mandela’s prime. He worked his way up in the hospitality industry as international hotel chains returned to South Africa. She studied by correspondence, supported her siblings through school, and eventually bought a house in what was once a whites-only suburb.
Today, the strangling cost of living and rolling blackouts have dimmed her optimism about South Africa, but she doesn’t blame her leader.
“Those who came later have to fix it,” she said.
Some monuments to Mr Mandela have also fallen on hard times. The Johannesburg Bridge, which crosses dozens of decommissioned trains on rusting tracks, is a hot spot for muggers. Cracks have begun to crack at the base of the country’s largest monument to Mr. Mandela: a 30-foot bronze statue in Pretoria, South Africa’s executive capital.
On a bleak winter morning, Desire Wawda watched a group of South Korean tourists take pictures next to the monument. They said they were killing time after the closure of their college campus following protests over unpaid scholarships and tuition fees.
Mr Vavda, 17, belongs to a generation that knows Mr Mandela only as a historical figure in textbooks and movies.
To him, Mr Mandela’s struggle to end apartheid was admirable. But he said the huge economic gap between black and white South Africans will be on his mind when he votes for the first time next year.
“They didn’t rebel against white people,” Mr. Vavda said. “I was getting revenge.”
Outside the library of Nelson Mandela University in the coastal city of Gkeberha, Asemahle Gwala said that when he was a student, he sat for hours on a bench next to a life-size statue of Mr Mandela. Students sit on the statue’s lap, or decorate the statue with clothes and lipstick.
Mr. Gwala, now 26, said he took it as a reminder that Mr. Mandela was human — he had not become a commercial brand.
South Africans, he said, would identify more with Mr Mandela if they could see him “as a man who wanted to change his world” rather than as a statue and a monument.
