But that is the point: reading what must have been his personally painful and humiliating public account of his crashed sexual relationship with his wife, I was affirmed in my larger reading of this extraordinary man. There is nothing, I concluded-nothing-that can diminish his elemental dignity… not even this.
Nelson Mandela is about many things, but to my mind he is above all about dignity. And for this reason he repays reflection, especially now when we are bogged down in our familiar quadrennial mud wrestle about leadership, vision, character, depth of conviction and the rest as they pertain or don’t pertain to the contenders for the presidency. I think dignity is, first, one of the hardest qualities there is to come by and maintain, requiring prodigious quantities of self-discipline and restraint; second, indispensable, even defining, in a true leader; and third, almost universally misunderstood in a way that cheapens and trivializes the real thing.
I’ll start with the misunderstanding part. Too many people seem to think that dignity can be conferred by status, uniform or unfailing boringness of personality. Wrong. Generally they are confusing dignity with stuffiness, when stuffiness is merely a manifestation of snobbery or stupidity or an impoverished imagination or all three. It’s not just that you can indulge in some silly fun or get in real trouble and still maintain your dignity if you have it in the first place. It’s that you can also be reduced to what is meant to be utter indignity and mortification by others in the cruelest of circumstances–I think of the skeletal death-camp survivors, the hollow-eyed prisoners and hostages returned from other ordeals-and still preserve, even exude, a fundamental dignity. This is the most important fact about the attribute. People often say someone robbed someone else of his or her dignity, but in truth it simply cannot happen. That is because dignity is not in anyone else’s gift to bestow or take away, either. It is wholly self-generated.
Not everyone understands that truth, let alone embodies it, but surely Mandela does. Like others in this country, I knew very little of him except the outline of his political biography when he was released from his 27-year prison term a few years back. And like others, I suspect, I was struck precisely by the strangely intense dignity of the man, his demeanor, as he walked to freedom that day, followed by the world’s TV cameras. His first words were about his country and the nature of the society he wished for it, about his hopes for the future, not what would surely have been an understandable bitterness about the past. Here was a man, after all, who had essentially had his adult life, his prime, stolen from him. It was now gone and irreplaceable, both the professional life and the personal life, the raising of his children, the love of his wife, the companionship of his friends. He had spent many of those years in near-total isolation and without reason to expect ever to be free. And yet neither at that moment nor at any time since have I heard of Nelson Mandela’s describing himself as a victim, complaining of his horrendous maltreatment by a state that then came to depend on him to save it from its own brutal folly. He was released from 27 years in prison for political dissidence and immediately asked to help end apartheid and bring racial peace and comity of the kind he had been jailed for advocating all those years before. And that, without a word or whisper of self-pity or self-aggrandizement, is what he did.
If anyone could fairly claim victimhood in this age of wall-to-wall, self-described victims, Mandela could. But it held no interest or attraction for him, and his dignity in any event would not have countenanced such self-presentation. He would not fuzz over or lie about those years of incarceration, just as in court the other day, he did not let personal pride keep him from speaking the surely uncomfortable truth about his wife’s refusal to accept him back as a husband and about her flagrant adultery. But it was a matter of truthfulness, not self-dramatization. There was a kind of stark but required honesty to his testimony-and that was that. The elder husband betrayed by the younger wife is a staple of comic literature going back to the classics. He is a figure of fun and indignity. But not this elder husband.
Over the years in this country we have had leaders who had the magic quality of exceptional dignity. People will see it-and them-in their own way, and probably no two lists would match entirely. But I think we could all agree on a few things. One is that it is supremely desirable in one who aspires to lead, a characteristic that subsumes so many other of the prerequisites we talk about. That is, those who have dignity are almost certain to have “the vision thing,” “the leadership thing” and the rest. Finally, there is the fact that dignity is something a public person has, not something he says he has or tries to look as if he has. And I believe people, a.k.a. voters, are on to this. To go back to the mildly racy note on which I began, dignity does have something in common with pornography as so memorably defined by the late justice Potter Stewart: you know it when you see it.
