FROM “THE NEW YORKER”
December 6, 2013
Nelson Mandela and the Bees
On a chilly Easter Saturday in 1998, I received an urgent message
from Nelson Mandela’s press aide to call a phone number in the Eastern
Cape. I was a reporter for a Sunday newspaper in Johannesburg at the
time, but was on vacation in Cape Town and had just stepped off a
wind-swept beach. So I was ill prepared for the conversation that
followed.
I called. A woman answered the phone and I gave my name. Soon, a
familiar voice boomed down the line. “I’m happy to hear from you,” said
President Nelson Mandela, as though a call from a reporter on a Saturday
afternoon was a pleasant surprise. But he wasn’t well, he said. The
reason for his indisposition was a swarm of honey bees that had attacked
him in his bathroom, while he was getting out of the bath.
The first democratic President of South Africa
said that he was particularly upset because he had defended the bees’
right to remain on the grounds of his rural home in Qunu, in the Eastern
Cape. “When the police wanted to remove them, I said, No, they are
perfectly entitled to select their own home,” he said. He also thought
the means of removing a hive—with smoke—was “a bit crude.”
But that morning, he’d stepped out of the tub and was about to put on
body lotion when he heard an aggressive buzzing outside the open
bathroom window. He had grown up in the countryside surrounding Qunu and
knew that, with snakes and bees, the best tactic is to keep still. But
the bees seemed intent on attacking, so he reached for a fumigator
spray.
“Then they launched a counterattack,” he said, stinging him in the
soft area just below the pit of his stomach, a favorite place for
attacking a boxer. “I had to flee.”
I asked a few questions, but I was so taken aback that I failed to
ask the big one: Why was he telling me this? He knew me as a reporter,
not as a confidante. His aides couldn’t or wouldn’t enlighten me, so I
called my editor from the beach parking lot and filed a story over the
phone. It ran the next day as a page-one anchor under the headline “STINGING ATTACK ON MANDELA HITS HIM BELOW THE BELT.”
It was picked up by the wire services and run around the world. At
least one newspaper felt at liberty to change his quotes. He had told me
that he was stung “four or five times in the stomach and in parts I am
too embarrassed to mention to a young lady.” That became “…and in other
parts that are privileged information.”
The story was deeply troubling for some. Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi,
who was in Mandela’s cabinet at the time, said that her mother-in-law
was concerned because the bees had stung him inside his house. A sangoma
(a traditional healer) told Sapa, a South African newswire service,
that this meant the ancestors were angry with him, and that his family
should slaughter a goat to appease them, and brew traditional beer.
“Why should the ancestors be angry with such a man?” I asked an aide.
“Because of Graça,” he said, meaning Graça Machel, Mandela’s then
fiancé. She was not even South African, let alone Xhosa, and there had
been some murmurings in Qunu about their relationship.
“There is a belief in Xhosa tradition that bees are connected to
ancestors, and if they show unkindness toward you it’s a message from
the ancestors,” Peter Mtuze told me years later. Mtuze is a professor
emeritus at Rhodes University in the Eastern Cape, a historian and an
expert on Xhosa culture. “Sometimes, it”—a bee attack—“just indicates
attention from the ancestor, if for some reason there is something you
need to do.”
At the time, I was ignorant of this dimension. When I interviewed
Mandela a few months after the bee incident, shortly before his
eightieth birthday, I asked him why he had told me, particularly given
that he had joked, soon after, that I had “exposed him to the world.”
Better the story got out the way it did, he said, than having a flutter
of gossip emanating from Qunu. He was kind enough not to say that he had
chosen a reporter whose ignorance would serve his purpose. My rendering
of the tale killed any deeper interpretation.
Mandela marked so many firsts in his brief five-year term as
President. One of them was the charming, though sophisticated and
tactical, way he dealt with the media. He got such good press not only
because of who he was but because of how he treated reporters. He once
fished a photographer from an Afrikaans newspaper out of a fountain on
the grounds of Tuynhuys, his Cape Town offices. The photographer had
been walking backward, taking pictures of him, when he tripped over a
ledge and fell into the water. (He was thereafter known among the local
cameramen as “the pool photographer.”) And he elevated the status of
journalists more than any other politician has done, before or since.
When the Namibian President, Sam Nujoma, came on his first state
visit to South Africa, in 1996, Mandela walked the surprised head of
state out of a press conference, through the Tuynhuys gardens to the
fence that borders Government Avenue, a tree-lined pedestrian
thoroughfare in Cape Town. Delighted schoolchildren stopped to shake his
hand through the railings. “Have you met the President of Namibia?” he
asked one solemnly. And to another: “What would you like to be when you
grow up? A doctor? Maybe even a news reporter?” He gestured at the reporters clustered around him.
There is an anthemic freedom song in Xhosa, Mandela’s mother tongue,
in praise of the statesman. It was sung when Mandela was imprisoned,
when he was freed in 1990, when he was President, and, afterward, in his
retirement. Nelson Mandela / Akekh’ ofananaye—“Nelson Mandela,
there is none other like him.” Today, for those of us fortunate enough
to have reported on him, it rings in our heads.
Pippa Green is a South African journalist and the
author of “Choice Not Fate,” a biography of Trevor Manuel, the first black finance minister appointed by Nelson Mandela.
Photograph: Steve Russell/Toronto Star via Getty
LINK: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2013/12/nelson-mandela-and-the-bees.html