Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface: Mandela and Mbeki: Two great lures for ‘Republicans’
- Chapter 1 What is ‘greatness’ exactly? The peculiarities of Mandela and Mbeki
- Chapter 2 What makes ‘Republicans’ Republicans? ‘We would still have chosen Frank and Lucille!’
- Chapter 3 When Mandela and Mbeki descend wildly into ‘novelistic’ fiction ‘Imagined communities’ and the stereotypes of Calpurnia and Julius Caesar
- Chapter 4 ‘Who first’ and who is the ‘martial captain’ of the class? Of the ‘commoners’ and ‘bourgeois’ people
- Chapter 5 ‘This thing of us is more than a comrades’ club’ The ‘medieval’ mentality of the ANC
- Chapter 6 ‘The Prince William inheritance’ of Thabo Mbeki ‘Oh by the way, I have decided that you will be my Deputy President’
- Chapter 7 ‘Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t’ ‘Hyphenation’, ‘dehyphenation’, and the ‘modern presidency’
- Chapter 8 Stuck on the wrong and right side of history Why Mr Mbeki lost his Presidency and why Mr Mandela did not
- Chapter 9 Reflections on the problems of paternal power and nostalgia Why Mr Mbeki was clearly a ‘patriarchalist’ and why Mr Mandela was clearly a ‘Republican’
- List of sources
- Index
Chapter 1 - What is ‘greatness’ exactly? The peculiarities of Mandela and Mbeki
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 March 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface: Mandela and Mbeki: Two great lures for ‘Republicans’
- Chapter 1 What is ‘greatness’ exactly? The peculiarities of Mandela and Mbeki
- Chapter 2 What makes ‘Republicans’ Republicans? ‘We would still have chosen Frank and Lucille!’
- Chapter 3 When Mandela and Mbeki descend wildly into ‘novelistic’ fiction ‘Imagined communities’ and the stereotypes of Calpurnia and Julius Caesar
- Chapter 4 ‘Who first’ and who is the ‘martial captain’ of the class? Of the ‘commoners’ and ‘bourgeois’ people
- Chapter 5 ‘This thing of us is more than a comrades’ club’ The ‘medieval’ mentality of the ANC
- Chapter 6 ‘The Prince William inheritance’ of Thabo Mbeki ‘Oh by the way, I have decided that you will be my Deputy President’
- Chapter 7 ‘Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t’ ‘Hyphenation’, ‘dehyphenation’, and the ‘modern presidency’
- Chapter 8 Stuck on the wrong and right side of history Why Mr Mbeki lost his Presidency and why Mr Mandela did not
- Chapter 9 Reflections on the problems of paternal power and nostalgia Why Mr Mbeki was clearly a ‘patriarchalist’ and why Mr Mandela was clearly a ‘Republican’
- List of sources
- Index
Summary
The government of the US [is] largely immune to great men, or indeed to anybody, taking great decisions, since rapid effective national decision-making, not least by the President, is almost impossible. The US, at least in its public life, is the only country that is geared to operate with mediocrities .. It is the only country in my lifetime where three able Presidents (FDR, Kennedy, Nixon) have been replaced, at a moment's notice, by men neither qualified nor expected to do the job, without making any noticeable difference to the course of US and world history. Historians who believe in the supremacy of high politics and great individuals have a hard case in America. (Eric Hobsbawm)
Usually, you need to die to be great. How I am judged has never been my worry. I am not obsessed with that. My worry is to be the best I can with what I have. Afterwards, you have to judge … My obsession is not whether or not people say I am great. We are all human beings. At the end of the day, we try to do well. (Arsene Wenger)
I am the greatest [because] I float like a butterfly and sting like a bee! (Muhammad Ali)
‘THERE ARE THREE WAYS OF ENJOYING SPORT’, writes Simon Barnes in the Times of London, which ‘can mingle and merge, two together or all three at once’, but all of which ‘form a hierarchy’ of some sort. The lowest among Barnes's three categories is ‘partisanship’, by which he means the identification, the loyalty and the cheering that ‘are today the bread and butter of the sports industry’. In the middle category is ‘drama’, that ‘intensity of feeling’ which always collects around our modern sport, such as when the victorious Matthias Steiner of Germany ‘bursts into tears’ at the Beijing Olympics, ‘cavorted about the stage in a mad dance like a giant baby in his romper suit, accepted his gold medal and held it up, holding in his other hand a picture of his wife, who was killed in a car crash.’ And then there is the last category, the most important of them all – namely, ‘greatness’. By Barnes's account, ‘greatness’ is ‘the remorseless drive for perfection, the extraordinary talent, the unstoppable desire to express that talent, and thereby, to redefine our understanding of the possible’.
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- Mandela and MbekiThe Hero and the Outsider, pp. 1 - 28Publisher: University of South AfricaPrint publication year: 2012