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 2 - What makes ‘Republicans’ Republicans? ‘We would still have chosen Frank and Lucille!’
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
Nations are inventions, the products of particular historical circumstances and movements. (James J Sheehan)
National myths do not arise spontaneously from people's actual experiences. They are something which people acquire from someone else: from books, from historians, from films, and now from people who make television. They are not generally part of the historical memory or a living tradition, with the exception of some special cases in which what was eventually to become a national myth was a product of religion. (Eric Hobsbawm)
Forgetting, even getting history wrong, is an essential factor in the formation of a nation, which is why the progress of historical studies is often a danger to nationality. (Ernest Renan)
‘HISTORY IS A COLLECTIVE REPRESENTATION of what happened’, wrote John Tosh in 1991 (The pursuit of history). Two years later, John Greyston shaped his arguments in agreement with Tosh when he made this important judgement on the historian's vocation: ‘history is what we make by telling a story, not a story of what actually happened.’ What Tosh and Greyston are stressing here is the fact that language mirrors and replicates differentperceptions of the world that surrounds us. Language, Tosh and Greyston seem to be saying, is always in the process of being produced and reproduced, constructed and reconstructed – or, to use Paula Treichler's phrase in How to have theory in an epidemic, language is always in the process of being ‘modified, institutionalized and put to use’. Another way of saying this is that history is based on ‘prior social constructions routinely produced within specific discourses’. A parallel argument runs through Edward Said's ‘Worldly humanism and the empire builders’. History, according to Said, ‘cannot be swept clean like a blackboard, clean so that we might inscribe our own future there and impose our own forms of life for people to follow;’ history is made by men and women, ‘just as it can also be unmade and rewritten’.
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- Information
- Mandela and MbekiThe Hero and the Outsider, pp. 29 - 66Publisher: University of South AfricaPrint publication year: 2012