Fitting location for Mandela statue

CHRIS FISHER, EDP Political Editor

Nelson Mandela hopes to return to London again next June for events marking his 90th birthday.

That could be the last time. For though the former South African president remains mentally sharp, he is now markedly frail physically. And maybe such thoughts were in the mind of Gordon Brown as he prepared yesterday to unveil the new statue of Mr Mandela and declared: "You will be here with us always."

Yes, and not just in the form of the bronze likeness in Parliament Square. The leadership he gave in taking his country from the apartheid era into multi-racial democracy will go on being cherished by millions of people like me who had long wished for such a transformation, but feared either we would not live long enough to see it or that South Africa's unique and systematic form of white supremacy could end only in great bloodshed and be replaced by new and possibly worse horrors.

And the example he set will surely go on being cited for many generations. In the eyes of many the man is more of a saint than a politician, and in the whole of world history not many political leaders have even approached that status.

Inevitably, the unveiling was an event at which cool analysis was never going to get a look-in. This was an occasion for sentimentality and even hero-worshipping. The prime minister stood in awe of the man he was honouring. And Lord Attenborough parodied himself to perfection. Did he really call Mr Brown "our dear prime minister"? I'm afraid the life-president of Luvviedom did just that.

The statue was originally to have been erected in Trafalgar Square, where South Africa House is situated, but the proposal fell foul of Westminster City Council which refused planning permission. The council's stance upset many people, but the eventual solution was a better one. Trafalgar Square should always be the domain of another Nelson, and the great Norfolk hero should not have to share it even with someone so revered as Mr Mandela.

Parliament Square is, moreover, the right place. The building Mr Mandela's statue faces is a symbol throughout the world of democratic government. It's a form of rule that is often - indeed, normally - far from perfect. It's vastly preferable to the alternatives, however. And it has been carried into the new South Africa.

In Parliament Square the Mandela statue will have the company of one of Abraham Lincoln who secured the abolition of slavery in the United States.

And there is also, of course, a statue of Winston Churchill, without whom we might all have become slaves to a regime welded to racism and extermination.

These links were pointed out yesterday by both Mr Brown and London Mayor Ken Livingstone. And the latter stated: "There can be no more fitting place than this square which you will always share with the American president who freed the slaves and the British prime minister who led a nation standing alone against the greatest evil of the 20th century."

But Mr Mandela would also have been thinking of another Parliament Square statue, and one close to his own - that of his fellow South African, General Jan Smuts.

In his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, he wrote of a trip to London with Oliver Tambo. "When we saw the statue of General Smuts near Westminster Abbey, Oliver and I joked that perhaps some day there would be a statue of us instead", he said.

Well, there is now one of him. But in addition to that of the former South African prime minister, rather than instead of. And that seems appropriate to me given the long and extraordinary political walk that Gen Smuts also took.

As an Afrikaner he became a committed opponent of British policy in southern Africa towards the end of the 19th century, and he led commando forces against our troops in the Transvaal in the Boer War. But after the war he committed himself to working with, rather than against, the British victors, and his rise through South Africa's military and political establishment resulted in his becoming his country's prime minister for the first time in 1919.

He remained in that role - after a 15-year interruption - until 1948. In his final years in office he wrote the preamble to the charter of the United Nations and both established and supported a commission which proposed the scrapping of the de facto segregation that already existed in South Africa. It was his attitude to that that cost his party the 1948 election and delivered power to the National Party with its apartheid agenda.

There are some difficult questions that could be put to Mr Mandela and those who almost treat him as a deity. Shouldn't he have spoken out long before now about the conspicuous failings of his successor, Thabo Mbeki? And about the cruelties and lunacies being inflicted next door in Zimbabwe by Robert Mugabe?

Moreover, when he became South Africa's president shouldn't he have done more to stop the wave of crime that has since swept over that country? Wasn't he in a uniquely advantageous position to preach loudly and repeatedly the message that being young, poor and black was not a legitimate excuse for violent lawlessness?

For all that, his virtues as a political and moral leader are outstanding. Despite being incarcerated for so much of his life by a ruthless and indefensible regime, he showed forgiveness rather than hatred of his and his people's oppressors. Without his example there might have been a bloodbath instead of a peaceful transition.

Why do so many black youngsters in Britain find role models in gangsters and monotonous rap singers portraying strutting thugs in a favourable light? Why can't they join the millions of white Britons who find little inspiration in this country's political leadership and look to Nelson Mandela instead? Irony is not lacking in this state of affairs.