Greatness

“This is one of the countries that had been very successful in overcoming the legacy of colonialism, of poverty, of ignorance, and we stand to gain a great deal by associating with it.”

That was what Nelson Mandela said when he came here in March 1997. He was probably just being his normal gracious self. His host country might have been many things, but it wasn’t one that had successfully overcome colonialism, poverty and ignorance. Proof of it is that few Filipinos now even remember, or know, he was here.

As it was, even then few Filipinos understood they were in the presence of greatness. Certainly, not the officials who were on hand to meet him, which included President Fidel Ramos, Vice President Joseph Estrada, Senate President Ernesto Maceda, and House Speaker Jose de Venecia. A day or so after Mandela left, he was forgotten.

The saving grace in all this was Cory Aquino. Mandela’s remark was in fact induced by what Cory had done for this country. For which Mandela expressed deep admiration, and which Cory in no small measure returned. It takes the great to truly appreciate the great. That was a wonderful picture of the two of them shaking each other’s hand and beaming at the world when they met. Two of the simplest people on earth, two of the mightiest people on earth. And the exalted shall be humbled and the humble exalted.

That picture also offers an opportunity to compare the two.

There are of course considerable differences between them. But I’ll leave others to spell them out, I’ll just dwell on what I consider to be one of the most important. That was the difference in their concepts of reconciliation.

For them to have embarked on it at all was a feat of character. Both had suffered a great deal. Mandela had been jailed for 27 years, in the course of which he had endured not just tremendous physical deprivation but tremendous spiritual devastation in the deaths of comrades. Cory was never detained, but her husband was for over 10 years, only to come back from exile and be greeted by an assassin’s bullet. When they arose from such abject depths to topple regimes that seemed destined to last forever—Cory came first, which was writing on the wall about tyrants having been weighed and found wanting—they startled the world some more by calling for reconciliation.

Mandela’s, though, was by far the deeper. He might have called for forgiving—he realized, he said, that if he had taken on a more vindictive path, South Africa would have been locked in strife that would assure no end to bloodletting—but he did not call for forgetting. Instead he assured there would be no forgetting by mounting a Truth Commission headed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, himself a Nobel Peace Prize winner, whose purpose was not to prosecute those who had persecuted during apartheid but to make even them see the evil of their former cause. And in the process make the people remember.

Before forgiveness, there was acknowledgment of the monumental sin. Before reconciliation, there was atonement.

That was what we never had, thereby producing contrasting results. Today, despite the many problems that lie in the path of unifying South Africa, nobody will be found there extolling apartheid’s virtues and saying how so much better it was in the past. Today, the Marcoses are saying precisely that about martial law in YouTube and elsewhere. More to the point, having secured a foothold in government, they are making a bid to wrest it back.

Mandela wrought the far deeper change from a far worse situation. In that respect, he is without peer.

In many other respects however, he and Cory were the equal of each other. They were both of rocklike and unwavering faith, the kind that moved mountains. Cory with her religious conviction of the providential hand that guides human affairs, Mandela with his humanist conviction of the human capacity to transcend. That was what made them rise from adversity, that was what made them conquer adversity. If people could be taught to hate, Mandela said, they could be taught to love as well, the latter being more natural to the human heart. Wherever their faith came from, it gave them a sense of being part of something larger than themselves, the mover of a grand purpose that lay beyond themselves. Some call it selflessness, some call it prophetic vision, some call it a sense of destiny. Whatever it was, it made them move mountains.

All the while imagining themselves to have remained molehills. That was the other thing they had in common, a profound humility, a tremendous appreciation for others, a sense of being dwarfed by the expanse of human striving and the depth of human talent. It was no small irony that Mandela kept saying, while he was here, that no leader was irreplaceable, at a time when Ramos was contemplating of staying around a little longer than the law allowed. Cory would say the same thing: She had done her part, others could pick up where she left off and do even better. Ah, but the great never see themselves as great, they see themselves only as standing on the shoulders of giants.

When Cory died, the world stopped too. This country in particular, Cory having the remarkable distinction of toppling two tyrants during her sojourn on earth, the first while in the flush of life, the second while in the throes of death. It was her passing that sounded the death knell for the past regime too.

So has the world stopped for Mandela now. And fittingly so, at a time of year when, whatever your faith, Christian or non-Christian, religious or secular, your thoughts turn to hope. No one embodied hope more than Mandela, in the pain and glory of his struggle, in the depth and richness of his humanity, in the simplicity and grandness of his life. A simple man has gone.

A great man has remained.