Mandelaism in Newspaper Advertising that “Pays Tribute” to Mandela after his Death

Abstract

SummaryFormer South African President, Nelson Mandela's death in 2013 saw an extraordinary outpouring of local and global grief. This reflected the worldwide iconisation of Mandela as a popular cultural and political symbol for human rights, political messiah-hood, sainthood, dignity, peace and forgiveness. Noting that in his lifetime, even, Mandela attempted to deflect and qualify this iconisation, we present critical views of what we call “Mandelaism” to describe the cultural practices and sign systems that surround and mythologise Mandela. Mandelaism is intermeshed with, feeds into and draws on patriotic sentiments, often invoking notions of magical powers to reconcile racial divisions, to right wrongs of the past and to nation-build. Mandelaism, we notice, is sometimes hijacked by self-serving machinations. Located in the context of the news-event that was Mandela's death and funeral, this aims to recognize self-serving corporate communications which invoke or play on Mandelaism. We do this with reference to selected corporate advertisements that were published in selected national English-language newspapers in the two weeks following his death. Our aim is to thereby address the concern that such corporates endanger democracy as they work to occupy and manipulate, for their own narrow and limited gains, social imaginaries in which nationhood is constructed.