Mandela: Myth vs. Reality

I have nothing against Nelson Mandela, and I'm not in a position to appreciate what he did for South Africans from their perspective. He seemed to be an okay guy.

That said, there are reasons to suspect that he was duped into accepting symbols over substance:

http://dissidentvoice.org/2013/12/victorious-over-apartheid-defeated-by-neoliberalism/

By teaching his continent to "forgive", he gave up a military struggle which was the only means by which Africa might have achieved true freedom. In a sense, his actions admitted that Africa could not possibly defeat the West, so why should they even try?

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/06/opinion/mahama-mandela-taught-a-continent-to-forgive.html

His eventual acceptance by Western governments who initially had conspired to keep him in prison reminds me of this passage by Baudrillard in The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, which I have edited to show you what I mean:

The crucial stake, the decisive stake in this whole affair is the consensual reduction of Islam [the desire for African independence] to the global order.  Not to destroy but to domesticate it, by whatever means: modernization, even military, politicization, nationalism, democracy, the Rights of Man, anything at all to electrocute the resistances and the symbolic challenge that Islam [the desire for African independence] represents for the entire West.  There is no miracle, the confrontation will last as long as this process has not reached its term; by contrast, it will stop as though of its own accord the day when this form of radical challenge has been liquidated.  This was how it happened in the Vietnam war: the day when China was neutralized, when the “wild” Vietnam with its forces of liberation and revolt was replaced by a truly bureaucratic and military organization capable of ensuring the continuation of Order, the Vietnam war stopped immediately — but ten years were necessary for this political domestication to take place (whether it took place under communism or democracy is of no importance).

See what I mean? Through Mandela the South Africans (and arguably the whole continent) achieved "freedom", but it was the freedom to be poor and hungry while the US and others were free to plunder their wealth (a.k.a. neoliberalism). To me, this makes Mandela appear to be a traitor to his people, a true "best African":

To paraphrase General Philip Sheridan: A good African is a dead African; a better African is one who helps the West kill other Africans; and the best African of all is one who forgives the West for killing his children, raping his wife, stealing his possessions, enslaving and exterminating his people, and eradicating his way of life.