mandela was the perfect neo-liberal: campaigned on the left, governed on the HARD RIGHT.
Far from presiding over a “post-apartheid” South Africa, the popular-front Tripartite Alliance of the ANC, SACP and Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) has instituted a neo-apartheid capitalist regime, still subjugating the impoverished black working people in the interests of the same capitalist masters.
http://www.internationalist.org/southafricaminemassacre1208.html
http://roarmag.org/2013/11/south-africa-marikana-anc-poor/
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i'm not kneejerking. the death of mandela is a good opportunity to draw the world's attention to the fact that, in truth, not much in south africa has actually changed.
http://www.anarkismo.net/article/26519
i think this article makes some valid points, but it goes a little too far and in the process exposes the author's reactionary white privilege.
my reading of mandela is essentially that he didn't really know what he was doing. he campaigned from the left based on it's ideals and then found himself in power at the confluence of the collapse of communism and the rise of neo-liberalism. he followed his advisers to the implementation of failed reforms.
i've compared him to trudeau before and will again. people attack trudeau for his economic policies. the truth is trudeau didn't actually understand anything about economics, he was a lawyer with an interest in philosophy, and if you spend some time searching through his biography and reading some of his statements you'll realize he admitted as much. on the one hand, trudeau took power in an economic mess - nixon shock, opec embargo, collapse of keynesian economic theory. even if he did have a clue, the challenges were substantial. he would have had to rely on advice, regardless. and we now know that the experts studying the situation were as flabbergasted as anybody else.
so, trudeau - a social liberal by any concept of the term and one with a background in workplace organizing that ran on an election platform that promised direct democracy - ended up carrying out experiments on behalf of milton friedman. canada liked monetarism before it was cool. and trudeau had no idea what he was implementing.
likewise, when mandela's advisers came to him and presented trickle down as a solution, he went for it because he trusted the advice and believed it was the way forward in a post-communist future. the task, now, is to point out that it failed. there's no need to vilify and no value in it.
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this article is very similar to points i made elsewhere.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2013/12/the-two-mandelas/
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it's hardly a "secret history"; it's available in any encyclopedia, even.
further, when you look at the video, it's not even clear that obama realized what he was doing. it just looks like he's shaking hands on a line. it even looks like he asks raul who he actually is and sort of cringes when he realizes it.
but this puts the silly media response into proper context: you really can't "celebrate the legacy of nelson mandela" WITHOUT shaking castro's hand in some way or another.
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/12/11/the_secret_history_of_how_cuba