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One key and many quarrels: what remains of the Mandelas

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One key and many quarrels: what remains of the Mandelas

Already alive, Nelson Mandela had been put up for sale by his greedy family, his name turned into a brand. Now, nine years after the death of the former president of South Africa and Nobel Peace Prize winner in 2013, we are on sale. Objects and paintings by one of the greatest political and moral leaders of the 20th century have ended up at auction in New York. Among these, one that symbolically sums up his entire life: the key to the cell where he was locked up on the prison island of Robben Island, for 18 of the 27 years that he lasted in detention.

Mandela, a pending country
between politics, family and friends

Pietro Veronese

Go for the sunglasses, the colorful shirts that were an integral part of his look, the fountain pens gift of the powerful of the Earth, from George W. Bush a Barack Obama, the watercolors painted not without talent in the lost hours. But the key is not. South Africa’s Minister of Culture, who learned of the upcoming auction by a London tabloid, assessed that the object is national heritage and blocked everything.

There was in fact a long time, in the last quarter of the twentieth century, in which Nelson Mandela was the most famous political prisoner in the world; the years in which South Africa was still ruled by the racist and segregationist apartheid regime and in Mandela monuments and squares were dedicated in the major capitals of the West, squares filled with thousands of demonstrators clamoring for his release. A story still alive in the souls of those who remember and enclosed in that piece of metal.

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The story of the auction and government intervention is a couple of months old. On the other hand, the quarrel between the heirs is alive and raging now, a new chapter in a depressing story that began when the father of the country was still alive. Pending a solution, the objects remain in the vaults of the Guernsey’s auction house in New York. The problem is to determine to whom they should be returned. To the government of South Africa? To the foundation that bears the name of Mandela? To the daughter, Makaziwe Mandela-Amuah, the eldest of his descendants still alive and the person who picked and packed all the items shipped to New York? To Makaziwe’s grandchildren, who accuse her of simply stealing them, without their knowledge? The story is as bleak as it is tangled and is giving work to gossip reporters and several lawyers in Johannesburg.

Red wine and t-shirt

Nelson Mandela had three wives. From the first marriage with Evelyn Mase Four children were born, of which only Makaziwe, sixty-seven, survives today. Then, a young lawyer and former political leader, Nelson met the beauty Winnie Madikizela and fell madly in love with it. She divorced and remarried. He barely had time to have two daughters with her, Zenani and Zindzi, before disappearing on Robben Island, where he was not expected to ever make it out alive. Finally, when he was already president and after the second divorce, he joined Graça Machelwidow of the president of Mozambique (the only woman of modern times to have been first lady of two different states).

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Already when he was at the height of his power, in the last decade of the last century, and then in the years of his retirement, when he continued to enjoy universal fame, the elderly Mandela had to deal with the insatiable demands of his daughters and grandchildren. Funding to launch risky deals, which regularly ended badly. Abuses and bullying to occupy advantageous positions on the market, followed by summons before the courts. Greedy exploitation of the father’s (or grandfather’s) surname to obtain credits that nothing justified. His daughters found the way to arouse easy feelings of guilt in him: Makaziwe for having been abandoned in favor of the second family; Zindzi and Zenani for growing up with a very absent father, are living in prison on Robben Island.
Reality is one of the most cheeky projects Being Mandela on the American Cozi TV, which stars Zaziwe and Swati, daughters of Zenani; on the initiative of other granddaughters, a clothing line under the brand name 46664, which was Mandela’s number in the prison register; finally a good quality red wine, to which Makaziwe tried (in vain) to give the name of the august parent.

The tomb of discord

This indecent spectacle marked the last years of the life of a man who deserved much better. It then culminated in a furious dispute in court to decide the place of burial, obviously with the idea of ​​making it a center of attraction, with parks, large hotels and so on. And here we come to Makaziwe’s latest gimmick: auction sales. The motivation is always to raise funds for a Garden of Memory and a Museum on Mandela’s life in Qunu, the village where he is buried. It began with watercolors, which the former president delighted in when he retired. The first was sold in 2019 in New York, for just over one hundred thousand euros. Now we have moved on to Nft, the new digital certification, for a series of five watercolors entitled My Robben Islandbeaten these days.

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In between, the failed operation at Guernsey’s: clothing and desk items, an autographed copy of the Democratic Constitution of South Africa. And the fateful key. “I was traveling and when I returned I found the house empty,” denounced his nephew Ndaba, the 39-year-old son of a brother from Makaziwe. “The aunt took everything away: sofas, square rugs, curtains, grandfather’s bed, his clothes, chairs, lamps … Everything.” No, it’s not easy being Mandela.

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