HomilyFromThePew

“To be the father of a nation is a great honor, but to be the father of a family is a greater joy.”
— Nelson Mandela

Yesterday, July 18, was Mandela Day.

It is not a day Mandela conferred on himself.

It was a day conferred on him, not by any single person, but by the quality of his work and his commitment to freedom for all people, beginning with freedom for his own people.

I often boast that I have read everything Mandela wrote, and everything written about Mandela.

That may sound like a very strong boast.

But it is largely true.

And it is because I have read him so deeply that today, I want to reflect on something beyond the celebration.

I want to reflect on a question that sits at the heart of my own life as a family man, husband and father, Egalitarian, a Family Attorney, and a Pioneer of Family Strengthening and Child Safeguarding Culture Practice.

The question is this:

If a man loves his family and loves his nation, how does he draw the line between the two?

Mandela lived that question.

And at the end of his life, he answered it with painful honesty.

At his daughter Zindzi’s wedding, he offered what I consider his own personal review of his life:

“It seems to be the destiny of freedom fighters to have unstable personal lives. When your life is the struggle, like mine was, there is little room left for family. That has always been my greatest regret, and the most painful aspect of the choice I made. We watched our children grow without our guidance, and when we did come out of prison, my children said, ‘We thought we had a father, and one day he’d come back. But to our dismay, our father came back, and he left us alone because he has now become the father of the nation.’ To be the father of a nation is a great honor, but to be the father of a family is a greater joy. But it was a joy I had far too little of.”
— Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom

Read those words again.

With the benefit of hindsight, the father of a nation confessed that he missed out on the greater joy.

The struggle cost him his first marriage.

It cost him his second.

It cost his children a present father.

Their testimony is the most piercing of all:

“We thought we had a father.”

I do not recount these things to diminish Mandela.

I recount them because Mandela himself recounted them.

His honesty is part of his greatness.

And here is what I take from it:

The nation is not built in the abstract.

The nation is built family by family.

Family is the first site of nation building.

But now, let me say something equally true.

Family is first.

But family is not all.

How far can the family go without the support of the nation through social protection?

I have long taught that the architecture of a child’s world rests mainly on three pillars.

The lead role of the family is to inculcate a positive value system in their precious children.

The role of the community, neighbours, religious institutions, the media, and other non-state actors is to reinforce the primary role of the family.

And the role of the state is to create a level playing field for the family through social protection.

Children are citizens of their nations, not of their families.

When the state fails, the family is burdened with what the state should do.

That burden becomes a distraction to the family.

And it deepens the moral crisis of the freedom fighter in a developing nation.

For if he focuses on his family, has he not focused on an institution the failed state has rendered almost extinct in the real sense of it?

Consider Nigeria.

Of our 242 million people, the National Bureau of Statistics tells us 133 million live in multidimensional poverty.

Of our over 100 million children, 67.5 percent are born into poverty.

In such a nation, which comes first, the family or the nation?

It is the question of the chicken and the egg.

And it is not a straightforward question in underdeveloped nations.

Perhaps that is the deepest lesson of Mandela’s regret.

His choice was not between good and evil.

It was between two goods, in a nation where oppression had made it impossible to serve both.

The tragedy is not that Mandela chose wrongly.

The tragedy is that apartheid built a nation where a man could not be both father of his family and free.

That is why the struggle for nation building and social protection in Nigeria and across Africa is not separate from family strengthening.

It is family strengthening.

A state that protects its families liberates its freedom fighters to go home.

Yet even in his regret, Mandela still teaches.

He loved his enemies.

He liberated his oppressors.

He disagreed without becoming disagreeable.

As he wrote:

“I knew as well as I knew anything that the oppressor must be liberated just as surely as the oppressed. A man who takes away another man’s freedom is a prisoner of hatred… The oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of their humanity.”
— Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom

So today, the day after the world celebrated him, I honour Mandela twice.

I honour the father of a nation.

And I heed the warning of the father who longed for his family.

His long walk to freedom did not end at liberation.

The truly long walk the one he confessed he never completed was the walk home.

May we, who fight for causes in our own generation, learn from him.

May we build states that make the walk home possible.

May we be men and women fit for children, building a world fit for children.

And may we never be forced to choose between the great honour and the greater joy.

Long live the spirit of Mandela.

Amandla! Awethu!