The Mandela effect — one error on top of another
The “Mandela effect” is a little trope that gets mentioned in news reports and commentary whenever a media figure feels the need to point out how silly people are in general. It’s the major element — in fact, the O.G. — of a supposed cluster of “false collective memories” in which large numbers of people are supposedly convinced of things that never happened. In this case, it’s a conviction that Nelson Mandela, anti-apartheid campaigner and former president of South Africa, died in prison.
Such an interpretation might be acceptable, if it weren’t based on a false premise, ignored easily ascertained facts, and, if anything at all, should be called the “Biko effect.”
Nelson Mandela, as is well known, was South Africa’s leading anti-apartheid crusader for decades beginning in the 1940s. A descendant of Xhosa royalty, Mandela became the focus of opposition to the white-supremacist government. He spent nearly thirty years in prison following 1962 after receiving a life sentence for “treason.” He was released by F.W. de Klerk in 1990. Originally a Marxist firebrand, Mandela had mellowed considerably over the years, and negotiated a peaceful end to the Apartheid regime with de Klerk before serving as the country’s first Black president from 1994 to 1999.
But Nelson Mandela was not the only anti-apartheid crusader in South Africa. There were plenty of others, many of whom also suffered misfortunes at the hands of the Boer authorities. One of these was Steve Biko.
Biko, much younger than Mandela, abandoned a potential medical career in 1966 to campaign against Apartheid. Biko’s opposition was racially based — he believed that Whites, in particular White liberals, had no real understanding of the situation of Blacks and should stand aside in the battle against the Boer regime. Strongly influenced by the U.S. Black Power movement, Biko formulated a “Black Consciousness” program to encourage South African Blacks in their defiance of the regime.
The Boer government targeted Biko and, as occurred with many other anti-Apartheid activists, issued a “banning” order, a form of police control just short of arrest which restricted individuals to small areas and forbade any public appearances or publication of opinions. In 1977, Biko defied the order by driving to Cape Town to confer with other anti-Apartheid activists. Picked up by the police, he suffered severe beatings and died a few short weeks after his arrest.
It’s perfectly clear what happened here. South Africa was a marginal news topic. (The Boers worked overtime to see that it stayed that way.) Although viewed as a martyr in South Africa, Biko had much less of an international impact than Nelson Mandela. The world public knew that an anti-Apartheid crusader had spent a long time in prison. Upon hearing that, one such individual had been beaten to death by government thugs, it was easy to conflate the two — Mandela and Biko — and assume that they were one and the same, that the longtime South African advocate for liberation, and not the younger, little-known activist, was the one who had been murdered. An error, yes, but an understandable one, unlike the uncanny “Mandela effect,” which presents itself as a product of serious failings in human cognition — something along the lines of a persistent computer glitch, one that reduces human beings to the level of malfunctioning units.
The “Mandela effect” is one of a number of intellectual constructs and narratives — like the Genovese effect, the Milgram experiment, the Stanford Prison Experiment — intended to make us look stupid, incapable, clownish, and generally less than what we are. Steve Biko’s murder was not imaginary, and he deserves better than to be remembered only as the misnamed element of a bogus narrative. It’s time that the “Mandela effect” was put to sleep.
