Abstract
Celebrated, Former President of South Africa, Nelson Mandela’s death in 2013 saw an
outpouring of local and global grief and emotion. This reflected how Mandela became iconized
as a popular cultural and political symbol for human rights, political messiah-hood, sainthood,
dignity, peace and forgiveness. Even Mandela attempted to deflect and qualify this iconisation.
Taking critical views into account, we propose ‘Mandelaism’ as a term to describe the cultural
practices and sign systems that surround and mythologize Mandela, intermeshing with, feeding
into and parasitically drawing on patriotic sentiments. Mandelaism magically invokes powers
and forms of what Mbembe (2001: 25) calls the commandement – to conflate and inflate often
weak notions and practices of the right. Popularly, these powers are invoked for nation
building. However Mandelaism is also tightly associated with self-serving machinations that
deform and weaken this right which legitimates it. This study explores advertisements from
selected national English-language newspapers published in the two weeks that followed his
death, subjecting them to a semiotic analysis. It thereby aims to recognize aspects of
Mandelaism and of the parasite behaviors which we claim are appended to it. The
unprecedented scale of the news-event that was Mandela death and funeral assures that the
study is set in one of the greatest known nationalistic imaginariums.