Like millions of South Africans, my own story is deeply tied to that of Nelson Mandela. It begins with my father. Inspired by Nelson Mandela, he joins the African National Congress. In 1961, my father slips out of the country and begins his life in exile. He travels to Russia and does military training. He travels around Africa doing revolutionary things. He thinks he will be gone for only a year. He never says goodbye to anyone because those are the instructions. He is 21 when he leaves—and he is gone 30 years. He is 51 when he finally touches South African soil again.

During those 30 years, he was busy. He met a woman in Lusaka in the 1970s and they had three girls. I am the eldest of those children. I grew up in many different countries, part of the ANC community in exile. We sang freedom songs about Mandela, Walter Sisulu and Govan Mbeki and all those who were fighting bravely for our freedom. I owe my sense of self-belief to that community, to the adults I grew up with who taught me that I was as good as anyone in the world.

I was 17 when Mandela was released. It was like a dream come true. My family—like many others—was able to return because of the changes that began to happen in the early 1990s.  Other than my parents no one did more to determine my destiny and shape my life, than Nelson Mandela.

This is why I am especially pleased to have a chance to reflect on the father of the nation. And in this capacity—as what Audre Lorde referred to as a sister outsider—I am paying him tribute of course, but also giving voice to some of what troubles me about how he is viewed today.

Today, many younger South Africans suggest that Mandela made too many compromises.  Twenty-five years into the new era, there is a lively, angry, often chaotic debate about the role and place of the father of our nation.

When the student protests began a few years ago on South Africa’s university campuses some of the young activists accused Nelson Mandela of betraying the revolution. They called him a sell-out. The elders were alarmed and hurt, but the young ones were convinced. I am of the generation that lies between the two: I was not old enough to fight for freedom but I am old enough to remember Mandela. I know that he was no sell-out.

I agree with one point the youth made however:  the revolution was betrayed. I do not place the blame at Madiba’s feet though. The blame for that lies squarely with the generation of leaders who followed him—my parent’s generation. The freedom fighters whom I respected and loved in Lusaka and Nairobi, returned home. They put down their guns and they picked up their spoons and they began to eat. Many of them have not stopped eating since. I can think of only a handful of them who I would trust with my future.

Although he was a loyal and lifelong member of the ANC, Nelson Mandela was also a pragmatist. He once said, “you must support the African National Congress only so far as it delivers the goods, if the ANC does not deliver the goods, you must do to it what you have done to the Apartheid regime.”

He was a man whose life was totally dedicated to removing oppression and restoring dignity.  Yet today, when we talk about Mandela, we focus almost exclusively on his message of healing and forgiveness.

If Mandela were to be named a saint, I have no doubt that he would be named as the Patron Saint of Forgiveness. Today, forgiveness is seen as the central component of Mandela’s legacy. I must confess that this irritates me greatly. Worse, I think this excessive focus on forgiveness diminishes his political legacy and blunts his power. Embracing the Rainbow Nation forgiveness narrative puts white people at the center of the frame so, that over time, as the story of our transition has been told and retold in the popular imagination it has become a tale of forgiveness rather than one of justice. It has been told as though Madiba loved white people so much that he was prepared to forgive them, regardless of their collective sins.

This is a perversion of the truth, and a distortion of his political legacy. The truth of course is that in his 75-year career as a leader and an activist, Mandela never wavered in his commitment to those who had been the greatest victims of Apartheid—black people.

I think it is time that we put forgiveness back into its proper place in South Africa. Because when you look at Mandela’s life, and his approach to problem-solving, you see a man who was both principled and pragmatic. Madiba was always prepared to throw away an idea or a theory that did not support his main cause, which was the liberation of black people.  So while he became a committed and wonderful champion of forgiveness, it is very clear that if forgiveness had been standing in the way of justice, if Mandela believed that it was an obstacle or a blockage, if he saw that it was being used as an excuse for maintaining oppression, he would have very easily stopped advocating it.

I am not saying forgiveness is not good or important, but I am saying that it cannot be reduced to the only strategy, and indeed the only story about South Africa. Furthermore, it concerns me that forgiveness takes up all the oxygen in conversations about South Africa because it appeals to white people. This is because talking about forgiveness eases white fears and anxieties about black rage. These white anxieties supersede black people’s pain, and black people’s need for justice. In the long history of unfair race relations this is an old theme. White people are always far more sympathetic to one another’s pain than they are to the suffering of black people. When it comes to this issue, they are tribalists—perhaps unconsciously so. It is as though the empathy muscle can only be activated deeply in service of white feelings.

So, I want to suggest to you that the idea of Mandela as the Forgiver-In-Chief is not benign. I want to argue tonight that to the contrary, it is very dangerous. In the years since Apartheid ended, the story of Mandela’s forgiveness has taken on a life of its own. You might say a cult of forgiveness has emerged, with Mandela as its unwitting high priest. The Prophet Mandela  has been reduced to a caricature of himself. This hijacked Mandela is a commodity. Today you can find him on tea cups and t-shirts. The other day I even saw Madiba leggings!

I don’t blame Mandela for this. This mythology was certainly not of his making. But it has spread like wildfire because it ties into already existing ideas about who we are as raced subjects; about the potential of black people for volatility and the desire white people have to be considered innocent of racial crimes.

Mandela is especially loved by my fellow white South Africans. Indeed, in South Africa, there are many white people who have never hosted a black person in their homes, and who have not had any social cause to really engage much with black people, who have pictures of him on their walls. They love Mandela’s smile. They love photos of him with children. Indeed, Mandela may be the only black person many of my fellow white citizens “know.” Whenever you do something they don’t like, they are quick to tell you that Mandela would never have behaved like this.

The Mandela these white people love is “reasonable,” and never angry. In an interesting parallel, White South Africans love Madiba the way many white Americans love Obama.  They have turned him into a saint, a teddy bear, a totem for peace and good vibes. This love, however, doesn’t seem to translate into real life actions. Mandela and Che Guevara and Gandhi. Incense and ohms.

Mandela has become the chai latte of revolutionaries. I want to take a minute to outline this because it gets to the saccharine nature of why this Mandela is appealing. Chai has a long history. It is a beautiful, scented spiced tea. A latte on the other hand, is a type of coffee.  It is a totally different plant, with a completely different history and different taste. A chai latte is an entirely new concoction. This is a millennial marketing invention directly from the mind of an executive in Seattle who has probably never been outside America. Sweet, drinkable in small doses but empty of useful calories.

Watching the chai lattification of Mandela makes me sad because we see Mandela stripped of the complexity of his legacy. Instead, as time passes, those who profess to love him often do so because they are engaged in an act of profound misremembering. They forget about the freedom fighter and intellectual giant and in so doing, they diminish his relevance for young people today.

So, I want to talk about how we can rescue Mandela from this Cult of Forgiveness, to reflect on how we might restore him to the dignity of strong black coffee rather than a chai (soy) latte. There are two ways I think we can accomplish this. The first is to remember his love for Winnie Mandela. I want to close the gap that has been created between them for reasons I understand, but that ultimately do more damage than good. Winnie forces us to complicate the frame, to remember Mandela the radical and to insist that they were more alike for many years than they were different.

The second way we rescue Mandela (and South Africa) from the cult of forgiveness is by reminding ourselves of his genius; by remembering correctly that Mandela was skilled at maintaining his political principles while being able to make important political compromises.