If you ask anyone, “who is the greatest African of all time?”, the name of Nelson Mandela of South Africa will likely pop up. I took this question to three Artificial Intelligence (AI) platforms: ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude. They all chorused “Dr Nelson Mandela.” While Gemini and Claude held Kwame Nkrumah in second place with Mansa Musa third, ChatGPT put Mansa Musa second and Nkrumah third. In typical fashion, ChatGPT went on to rank six other greats: Julius Nyerere, Patrice Lumumba, Haile Selassie, Thomas Sankara, Shaka Zulu and Nnamdi Azikiwe.
Glad to see a Nigerian made it, even if he “carried last.” What an irony that the same Azikiwe who inspired Nkrumah into Pan-Africanism, while chieftains of his political machine, the NCNC, sheltered Mandela in Nigeria before he went home to be convicted, is mentioned almost as a footnote. For me, the honour is between Mansa Musa, the 14th-century emperor of old Mali, and Selassie, who also reigned as the last emperor of Ethiopia. They were great kings who were second to nobody outside the continent.
Mandela’s fame cannot be denied. But from what we see in the South Africa he left behind, it is essentially hype-driven. Mandela was a favourite of the West and its media because of the way he managed South Africa’s transition from apartheid to freedom and democracy without bloodshed in his voluntary five-year, single tenure of office. He created what was referred to as a “rainbow nation” where the former white and black constituents cohabited in … emm … harmony.
