I saw an article about the ballet “The Nutcracker Suite.” Suddeny, the main character is Marie. Her name has always been Clara. Does anybody remember this? Is this another Mandela effect?
No it is not.
First reason, both names are used at times according to the wiki.
Second reason, the Mandela Effect is nonsense. False memories occur all the time. When multiple people have the same false memory it’s usually because they’ve been prompted with a question about the false memory, or just common confusion about similar events (see epic alternate ending to Big thread).
Thank you! Couldn’t agree more. I hate that the “Mandela Effect” is even considered to be a “thing.”
The example it is based on—some ignorant person assuming that everyone else thought Mandela was dead, too—is tenuous at best. I think the real mass delusion or false memory isn’t that Mandela died in captivity, but rather that a significant number of people outside South Africa 1) knew who Mandela was prior to his assuming office and 2) believed he died in captivity (that is, one or both of those are not true: I doubt very many people at all actually believed Mandela died in captivity at any point between his arrest and his ultimate release and rise to power).
I’ve always felt there’s an obvious explanation for the mistaken belief that Nelson Mandela died in prison; people are confusing him with Stephen Biko.
Both men were South African activists and both men were imprisoned. Stephen Biko was killed in 1977. Nelson Mandela would survive and be released in 1990 and go on to become the President of South Africa in 1994.
I think it’s notable that the belief that Mandela died in prison began appearing in the eighties. Peter Gabriel released a song about Biko in 1980 and Denzel Washington played Biko in the movie Cry Freedom in 1987. I’m guessing this put the idea of “that guy who died in prison in South Africa” into people’s minds but they were vague about the details.
There was a famous South African anti-apartheid protester who was killed in prison - Stephen Biko. People who could only remember one South African protestor might get confused between Biko and Mandela. You might enjoy this video by Captain Disillusion by the way https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGgUrj10HdM
And I was Biko-Ninja’d by Little Nemo
That certainly seems plausible, in which case I wish they’d start calling it the Biko Effect. Because the Mandela Effect lacks context and seems dubious without it (for the reasons I stated upthread), whereas the Biko Effect provides that context in a way that more fully explains the purported phenomenon. There’s nothing mystical about it, no mass delusion that somehow forms independently in the minds of many, just two or more things that are similar enough that it’s understandable they’d get confused in the memory. Like the whole Shazam vs Kazaam thing.
Well, the “Biko Effect” doesn’t work all that well because Stephen Biko actually died in prison, so remembering that isn’t anything noteworthy. It’s that the memory is wrong that makes it a thing.
Really, it should be called the “Berenstain Effect.” That one just floors people; I’d guess 95% of all people who know the book series thought it was “Berenstein Bears.” You can easily explain that one too - “-stein” is a very, very common name suffix in the English-speaking world, while “-stain” is extremely uncommon, so it’s an understandable error. Still, it’s jarring; I never in a million years thought it was “Berenstain” until I read about how it freaks people out, and it freaked me out.
Have we had some serious answers? We have? Good. I can make a joke answer.
It’s not Mandela. It’s the Mengele Effect. A lot of people remembered Josef Mengele being dead and got confused when he was arrested on national television when he was hiding out in Illinois in the 70s.
Yes, the people that know it was Biko know what really happened. There’s no discrepancy for them to make note of.
It’s the people that were hearing about how Nelson Mandela was becoming the President of South Africa in the nineties and were thinking “Huh? I thought he died ten years ago.” who are experiencing a discrepancy between what they were being told in the present and what they thought they remembered from the past.
That’s the way it went on the X Files (more or less).
Sure. But call it the Biko Effect and, to the vast majority of people, that’ll be all Biko is known for. The Biko Effect would be the phenomenon by which people fuse knowledge of related subjects together, as is posited to have been the cause for a number of people in the 80s coming to believe that Nelson Mandela died in prison, when in fact it was actually another anti-Apartheid activist—a contemporary of Mandela’s whose experiences some may have mistakenly translated onto Mandela.
If you call it the Mandela Effect, though, I’m not even sure it’s real, because the explanation doesn’t get incapsulated with the term. We all (for now) know who Mandela is, and so it seems incredible that anyone would think he died in the 80s. How did that happen? Most of us have no idea who Biko was, and are unlikely to make the connection ourselves (unless, again, Biko is in the name).
Or call it the Biko-Mandela Effect.
Missed the edit window. To further clarify where I’m coming from, consider that my reaction, as an American millennial who grew up when Mandela was known worldwide as the head of state for South Africa, on hearing from someone that they thought Mandela had died in the 80s, wouldn’t have been “Oh, wow, I wonder how you got confused on that? It’s so strange that our memory can play tricks on us!” it would have been,“Wow, I guess you’re an idiot. No mystery there and don’t try and convince me otherwise.”
That someone thought Mandela died in the 80s doesn’t seem to need an “effect” to explain, unless you are familiar enough with anti-Apartheid activism in South Africa to able to make the connection to Biko. Which most of us can’t, because Apartheid is not only history to us, it’s someone else’s history. So the claim of a “Mandela Effect” seems absurd on its face, just an attempt to explain away stupidity.
My take on the Mandela Effect
Never attribute to alternate universes colliding what could instead be attributed to human stupidity.
When Mandela was becoming world famous in the nineties, I don’t think there were any people who thought “How did he come back to life?” (Okay, maybe a few fringe cases.)
People knew he was alive. They also were aware that they had thought he was dead but they understood that belief was mistaken. People were aware they had made a mistake.
The “effect” arose as people began finding out that other people had made the same mistake. That was what made it interesting; not that people had made a mistake but that a large group of people had all made the same mistake, apparently independently.
My explanation is that they didn’t make the mistake independently. Their mistakes were all attributable to a common source; a vague memory of a movie that had been released ten years earlier.
I think a lot of these false memories are triggered by being asked about it. I think very few people who were truly aware of who Nelson Mandela was and the events taking place in South Africa at the time ever thought he died in prison. Many of the multitude of people who only recognize the name with no firm memory of the events of the time when asked if they had a memory of Nelson Mandela dying in prison would respond that they did have that memory simply by the presence of new information related to the minor tidbits they recalled.
I think the alternate ending to Big is also a result of that, if people at random are asked how the movie ended they’d usually get it right, or not remember at all, but when asked if they’d seen the alternate ending and then given the content of another similar movie they’d easily create a memory of something that didn’t happen.
Certainly some people were just mistaken in either case without any prompting but it’s nothing like at the level the so-called Mandela Effect is supposed to produce.
Of course the big problem with the Mandela Effect is that it ignores the well known and studied phenomena of false memory and tries to introduce crackpot ideas about alternate universes and the like into the subject.
No, but Joe Pesci still being alive certainly is! I did a spit take when I heard he was in The Irishman.
Pretty much no one who uses the term “Mandela Effect” actually believes that it’s because of alternate universes.
Then why don’t they use the term ‘false memory’?
Nobody remembers “Free Nelson Mandela”?? I’m sure there were some people who would have found it convenient if people thought he died, or, much more preferably, forgot about him and his ilk entirely. Seems more like willful ignorance or minimization of Apartheid on the part of those who did not want to confront it rather than any sort of false memory (which is a real thing in psychology).