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The World remembers Nelson Mandela

No Comments 7 December 2013

The World remembers Nelson Mandela

Everybody seems to want to say good-bye to Nelson Mandela and participate in his sainthood. Here is a nice obituary from the New Yorker. .

POSTSCRIPT: NELSON MANDELA, 1918-2013    by
He was the last of the twentieth century’s national liberators. He became a global symbol of righteousness and reconciliation. He led his beloved, tormented country from the howling darkness of apartheid to the promised land of democracy with shrewdness, courage, and visionary determination. It was a long and difficult trip, both for Nelson Mandela, who died on Thursday, and for South Africa.

When Mandela was born, in 1918, his parents named him Rolihlahla—“troublemaker,” in Xhosa. He got the name Nelson at a mission school, where teachers handed out the names of British imperial heroes. Raised in the Transkei, a remote, hilly territory on the Indian Ocean coast, he had an old-fashioned rural African childhood, herding cattle and sleeping in a round, thatched-roof hut. His father was an adviser to the royal family of the Thembu tribe; a renowned orator, he was illiterate, polygamous, and, in his son’s memory, a commanding figure. At sixteen, Mandela was shocked to hear a Xhosa chief rail against the treatment of black South Africans. “I was cross rather than aroused by the chief’s remarks,” he wrote, in “Long Walk to Freedom,” his autobiography, “dismissing his words as the abusive comments of an ignorant man who was unable to appreciate the value of the education and benefits that the white man had brought to our country.”

Mandela’s political evolution was gradual. At the University College of Fort Hare, his goal was to become “an interpreter or a clerk in the Native Affairs Department.” He was a country boy, a clotheshorse, a Xhosa chauvinist. He was also a natural leader and, while at Fort Hare, he made friends who would become lifelong political comrades, among them Oliver Tambo. Mandela was expelled from Fort Hare in a dispute over student rights, then fled the Transkei to escape an arranged marriage. He arrived in Johannesburg in 1941, worked as a night watchman on a mine, and then met Walter Sisulu, a political activist, who helped him get a job as an articled clerk at a law firm. He began to study law. Slowly, he was drawn into politics.

I cannot pinpoint a moment when I became politicized, when I knew that I would spend my life in the liberation struggle. To be an African in South Africa means that one is politicized from the moment of one’s birth, whether one acknowledges it or not.
Mandela became conscious of “an anger, a rebelliousness, a desire to fight the system that imprisoned my people.” White-minority rule in South Africa did resemble, for its black majority, an open-air prison. Dispossessed, restricted in their movements, blacks toiled, voteless, at the bottom of a pitiless economic and political structure.

One of the few channels available for mass resistance was the boycott. In 1943, Mandela marched in an enormous bus boycott that succeeded in reversing a fare increase. Soon afterward, he joined the African National Congress. The A.N.C. had been campaigning for equal rights, to little effect, since 1912. Determined to inject new zeal into the old organization, Mandela, along with Sisulu, Tambo, and others, founded the A.N.C. Youth League. The Youth League tried, unsuccessfully, to expel Communists, whose intentions they suspected, from the A.N.C. The young men also mistrusted the propensity of their radical white, Indian, and mixed-race comrades to monopolize discussions and thus replicate the prevailing social order.

Mandela became a lawyer in 1952. He and Tambo opened the country’s first African law firm. The political landscape had become dramatically harsher, though, after Afrikaner nationalists, propounding a fiercely racist program that they called apartheid, won a whites-only national election in 1948. The dispossession of black South Africans accelerated. The Communist Party was outlawed. The state took over the education of blacks, with malign intent and ruinous consequences. Resistance leaders, including Mandela, were “banned”—a peculiarly South African punishment under which a person could not be quoted, speak publicly, write, travel, or associate with more than one person at a time.

In 1956, Mandela, along with a hundred and fifty-five other dissidents, was charged with treason. Their trial lasted more than four years. Although it ended with acquittals, Mandela had grown disenchanted with the law.

I went from having an idealistic view of the law as a sword of justice to a perception of the law as a tool used by the ruling class to shape society in a way favorable to itself. I never expected justice in court, however much I fought for it, and though I sometimes received it.
The A.N.C. was outlawed in 1960. Mandela’s first marriage and his law practice had already fallen victim to the rigors of his political involvement. Now he, along with many others, was driven underground or into exile. In 1961, the A.N.C. launched an armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation). Mandela, convinced that there was no peaceful alternative, became its first commander. He travelled through Africa and Europe, seeking support. He underwent military training in Ethiopia, and then returned, in secret, to South Africa, where he was captured on August 5, 1962.

Mandela, Sisulu, Govan Mbeki, Ahmed Kathrada, and six others were charged with sabotage, a crime that carried the death penalty. They announced beforehand that they would not appeal a death sentence. Mandela gave a four-hour speech from the dock, tracing his own evolution from tribalism to African nationalism to a belief in nonracial democracy. He admitted to being the commander of Umkhonto we Sizwe but denied that he was a Communist. He praised “the ideal of a democratic and free society” and concluded, “It is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.” He and his main co-defendants were given life sentences.

Mandela spent twenty-seven years in prison, including eighteen years on Robben Island, an infamous penitentiary near Cape Town. He was forced to work for years in a lime quarry without sunglasses, which permanently damaged his eyesight. He later contracted tuberculosis from a damp cell. For companionship, he had most of the A.N.C.’s senior leadership, including Sisulu and Mbeki. An influx of new political prisoners arrived after the uprisings of 1976. Most of them had grown up with little knowledge of Mandela or the A.N.C., whose words, ideas, and even images were banned in South Africa. Robben Island became known as Nelson Mandela University. The confluence of activists of different generations, and the lively debates between them, created new alliances and, with the eventual release of some of the younger leaders, reinvigorated A.N.C. networks. In 1985, the regime offered to release Mandela if he would renounce violence as a political instrument. He replied that it was the government that needed to renounce violence, and he declined the offer, issuing a statement through his daughter Zindzi, saying, “Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts.”

The pressures on Pretoria, both internal and external, grew. Black communities were in full revolt from the mid-eighties onward. A financial crisis began when international banks, after a cold reassessment of the country’s stability, refused to roll over major loans to South Africa. The anti-apartheid movement gained traction globally. Economic sanctions and the divestment campaign, although opposed by conservative Western leaders, including Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, who continued to call the A.N.C. a “terrorist organization,” began to take their toll. The collapse of the Soviet Union and its client tyrannies in Eastern Europe stripped the apartheid state’s self-proclaimed anti-Communisist stance—its main claim to Cold War legitimacy—of any last shreds of credibility. Mandela was released near Cape Town on February 11, 1990, to worldwide acclaim.

It took four years of tumultuous, bitter negotiations to produce the country’s first democratic election. Amid continuing violence, Mandela had to keep a fractious, diverse coalition together while horse-trading with his Afrikaner adversaries over the terms of the historic transition. He travelled the globe, enlisting support, drawing vast crowds—he received a ticker-tape parade up lower Broadway—and personally thanking those who had supported the A.N.C., including Fidel Castro and Muammar Qaddafi, whom he considered, to the horror of many well-wishers, true comrades. In 1993, he won the Nobel Peace Prize, together with F. W. de Klerk, the State President of South Africa and his negotiating counterpart, though no love was lost between the two men. Mandela had worried, while in prison, that he would become a “political fossil” after being out of circulation for so long. And he was, in fact, like a leader from another era, the pre-television era, with his courtliness, his seriousness, his indifference to the camera. Yet he seemed altogether up on current events and left few audiences unwowed.

He became South Africa’s first democratically elected President on April 27, 1994. De Klerk, by agreement, became one of two Deputy Presidents, and Mandela went out of his way to reassure businesses and white citizens generally that they were welcome in the new South Africa. Ambitious programs to combat poverty, illiteracy, and inequality were launched. Long-cherished A.N.C. plans to nationalize banking, mining, and other industries were shelved. Mandela established the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which gave victims of apartheid violence the chance to tell their stories and offered amnesty to those who testified about their crimes, and chose Archbishop Desmond Tutu to lead it. Its two years of public hearings produced tales even more horrifying than many South Africans had expected. Some victims and grieving families were bitter about the amnesties granted to killers and torturers. De Klerk sued, successfully, to have the commission’s findings about his personal responsibility redacted. The A.N.C., over Mandela’s objections, also tried, without success, to have testimony about abuses in its external training camps suppressed.

While the A.N.C. dominated politics and government under the new dispensation, the opposition parties and the press remained sharp critics. In 1999, Mandela expressed his exasperation to Anthony Sampson, his authorized biographer. “He attacked the ‘Mickey Mouse’ white parties,” Sampson wrote, “to which Tony Leon of the Democratic Party replied that Mandela was ‘running a Goofy government.’ (Some weeks later, Mandela was visiting a hospital where Leon was recovering from an operation, and called out from behind the curtains: ‘Mickey Mouse, this is Goofy!’)”

Mandela’s long marriage to Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, which had produced two daughters before his imprisonment, and had helped him endure the decades in jail, ended in divorce in 1996. Winnie, banished and persecuted by the apartheid state, had become a political force in her own right, but went off the rails in the nineteen-eighties. She publicly endorsed the grisliest type of mob justice, and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission later found her security detail directly responsible, with her close involvement, for numerous murders, abductions, and assaults.

In 1998, on his eightieth birthday, Mandela married Graça Machel, the widow of Mozambique’s first President, Samora Machel. A distinguished educator and humanitarian, she is the first person to have been First Lady of two countries. Walter Sisulu and Ahmed Kathrada attended the wedding, as did Christo Brand, one of Mandela’s former prison guards, who by that time ran a Robben Island gift shop in Cape Town.

Mandela served one five-year term as President, then retired. He continued to work and travel at a hectic pace, devoting himself to peace campaigning and charitable work, particularly children’s welfare and the fight against H.I.V./AIDS. He was awarded the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom, among many other decorations and honors. In 2004, at nearly eighty-six, in frail health, he told a gathering at his home in Johannesburg that he was “retiring from retirement.” He wanted to read more books, live quietly in a house he had built in his ancestral village, and enjoy his children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and doting wife. “Thanks for being kind to an old man,” he told his guests, “allowing him to take a rest even if many of you may feel that after loafing somewhere on an island and other places for twenty-seven years, the rest is not really deserved.” He promised to stay in touch. “Don’t call me. I will call you.”

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