Brett Daniel Shehadey
Special Contributor for In Homeland Security
At age 95, African National Congress party member, Nobel Peace Prize Winner, and former President of South Africa, Nelson Mandela passed away Yesterday on December 5, 2013. Until 2008, Nelson Mandela was on the USA’s terror list for what is now considered ‘freedom fighting’ activities against the apartheid South African government.
In a way, there are really two Nelson Mandelas. He is being praised in the West for his maturity after imprisonment and his decisions as President of a new vision of South Africa, in which racial integration was aspired and racial segregation was done away with. Previous violence, communist affiliations and so forth during the Cold War are being cast aside or revised. But for the non-Western world, they are sure to remember a more complicated historic individual.
It is true that Mandela’s early activities were largely that in character of civil disobedience, but that changed as a crackdown occurred by the authorities. His use of violence for the greater good will not be overlooked by the regional rebellions haunting the greater Africa.
“My people, Africans, are turning to deliberate acts of violence and of force against the government in order to persuade the government, in the only language which this government shows by its own behavior that it understands.”
And such is terrorism by most and varying definitions. Bombings were aimed at government installations but civilians were killed as well by his group, Umkhonto we Sizwe. Nelson Mandela, difficult to picture after all of those years in prison and coming out an old man on the US terror watch list, or the Nobel Laureate, received paramilitary training in Algeria and Ethiopia.
Nelson Mandela was arrested and imprisoned for over 26 years for treason and charges of sabotage in 1964. He was held until 1990. This was long after the Defiance Campaign of civil disobedience in the mid-1950s that came about as response to the apartheid. It was a time of violent attempt at government overthrow of whites and authoritarian brutalities to the blacks. At the time and afterwards, Mandela and his African National Congress Party were increasingly leftists. Their local concerns were drowned out in the West by a much larger problem and wrapped up into a bipolar universe of superpower rivalry. Their aspirations were turned to more revolutionary social struggles against white supremacists.
South African success is attributed to former President F.W. de Klerk as well as Nelson Mandela. It was de Klerk after all and not Mandela that brokered the end of the racial segregation policies of the apartheid era government, released Mandela from prison and legalized his party. De Klerk allowed multi-racial elections in which Mandela won shortly after his release; which is not surprising considering that there was now a black majority of voters whose votes counted equally as the white ruling minority.
What was surprising was that Mandela honored his word and perused racial equality and avoided the destruction of the state or falling into civil war. Both received the Nobel Peace Prize and both deserve the credit for maintaining political stability and social harmony in South Africa: the former for a revolutionary break and initiating the process and the latter for making sure there were no major political reprisals against the white minority South Africans.
Yet it was not just a simple case of a changed heart that the apartheid era crumbled either. International activism to release Nelson Mandela came largely from Winnie Mandela, his first wife who he married in 1958. The man Mandela was integrated into the issue of racial injustice and international condemnation against an increasingly solitary white minority ruling South African. Mandela also had to endure a constant struggle of writing letters and persecution in response to his and his cause’s international successes. It was a clever political strategy of coordination. The negotiation of a peace process and reconciliation was also a championed life long cause of Mandela, even hile in prision. The combined efforts of Winnie, the international community and his pen brought him together with President P.W. Botha. But President F.M. de Klerk, who succeeded Botha, looked ahead at the solution, saw the signs of instability and the international isolation against his regime and decided to broker the new way forward as a national leader for the benefit of South Africa and the survival of a future minority.
At 72 years old, decades of rehabilitation, one might say, led him on a path with a better appreciation of non-violence, learning and reconciliation. Rugby and other tactics became his fix. It is possible for a man of causal violence to be reformed even if his cause remains the same or is refined, so long as the individual can be convinced of a better alternative. And for Nelson Mandela, that is exactly what happened in the big picture. Age, learning, exposure in reading and wisdom are the cure for youthful radicalism.
In his senior years he would write wise and poetic things like: “No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion;” or also, “people must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for loves comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.”
President Nelson Mandela served only one term as promised and did not try and grab power. He championed international human rights causes, AIDS and world peace after retirement. If only Africa and the world looked at the man post-trial and detention, they might see a man of peace. Yet the legacy is overblown. Surely racial segregation still exists and so how much of Mandela’s dream turned into a reality? And one might, for example, argue that there may never be a white president ever again in that country. Why should there be? The bad guys lost, right? Bad blood and sentiments abound in inequality; black supremacist rallies, wealth redistribution, high poverty and unemployment of seven million of the 52 million total.
South Africa has made substantial economic growth in spite of all of this and becoming the S in BRIC. But Mandela is unfortunately more of an international symbol for struggle and broker of peace than a national savior. He remains an extraordinary individual of our time not to be praised and made myth but better understood in a realistic context and should be admired by the South Africans for his reconciliation and human rights, not his activism and race.
“I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination,” Mandela had said. “I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”