M.L. Kotru
Nelson Mandela is no Mahatma Gandhi, and I don’t mean it in the pejorative sense. There’s no doubting their belief in their respective countries, their people’s right to live in freedom and dignity and possibly in prosperity as well. Nelson Mandela was to the South African liberation (anti-apartheid) movement what Gandhi was to India’s long freedom struggle. Gandhi, for the record, used South Africa as his laboratory to test out his Satyagraha and non-cooperation, which in his later years became his principal tools in the flight against the British rulers of India.
Many years later, after Gandhi’s death, Mandela handsomely acknowledged Gandhi’s contribution to the evolution of the anti-apartheid movement in his country. But unlike Gandhi, Mandela did not hesitate to take to arms to fight back the white oppressors of his country. Like Gandhi he did suffer long jail terms, 27 years in a lonely island in the country, which has now, not surprisingly, become a place of pilgrimage not only for his own people but for people from other lands as well. The long years of his incarceration did in fact give the anti-apartheid movement far more impetus than the White rulers of the country had anticipated.
In his autobiography ‘Long Walk to Freedom’ there is a climactic moment when on his release in Cape Town some two decades ago, after his prolonged jail term he confronted a mass of welcoming people with a raised fist and shouting anti-apartheid slogans: Amandla (power), the crowd responding Ngawethu (to the people). As he recalls he took out his prepared speech only to discover that he had left his reading glasses in his prison cell. He turned to his then wife Winnie: “I knew she had a similar prescription, and I borrowed hers.” The book recalls many occasions undercut by self-deprecating anecdotes. As an admirer has put it Mandela saw to it that private remained part of the public, the individual part of the collective.
In the endless death watch that has been going on in Pretoria for the last few weeks it’s amazing to see thousands trooping in every day and every night, hoping that the 95-year-old leader would somehow pull through When the American President Barack Obama came calling last week on a State visit his first priority was to see Mandela but was content with a meeting with the family members. For the first Black American President Nelson Mandela has been as much a source of inspiration as he has been over the decades to millions of the poor, the under-privileged and the deprived of the world.
Somehow, that hint of a smile on his face always inspired hope in the most aching of South African hearts. When he came out of prison, aged over 70, and when the deification became excessive he always undercut it with a joke or with just a little anecdote which only cemented the adoration. Nowhere was his star power put to better use than when he proffered his hand of friendship to win over the South African Whites for whom he had been a hate figure for generations.
As he says in his autobiography his long confinement in Robben Island was critical to the making of the world Mandela saw on his release. These had been years of learning and bonding. New ideas had taken birth in the loneliness of his prison cell. The need to bring African National Congress activists to order, to bring the younger African men sent to the jails by the racist regime closer to the jailed leaders like Mandela, helped create a bond that helped a great deal in the initial days of freedom. Nelson Mandela himself had learnt to interact with the White prison warders most of whom were to become his admirers; such interactions would help him understand what exactly drove apartheid as a policy, eventually helping him to evolve an approach that would bring the practitioners of the race card to his side, if not fully, at least with a sense of understanding of the forces that had made the ANC act the way it had in the past.
Mandela’s days in office, as the first President of the multi-racial nation, may have evoked a mixed kind of reactions but there was no denying the fact that the man was a unifier, that he was no longer the terrorist he had been painted to be, that nor was he a communist as many had feared in the 60s. There is irony in the fact that perhaps the differences in the paths of the African terror movements and the one adopted by Mandela did eventually prove the racists wrong; Mandela emerged from his long confinement as South Africa’s man of destiny. He who relinquished office after his term ended, ruling himself out much to the disappointment of his countrymen, believed that those that followed him would remain loyal to the picture he had drawn of his country-a rainbow perfect one.
It is quite likely that the image has fallen far short of the one that he had seen but even so his effort has been worth the suffering he underwent in his search for the “rainbow”. That may have been his cherished hope and also reason why he scrupulously avoided trespassing on the turf of his successors. May be he should have intervened at least in some of the more bizarre situations created by those that followed.
Mandela, with his iconic stature, surprisingly has wanted to go quietly, like he made a dignified withdrawal from public life. He has told his aides and members of his extended family of his desire for a quiet funeral sans pomp and ceremony, a wish that may not be granted to him by his people. They have been assembling round-the- clock, singing dancing, bringing boquets to the hospital where he was fighting his life’s last battle.
The visit by President Obama, Justice Malala, a political commentator and columnist has said, is overshadowed by Mandela’s hospitalization. (He was lying in a critical state as I write) At any other time Obama’s arrival would have been a symbolically potent moment with resonance for both the US and South Africa: America’s first Black President visiting a nation that only two decades earlier shook off the yoke of White minority rule.
Nelson Mandela’s became a household name in the 1960s when he was given a life sentence for his anti-apartheid political activities. He was usually described as a Black Nationalist leader till then. Not surprisingly with him in the prison were nine comrades (five black, three white and one Indian) who were prosecuted in the celebrated Rivonia Trial, named after a fashionable suburbs of Johannesburg, where police had recovered arms and equipments at the headquarters of the underground ‘Umkonto We Sizwe’ (Spear of the Nation, the ANC’s military wing.)
Mandela, in jail long before the seizure of arms accepted guilt, a Gandhian hangover in a man who had once subscribed to the Communist creed. Followed another sentence in 1964 which saw him spending the next two decades and more first at Robben Island and then Pollsmoor prison nearby. Awards came thick and fast including the Jawaharlal Nehru Award, the Kreisky prize for human rights and doctorates from many universities. Awards like the Nobel have chased him ever since. Many others followed post-apartheid.
The son of Chief Henry Mandela of the Tembu tribe, he did his law from University College of Law and the University of Witwatersand in 1942 but plunged directly into the African National Congress to become a thorn in the side of the ruling all-White National Party and its policy of apartheid. After that it was a life of many trials and imprisonments until the Whites saw the light of the day at the end of his final incarceration. Mandela, to the surprise of many, shared power with the former White President. He worked with unaccustomed zeal for a septuagenarian to build up the rainbow State with the Blacks suddenly transformed into the majority. To safeguard against reprisals of any kind he appointed his long-time friend Archbishop Desmond Tutu to head the Truth and Reconciliation Commission which made a unique contribution to the solidarity of the nation.
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