Nelson Mandela’s righteous turn
Unlike Americans, who frequently express a phobic love for dogs and other lower creatures, Africans will not get overly upset by claims of cruelty to animals. What troubles Africans is cruelty to fellow human beings. They have seen how tribal hatreds can be manipulated by those like former Liberian dictator Charles Taylor, notorious for blood diamonds, and the disputed president of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, internationally considered a butcher.
The most important things that the recently and rightly mourned Nelson Mandela did were moving beyond tribalism and outgrowing Marxism before he got out of prison in South Africa. It is not unusual for a man thought to be a terrorist to become a butcher on his release from prison or return from exile.
Mandela took a more righteous turn.
A handsome young African aristocrat once told me that tribalism had been fine for him, given all the favors he was shown, because he was considered royalty back home, where slavery was still practiced. After being sent to France and reading “The Rights of Man,” that man rejected it all, seeing individual human value as more important than tribe, class, sex or religion.
Mandela, too, saw that. He was a great man, one who was fortunate to stand on the shoulders of the civil rights movement here, moved in part by the way that Martin Luther King Jr. updated the European Enlightenment.
Though impressed by Mahatma Gandhi, King’s social vision became the dream of the world. He was a more modern version of what Thomas Jefferson and then Abraham Lincoln had wrought, producing the most modern vision of civilized society in the world, shining like the lighthouse on the dark sea of the blues.
The next generation of black Americans, in media, law and business — the ones who were King’s most immediate legacy — were central to Mandela being re-
Tribalism barbarically separates human beings
leased from prison and elevating himself to an international symbol of a man deserving, and needing, reason, justice and social fairness.
Black Americans like John Payton of the NAACP Defense Fund and his wife, Gay McDougall, who raised millions for arrested citizens during the minority rule of white over black, were part of the first open election in South Africa.
South Africans made it clear that aroused black Americans had expressed their political, moral and intellectual power as they led or participated in the momentous multiracial wave sweeping America, beginning mostly on American college and university campuses.
The beginning of the end of apartheid triumphantly started when President Ronald Reagan’s veto of American sanctions against the South African government was rejected thanks to the votes of Republicans like freshman Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell, who had seen the light and tried to warn Reagan against resisting the national mood. Hmmm.
The greatness of Mandela is shown in his legacy, enacted by nonviolent, empathetic and democratic people like Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the elected president of Liberia; Leymah Gbowee, who helped unite Liberian women across tribe, religion and language; Barack Obama, who continues to fight the good fight, and angel queen Oprah Winfrey — all of them representing Mandela most perfectly by what they have done in their best and most effective moments.
Forget tribalism of any color; it separates human beings in a most barbaric way. Individuality and empathetic respect for ideas, human feeling and fresh perspectives is the modern way.