‘HE BELONGS TO THE AGES’
Nelson Mandela, the first black president of South Africa, dedicated his life to bringing blacks and whites together in peace, and to healing the rift in his country caused by apartheid.
It was a sunny day, a classic midsummer February day full of warmth and hope, into which the old man emerged slowly from the prison gates, a free man, finally, after 27 years of incarceration.
In was 1990, and this was no ordinary man, and no ordinary exit from prison. Crowds were cheering, chanting, crying. The world’s television cameras followed his measured walk. And as always, Nelson Mandela was superbly dressed, the crease in his trousers knife-edged, the shoes gleaming, the tie tasteful and beautifully knotted.
As he came into the sunshine, groups of black South Africans began a joyful dance. Dropping his wife Winnie’s hand, he spread his arms high and faced the adoring crowd, and began the walk to the tiny car that would take him away from the gates of Paarl’s Victor Verster Prison to his own destiny, a future entwined with that of the country he would soon lead. He stopped several times to confer grandfatherly smiles on children.
And then Nelson Mandela, future president of South Africa, slipped away from the cameras, the crowds, and the crushing weight of the legend.
By the time Nelson Mandela died Thursday at home in Johannesburg at the age of 95, he had assumed the kind of seraphic presence on the world stage that recalls such figures as Gandhi, Schweitzer and Martin Luther King.
Mandela was often called the last of the great black liberators of Africa, heir to Jomo Kenyatta and Kwame Nkrumah. He was the first black president of South Africa, his election marking the end of centuries of repressive white rule, codified since 1950 in the shameful explicitness of the apartheid laws.
The wonder was how peacefully the transition to majority rule was finally achieved. But as leader, first of the African National Congress and then of South Africa itself, Mandela personified the resolute but peace-loving man.
Not even nearly three decades in prison, many of those years at hard labour, were able to quell the balance and beneficence of his spirit. His demeanour seemed always to combine humility with an inward rightness of heart.
Mandela had often said that whites, no less than blacks, had been savaged by the inhumanity of apartheid. Only by working together, he insisted, could blacks and whites heal the divisions of the past and become whole people.
And if that would require actions just shy of a miracle, the world had in Mandela the man who could bring them off.
Perhaps the world, and especially South Africa, was simply ready to accept the merely rational — to see, as Mandela said in a paraphrase of Martin Luther King, that “humanity can no longer be tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war.”
The world, no less than his nation, in the end had no difficulty paying tribute to Mandela. He won the Nobel Peace Prize. Former U.S. president Bill Clinton said of Mandela, when both were still in office, “For millions of Americans, South Africa’s story is embodied by (his) heroic sacrifice and breathtaking walk out of darkness and into the glorious light.”
For Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general when Mandela was South Africa’s president, he reflected human possibility. “People often ask me what difference one person can make in the face of injustice, conflict, violation of human rights, and other entrenched and complex problems of our time,” he once said. “I answer by citing the integrity, wisdom and bravery of Nelson Mandela.”
In 2001, Canada made Mandela an honorary citizen and also proclaimed him the first foreign leader with membership in the Order of Canada. At the ceremony, prime minister Jean Chrétien cited Mandela’s “great moral leadership” and described him as “a citizen of the world by excellence.”
Rolihlahla Mandela was born in the black homeland of Transkei on July 18, 1918, a member of the royal family of the Thembu tribe, part of the Xhosa nation.
Nelson was not Mandela’s original given name. Rolihlahla means, roughly, “troublemaker.” For the white overclass in South Africa, the name would prove prophetic.
As a child, he was groomed to become a counsellor to the rulers of the tribe, perhaps why he later in life wore the mantle of leadership so easily.
His father, who was simply named Mandela, was illiterate, but nonetheless an acknowledged custodian of Xhosa history and an orator adept at entertaining and educating his audiences. His father had four wives, the third of whom was Nelson’s mother.
His father was so headstrong in a dispute with a local magistrate that he lost his chieftainship of the village of Mvezo. Afterward, Nelson moved with his mother to the nearby village of Qunu, to which he traced his earliest memories.
It was a truly tribal existence. The huts in which Mandela lived had no furniture in the Western sense. He slept on a mat on the ground. Pillows were unknown. His mother cooked in a three-legged iron pot in the centre of the hut.
At seven, he became the first member of his family to attend school. His first day, he wore his first pair of pants, cinched with a piece of string at the waist. “I have never owned a suit that I was prouder to wear,” he wrote.
That first day, the teacher gave English names to all the students. He was now Nelson Mandela. Why Nelson and not some other name? He was never told, although it is a good guess to suspect it had something to do with British naval hero Lord Nelson.
School was a universe far removed from what he had known. He would now receive “a British education, in which British ideas, British culture, British institutions, were automatically assumed to be superior. There was no such thing as African culture.”
When he was nine, Mandela lost his father to an undiagnosed lung disease. The boy was then sent to his uncle, Chief Jongintaba Dalindyebo, the regent of the Thembu people, who became his guardian. Mqhekezweni, Jongintaba’s town, was Westernized and up to date. The men wore suits, the women were garbed in severe missionary-style dress.
The ancient style of governing was still in place, however, and Mandela learned a great deal while watching his uncle in meetings of the local tribal council. All men were free to voice their opinion, often in criticism of the regent, who would remain largely silent and free of visible emotion. At the end, he would sum up the discussion and present whatever consensus had been reached.
Mandela later followed the principles of leadership he saw demonstrated there, listening closely, venturing few opinions of his own.
“I always remember the regent’s axiom,” he wrote. “A leader, he said, is like a shepherd. He stays behind the flock, letting the most nimble go out ahead, whereupon the others follow, not realizing that all along they are being directed from behind.”
At 16, Mandela went through the
‘During my life, I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination and I have fought against black domination. 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 idea which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.’
NELSON MANDELA, at his 1964 trial
rite of circumcision and received yet another name, Dalibunga, which means “Father of the Bungha,” the traditional ruling body of the Transkei. He was now formally a man, with a man’s respect and a man’s responsibilities.
Political awakening didn’t come quickly to Mandela. He was in his mid-20s, a graduate of a succession of religious schools, and now living in Johannesburg, when he joined the African National Congress, the black political body known worldwide as the ANC.
In large part, his joining reflected the influence of Walter Sisulu, for decades an important figure in the liberation struggle and who was already part of the organization and deeply dedicated to its aims.
According to Richard Stengel, the collaborator on Mandela’s autobiography, Sisulu immediately saw how charismatic a leader Mandela could become.
“What Walter got to realize was, ‘Here is our natural mass leader. I am a short man. I have a soft voice. I am shy. I cannot stand in front of a roomful of people and get them excited. This man, this boxer, with a beautiful smile, who is so winning — he is our mass leader.’”
Set up in 1912, the ANC had by the early 1940s only a small, mostly middle-aged membership. But by 1943, new young members, including Mandela, were determined to change that. Already among their cohorts were such future strongmen of the ANC as Sisulu, William Nkomo and Oliver Tambo. In September 1944, the four came together to form the ANC Youth League.
Mandela’s leadership qualities were evident from the outset. In 1947, he was elected secretary of the league and by 1950 was its president.
In 1948, repression was formally strengthened when the Afrikaner-dominated National Party won the all-white elections on a frank program of apartheid. Now the country — officially as well as in practice — belonged to the white race.
A year later, the ANC Youth League drew up a “program of action” that called for strikes, boycotts and civil disobedience in a campaign of defiance. Mandela was fiery in those days, an imposing man with an impressive sense of command and of calm. His physique was extraordinary, the result of daily 90-minute sessions in the boxing ring, an arena where race did not count, but endurance, tactics and showmanship did. Politically, as he sometimes said, he was already in the light heavyweight division.
Mandela, however, never considered himself a heavy political thinker, in a league with colleagues like Tambo and Sisulu. But he was reading voraciously, including leftist philosophers such as Harold Laski and Bertrand Russell and such black nationalists as Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana. Importantly, he was also reading Gandhi, whose theories of passive resistance were developed in South Africa decades before their implementation in India.
In 1952, Mandela led the ANC’s Campaign for the Defiance of Unjust Laws, a massive civil disobedience campaign that brought the movement to the fore. For his pains, he was sent to jail several times, but hardly minded. As he wrote, “Going to prison became a badge of honour among Africans.”
Though Mandela cut quite a figure, not everyone was sure he had the gravitas to one day lead the country. Anthony Sampson, who came to know Mandela in the 1950s and later wrote his biography, says: “He had quite a strong touch of the showman — which made some people, including myself, a bit skeptical about what really lay behind the show.”
By the 1960s, South Africa was losing whatever caste it had ever had internationally. In March 1960, the world watched wholesale government violence in Sharpeville, a small township south of Johannesburg, when police opened fire on a crowd of 10,000 peaceful protesters. Sixtyseven people were killed, most shot in the back as they fled. Another 400 were wounded.
Horrifying pictures appeared on front pages around the world. The UN Security Council blamed the government for the shootings. The South African stock market collapsed and many whites, fearing apocalypse, queued up for exit visas.
Mandela, in danger of being arrested, went underground. Newspapers soon dubbed him the Black Pimpernel, a reference to the Scarlet Pimpernel, the famous fictional character who escaped capture during the French Revolution. Dressed sometimes as a workman, sometimes as a chauffeur, sometimes wearing glasses and a beard, Mandela moved fairly freely around the country, exhorting supporters to keep up the battle and even granting interviews to journalists.
From the beginning, the ANC had been committed to non-violence. The question was, could such means remain effective? The government was resorting more and more to the army, suppression was becoming heavier and non-violence was starting to seem a loser’s game.
“Non-violent passive resistance is effective as long as your opposition adheres to the same rules as you do,” Mandela wrote. “But if peaceful protest is met with violence, its efficacy is at an end.”
Mandela and other ANC leaders decided a carefully targeted sabotage campaign could prove a powerful weapon. Damaging buildings, roads and power plants would injure foreign investment and trade and demoralize the government.
Mandela was named chairman of a new military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe, which means “the spear of the nation.” The spear was not very sharp, however. No one really knew how to construct a bomb.
Mandela himself could hardly shoot a rifle. One day, at Umkhonto we Sizwe headquarters, he was teaching himself marksmanship. He shot a sparrow. But his accuracy, and the sparrow’s death, left him stricken. Even later, in prison, he could not bring himself to kill insects, always carrying them outside and setting them free.
His personal hatred of violence was obvious. But if the ANC could not use a measured form of violence, what other tool could it bring against repression? One day in August 1962, police captured Mandela trying to pass as a chauffeur. Eleven months later, the entire high command of Umkhonto we Sizwe was captured, including Sisulu. The raid turned up reams of incriminating evidence, including maps that showed such targets as police stations and government offices. More than 10 documents were in Mandela’s handwriting.
At trial, Mandela delivered a ringing speech of defence and defiance, so explosive that one lawyer predicted his immediate hanging. The final paragraph was the capstone.
“During my life, I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people,” he declared. “I have fought against white domination and I have fought against black domination. 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 idea which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”
At the trial’s end in June 1964, the judge took all of three minutes to find all but one conspirator guilty. The next day, he sentenced those convicted to life imprisonment.
Within days, they were all at hard labour on Robben Island, from which no prisoner had escaped in three centuries. Slowly, they and their cause began disappearing from the consciousness of their cohorts on the mainland.
Mandela’s cell, like the others, was small, about two metres square. For years, the prisoners worked in a limestone quarry where the light was so strong that Mandela’s eyesight was damaged permanently.
However, the prisoners never became passive victims. They read widely, took correspondence courses, and offered political instruction to new arrivals. Their cellblock became known as “Mandela University.”
The firebrand Mandela developed great discipline in prison. Each day he made his bed, a habit that continued for the rest of his life, even while he was president.
Mandela learned to speak Afrikaans and became friendly with his warders. Soon he could empathize with the Afrikaner predicament and suffering, a boon in the negotiations he was to undertake with the government years later.
The government knew Mandela was still the moral head of the ANC. Any negotiations would have to be with him. So they tempted him. With a bit of reasonable compromise, they told him, he could be free.
From 1974 to 1988 he was offered freedom in exchange for compromising his struggle. But so long as apartheid was in place, he refused.
Late in 1988, he was transferred again, this time to Victor Verster Prison near Paarl, a sort of elegant halfway house in which he passed his last months in incarceration. He had a cook and a garden, and could receive visitors. South Africa’s four-decade experiment with apartheid was
‘Never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another. The sun shall never set on so glorious a human achievement.’ NELSON MANDELA, at his 1994 presidential inauguration
drawing to a close. In 1986, the U.S. Congress had passed a sanctions bill that banned new investment, loans, airport landing rights and exports of oil. The European Community imposed concurrent sanctions. And the fear of the ANC representing a kind of monolithic communist conspiracy seemed absurd as the Soviet Union entered its death throes.
Doing business and even living in a pariah state were becoming tiresome for the white majority.
Finally, his back against the wall, president P.W. Botha allowed members of his cabinet to begin talks with Mandela. They found him far more intelligent than they expected, and not ripe for manipulation or compromise as other Bantu leaders had often seemed.
But talks would be pointless, Mandela told them, if the government continued to insist that the ANC renounce violence even while whites refused to share political power. The government must accept the principle of majority rule.
In July 1989, Mandela met with Botha, whom he found surprisingly respectful and charming, though weakened by a recent stroke. Unfortunately, the encounter led nowhere. Six weeks later, Botha resigned and was succeeded by F.W. de Klerk.
Soon after, de Klerk led his party to a slim election victory, which he interpreted as a mandate for change. Five months later, in February 1990, de Klerk addressed Parliament in a speech of pivotal force. Mandela and all political prisoners would be released unconditionally. The ANC, indeed all political organizations, would be legalized.
On Feb. 11, 1990, Mandela made his historic walk out of the prison gates to the jubilation of his fellow blacks. “It seemed as if that day heaven was walking on earth because a great man was back home,” recalled one Thembu chief.
Above all, he expressed absolutely no bitterness for 27 years of incarceration. The world welcomed him, more as a moral than a political leader. He toured the globe, a private citizen meeting presidents and prime ministers as an equal.
Among the first countries he visited was Canada, which he lauded for pushing early and successfully to have South Africa ejected from the Commonwealth until it rescinded its apartheid laws.
At the end of 1993, Mandela and de Klerk were proclaimed joint winners of the Nobel Peace Prize.
To be sure, even the “peace” back in South Africa sometimes seemed fragile. Conservative whites, outraged by their loss of power, threatened war. And in the east, the Zulu nation, under Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, toyed with secession. But in the end, neither threat emerged.
In spring of 1994, Mandela led the ANC in South Africa’s first truly democratic vote. He proved a canny campaigner, and the ANC took 252 of the 400 seats in Parliament. Mandela was now president of the country he had long felt destined to lead and after 352 years, colonization had ended in South Africa.
“Never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another,” Mandela said at his presidential inauguration. “The sun shall never set on so glorious a human achievement.”
In power, Mandela healed a wounded nation by creating the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a model for the world, aimed at resolving the horrors of apartheid not through retribution, but by seeking truth for its victims, and amnesty for perpetrators willing to disclose their political crimes.
Mandela was also scrupulous in representing all South Africans. Long before his term ended, even many whites seemed to cherish the pacifying influence of their former demon.
After serving a full term, Mandela left office in June 1999. He had always said that no man over 80 should lead. And he wanted to leave no doubt that he and the ANC had no ambitions for one-man rule.
■ Triumphant though he finally was in politics, Mandela faced a private life full of sorrows, including the death of a son. During his long years in prison, he was denied the company and pleasures of his family, including his five children.
Winnie, his wife since 1958, had stood beside him throughout his years of imprisonment but seemed less committed after his release. Moreover, she was becoming a political liability, attacking ANC members in public, and consorting openly with lovers.
In 1996, they were divorced. “I was the loneliest man,” Mandela told the court.
On July 18, 1998, his 80th birthday, Mandela married for the third time, wedding Graca Machel, the widow of Samora Machel, former president of Mozambique. Twenty-seven years his junior, she had a strong character, though she was less domineering than Winnie.
In his last years, he spent much of his time at his home village in Qunu, in the Transvaal, but still loomed as large as any statesman on the horizon.
He was often called upon to soothe political dissensions, especially in Africa. He spoke out in favour of literacy and of compassionate policies. Sometimes he confronted his successors in the presidential office, never more openly than when he took Thabo Mkeki to task for his denials over the AIDS crisis.
His last public appearance on a major stage was when South Africa hosted the 2010 World Cup soccer tournament.
■ Mandela did not create a paradise in South Africa, but he averted the civil war that had long seemed inevitable. He gave a sense of dignity to his long-defeated people. He brought out the best in those he touched, achieving reconciliation where it seemed least likely.
No one could have lived up to the godlike image that built up around him during 27 years of imprisonment, but Mandela came close. He had the wisdom to present himself as the most ordinary of men, astonishingly free of public ego, interested only in the larger good. He exuded, at least publicly, a child’s simple goodness, too close to the heart to cling to bitterness and its pinched consolations.
Lord Acton said that great men can never be good — but many who observed Mandela’s passage through life would have another view.