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In His Own Words

Little, Brown

Chapter One

WILMOT JAMES

How extraordinary, even astonishing, it is to find passages written by Nelson Mandela in 1951 anticipating the nature of today's war on Iraq: 'Mankind as a whole is today standing on the threshold of great events - events that at times seem to threaten its very existence,' he told the annual conference of the African National Congress Youth League in December 1951, 'those groups, parties or persons that are prepared to go to war in defence of colonialism, imperialism and their profits', those 'who are determined to perpetuate a permanent atmosphere of crisis and fear in the world knowing that a frightened world cannot think clearly, these groups attempt to create conditions under which the common men might be inveigled into supporting the building of more and more atomic bombs, bacteriological weapons, and other instruments of mass destruction.'

It was 1951; three years after the National Party came to power, taking South Africa into a direction different to the tendency of the late colonial world, just a decade before the post-colonial independence movements reached their crescendo. The 1950s were a time in which the United States of America became strong, starting a post-war expansion extraordinary in its economic scale, and militarily awesome in its technological hardware. The US government was no friend to Mandela and the ANC during the difficult days of apartheid, but made up for it by Bill Clinton's support for democratic transformation after 1994.

The 1950s was for Mandela also a time of the ordinary person, 'the common man [who] is rising from being the object of history to becoming the subject of history', an expression strongly Hegelian in its philosophy of history. It was a time of growing defiance against injustice, of the 'oppressed all over the world' becoming 'creators of their own history', pledging 'to carve their destiny and not to leave it in the hands of tiny ruling circles - or classes'. The idiom used was clearly Marxist, though not because he was one, as Mandela later explained in his lonesome and compellingly powerful defence in the statement from the dock at the opening of the Rivonia Trial in April 1964: 'I have denied that I am a communist? I have always regarded myself, in the first place, as an African patriot.' He was 'attracted to the idea of a classless society, an attraction which springs in part from Marxist reading' and is based on the egalitarianism with which pre-capitalist society treated land ownership, the promise of equality of which Marx spoke having a strong resonance with the - perhaps overstated in recollection - ethos of the 'tribe': 'There were no rich or poor and there was no exploitation.'

But where Marxists dismissed representative democracy as a mere shell for the expression of class interests, Mandela admired the Western parliamentary system; he had great respect for British political institutions, particularly the independence with which the judiciary was endowed, both in Britain and in the US, where the separation of powers, between the executive, Parliament or Congress and courts of law, provided for the just and fair representation of individual citizens on the basis of equality of citizenship. Individual representation was about human dignity, which next to poverty, were the two abiding issues that placed him and his people in bondage under apartheid. And therefore, Mandela gave himself the freedom to 'borrow the best from the West and the East' as he put it, to fight against poverty and the lack of human dignity, an intellectual liberation from dogma, powerfully stated.

The freedom to make up your own mind, to craft ideas for the problems of your own place and time and to find indigenous solutions by borrowing and not bowing to either the West or the East or both, was a quality Mandela and the ANC leadership brought to negotiations of the early 1990s, the settlement of 1994 and reconciliation politics of the post-apartheid democratic era. As Van Zyl Slabbert puts it elsewhere in this book: 'South Africa, as far as my knowledge goes, is the only country that negotiated itself out of domination into democracy without any outside assistance and/or interference.' From Marxism he took the class capacity this theoretical eschatology gave to the ordinary person, to use his or her 'labour power' as an instrument of resistance against unjust laws during the Defiance Campaign of 1952, empowering the masses by a recognition of its source: 'there is a mighty awakening among men and women of our country and the year 1952 stands out as the year of this upsurge of national consciousness', he told the Transvaal meeting of the African National Congress in 1953. The Defiance Campaign, like a lot of things in the political history of struggle, started in Port Elizabeth, and it awoke the 'political functioning of the masses'.

He was not a communist and counselled against open revolution and guerrilla warfare, widely regarded as their trademark. He was a democrat. The Defiance Campaign exemplified the 'passive resistance' against unjust laws inspired by Gandhi, the towering personality from the 'East', and respect for and admiration of the 'just laws' made democratically in the West. This was as much a question of analysis of class interests as it was a question of strategy moved by conscience, considerations of what is not only appropriate but what also is right: 'all South Africans are entitled to live a free life', Mandela told the Old Synagogue Court on the closure on the prosecution's case in 1962, 'on the basis of fullest equality of the rights and opportunities in every field, of full democratic rights, with a direct say in the affairs of the government', not simply because of an intellectual consideration of what is proper and just, but because Mandela felt 'driven to speak up for what we believe is right', because 'truth and justice' mattered to the dignity of the individual, to the emotional wellbeing of a person that neuro-psychologists today would associate with the power of the brain to have an inner-eye, a 'conscience'. It is here in Mandela's addresses that we first come across a phenomenon a colleague once described as an 'instinct for justice and democracy', and therefore a visceral reaction to injustice, the indignity of racial discrimination and to what Mandela characterised as the fascism of apartheid associated with an ideology of the herrenvolk, unsatisfactorily translated as a 'master race'.

Something else in his speeches and writings that we only see with hindsight, after having met him, we can now recognise as a quite extraordinary quality: an uncanny ability to lead by virtue of a self-reflective and deeply understood appreciation of the contradictoriness of human nature. Anthony Sampson in his biography, Mandela, describes the reflective self-understanding of dignity as a core of the humanity that framed his personality. Anybody who has met him would know the feeling. Mandela receives any person with the greatest of respect. He makes you feel valued and important as a sincere expression of his person.

Mandela's approach to building the South African nation, to the reconciliation of diverse people with an awful history of oppression and repression, became a natural extension of a personality that lacked a sense of bitterness or vengeance. 'Mandela's capacity for forgiveness already amazed visitors', wrote Sampson, and '[M]any of his basic principles - his capacity for seeing the best in people, his belief in the dignity of man, his forgiveness - were essentially religious.' The politics of these personality characteristics were, never to diminish your own dignity by diminishing that of others, and never to humiliate your adversary or do things to make them bitter beyond the reach of a future reciprocal embrace. This notion of an appreciation of our mutual humanity in the darkest hours of rage or despair is the quality that saved South Africa from self-destruction, articulated all too clearly in Mandela's statement from the dock at the opening of the defence case in the Rivonia Trial of 20 April 1964.

After countless efforts to petition and make representations to government, endless letters that went unanswered, of civil disobedience to convey unhappiness with unjust racial laws, Mandela explained that they either had to submit or fight. In a statement where he rejected PW Botha's offer of release with conditions, which was read out at a public meeting in Soweto by his daughter Zindzi Mandela in 1985, he recounted how 'My colleagues and I wrote in 1952 to Malan asking for a round table to find a solution to the problems of our country, but that was ignored. When Strijdom was in power we made the same offer. Again it was ignored. When Verwoerd was in power we asked for a national convention for all the people in South Africa to decide on their future. This, too, was in vain.'

Only then did the ANC form Umkhonto we Sizwe, and there was a choice to be made between four options: 'there is sabotage, there is guerrilla warfare, there is terrorism, and there is open revolution. We chose to adopt the first method and to exhaust it before taking any other decision.' Sabotage of installations and infrastructure was chosen because it did not involve the loss of life and because it would scare investors away, 'thus compelling [white] voters to reconsider their position'. And, in a series of phrases that anticipates his approach to post-apartheid nation building, sabotage 'offered the best hope for future race relations. Bitterness would be kept to a minimum and, if the policy bore fruit, democratic government could become a reality.'

Mandela sent a ringing letter of encouragement to the students who took to the streets of Soweto in 1976: The 'verdict of June 16 is loud and clear,' he said, 'apartheid is dead'. But in a long and considered treatment on the Black Consciousness Movement, he worried deeply about the wisdom of denigrating Afrikaners and the Afrikaans language. I remember the time. As an undergraduate student at the University of the Western Cape in the early 1970s the Black Consciousness Movement had great appeal because it celebrated the dignity of black humanity. But because there was no memory and political presence of the nonracialism of the ANC, given the incarceration and exile of its entire leadership, the assertion of black pride came at the cost of denigrating the culture of the oppressors, which included the language of Afrikaans, a tendency made worse when government imposed Afrikaans as a compulsory language in black schools which in turn sparked the Soweto revolt. In a powerful passage, Mandela had this to say about the implications of diminishing your adversary:

Like many people inside and outside the liberation movement, BCM members have strong objections to the use of Afrikaans. The objection is quite understandable since Afrikaans is not only the language of the oppressor, but has also produced a literature that portrays the black man in a bad light. However, Afrikaans is the language of a substantial section of the country's blacks and any attempts to deprive them of their language would be dangerous. It is the home language of 95 per cent of the coloured population and is used by Indians as well, especially in the country dorps of the Transvaal. It is also widely spoken by the African youth in the urban areas. Even if only Afrikaners spoke the language it will still be unwise to abolish it. Language is the highest manifestation of social unity in the history of mankind and it is the inherent right of each group of people to use its language without restriction. Not only would its abolition be out of step with progressive developments in the enlightened world, but it would also be inviting endless strife. The question of minority rights has been of major concern to progressive forces throughout history and has often led to sudden and violent strife from the aggrieved community. Today South Africa has almost three million Afrikaners who will no longer be oppressors after liberation but a powerful minority of ordinary citizens whose co-operation and goodwill are needed in the reconstruction of the country.

This approach, which Mandela strenuously insists is that of the ANC and not his, is what saved South Africa from civil war. It is an approach that would serve Israel and Palestine well in their search for peace and justice today. It is an ethos of avoiding the accumulated bitterness that has scarred the Balkans and delayed the resolution of the troubles of Northern Ireland. It is a powerful reminder of the folly of the US/UK-led war on Iraq, given the humiliation of the Iraqi people and the passionate identification of the entire Muslim and Arab world now with a severe feeling of insult: if in the conduct of war and struggle you humiliate your adversary, reconciliation and the achievement of democracy after the struggle is over become difficult, even impossible, certainly delayed. Mandela's profound wisdom of anticipating, premeditating perhaps, future outcomes as a guide for how you conduct your struggles and political conduct day-to-day, today, is the most telling legacy he leaves from his leadership.

And there is yet something more: the way in which South Africans negotiated their way out of the miserable corner of apartheid, the manner in which full equality of black and white was achieved by way of negotiating forums like the Conference for a Democratic South Africa (Codesa), can be found in writings penned during Rivonia. Mandela explained that the ANC turned to sabotage only after it had exhausted all legal and peaceful channels. In this the answer was always force and violence:

It must not be forgotten that by this time violence had, in fact, become a feature of the South African political scene. There had been violence in 1957 when the women of Zeerust were ordered to carry passes; there was violence in 1958 with the enforcement of cattle culling in Sekhukhuniland; there was violence in 1959 when the people of Cato Manor protested against pass raids; there was violence in 1960 when the government attempted to impose Bantu Authorities in Pondoland. Thirty-nine Africans died in these disturbances. In 1961 there had been riots in Warmbaths, and all this time the Transkei had been a seething mass of unrest.

And, of course, there was Sharpeville, which resulted in the declaration of a state of emergency and banning of the ANC, the Pan Africanist Congress, the South African Communist Party and other organisations.

Continues...

Excerpted from In His Own Wordsby Nelson Mandela Copyright ©2003 by Nelson Mandela Foundation. Excerpted by permission.
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