Month: December 2013

As I type this I’m listening to the BBC’s coverage of the memorial service for Nelson Mandela that is being held at FNB Stadium in Johannesburg. Leaders from the U.S., China, Brazil, the U.K., India, Afghanistan, Liberia, France, Cuba and scores of other countries are arriving to join more than 90,000 mourners who are gathering to show their respects to Mandela.

While awaiting the start of the proceedings, I’ve been listening to the sounds of the stadium and leafing through “Long Walk to Freedom,” Mandela’s autobiography. I’ve been re-reading Mandela’s speech at the Rivonia trial, at which Mandela and fellow members of the African National Congress were convicted of conspiring to overthrow South Africa’s apartheid government.

The trial took place over roughly 20 months beginning in October 1962. As Mandela describes, the defense case began in April 1964 with a statement from the dock by Mandela. In his address, Mandela detailed the disparities between the lives of blacks and whites in South Africa and described the aims and objects of the ANC, which included the following:

Africans want a just share in the whole of South Africa; they want security and a stake in society. Above all, we want equal political rights, because without them our disabilities will be permanent. I know this sounds revolutionary to the whites in this country, because the majority of voters will be Africans. This makes the white man fear democracy. This then is what the ANC is fighting for.  Their struggle is a truly national one. It is a struggle of the African people, inspired by their own suffering and their own experience. It is a struggle for the right to live.

After reading for four hours, Mandela turned to face the judge and delivered from memory the final words:

During my lifetime 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 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.

On Saturday I spent the afternoon in the rondaval of a South African traditional healer.

My girlfriend and I had come to see the healer and his wife to ask them their feelings on the passing of Nelson Mandela and to visit a nearby taxi rank together. Each day residents of the Zulu tribal area that adjoins the mostly white enclave where we live gather at the rank to hail taxis to town and elsewhere here in the province of Kwa-Zulu Natal.

“Mandela was a hero,” Makhosi Zuma, our host, told us. “In Zulu, we say ‘iqhawe.’ He survived from being a prisoner to become a president.”

Mandela is a hero. Born, educated, tried for treason, imprisoned for 27 years and elected president in his country’s first democratic elections, he changed the lives of all South Africans. He may be the greatest man to have been born within these borders, but he became a hero to the world.

Buried in the roadway near the taxi rank lies a steel grate that is said to have marked a barrier in the days of apartheid. Blacks who sought to enter the whites-only area on the other side of the grate had to present their so-called passbook in order to cross.

To this American, the grate embodies both South Africa’s progress and the challenges that remain. Stand at the grate and you’ll see cars and trucks carrying white South Africans bump past the tribal area’s mostly black residents, who gather at the rank to hail rides in taxis known as kombis.

Commuting via kombi can mean packing into a van with 10 others and enduring ear-splitting music. It also can mean exposing oneself to tuberculosis, especially when the windows remain rolled up, which is often the case on rainy days that mark the springtime.

A commute suggests the commuter has a job, something that too few people here possess. South Africa’s unemployment rate stands at 24.7%, among the highest in the world, according to Africa Check. The country also has the world’s fourth-highest murder rate and the highest incidence per capita of people living with HIV. For millions of its citizens, South Africa remains, to borrow a label coined by the novelist Zadie Smith, a death-dealing place.

That’s not to say South Africa has a monopoly on death. America’s transition from apartheid took about 100 years and was marked by violence, poverty and other ills that have spanned generations. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the hero of America’s anti-apartheid movement, was murdered at age 39. Mandela lived to be 95.

Mandela himself knew the challenges his country faced would not end with majority rule. As he wrote in his autobiography:

The truth is that we are not yet free; we have merely achieved the freedom to be free, the right not to be oppressed. We have not taken the final step of our journey, but the first step on a longer and even more difficult road. For to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others. The true test of our devotion to freedom is just beginning.

Iqawhe.

“Nelson Mandela embodied the 20th century in South Africa and in the world in many more ways than people think,” recalls Zackie Achmat, who co-founded the organization that forced the government to provide antiretroviral drugs to South Africans living with HIV.