Tag: Nelson Mandela

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In South Africa, a quarry that yielded democracy…

quarryIn 1964, two years after Nelson Mandela arrived at Robben Island, the prison’s commanding officer ordered Mandela and his fellow political prisoners to work in the island’s lime quarry.

The quarry, which I visited in December on a tour of the island, is, as Mandela wrote in his autobiography, “an enormous white crater cut into a rocky hillside.” Mining the lime required the prisoners to break through it with a pick, and then extract the lime with a shovel. Warders with automatic weapons watched from raised platforms as the men worked.

Though the work could be blinding – the lime reflected the sun’s rays into the prisoners eyes; the prisoners would not receive sunglasses for another three years – Mandela wrote that he preferred being outside in nature and the opportunity to use one’s muscles, as opposed to working in the prison compound.

Work in the quarry aided the prisoners in other ways. The men used a cave that measured about 22 feet by 9 feet as a latrine that doubled as a meeting place. (The cave appears as a rectangular hole on the left side of the wall in the above photo.) The guards did not use the latrine, which meant that Mandela and his colleagues could huddle in it. “It is said that 69% of our constitution was drafted there,” said the guide who led our tour. “It is known as the first democratic parliament of South Africa.”

Initially, the commanding officer told the prisoners they would labor in the quarry for six months and thereafter would be given light tasks. “His timing was considerably off,” wrote Mandela. “We remained at the quarry for the next thirteen years.”

In 1995, Mandela, who died in December, and about 1,300 former political prisoners returned to the island to mark the fifth anniversary of Mandela’s release from prison. There he visited the quarry, where he chipped at a rock that now forms the base of a memorial to the men who labored there. A photo from the reunion shows Mandela wearing a blue shirt, his hair mostly white like the excavation that surrounds him. Sunglasses shield his eyes.

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People

Remembering Nelson Mandela…

IMG_0370As 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.

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People

From prisoner to president…

taxi_rankOn 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.

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People

One measure of Mandela

“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.

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People

Never Again

purple mandelaTerrific tribute to Madiba, by Prophets of da city

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People

Nelson Mandela’s long walk to freedom

purple mandelaI recently read “Long Walk to Freedom,” Nelson Mandela’s autobiography. Besides being an amazing tale of one of the world’s great leaders, Mandela’s account of the development of his political consciousness fascinated me.

Throughout, Mandela writes about lessons learned in the politics of the anti-apartheid movement. The story he tells is, of course, one of struggle and ultimately triumph, but it’s also a story about politics. While reading I bookmarked some of Mandela’s descriptions of life under apartheid, his childhood and his outlook.

Here’s Mandela, who practiced law in Johannesburg, describing life for black South Africans under apartheid:

Africans were desperate for legal help in government buildings: it was a crime to walk through a Whites Only door, a crime to ride a Whites Only bus, a crime to use a Whites Only drinking fountain, a crime to walk on a Whites Only beach, a crime to be on the streets past eleven, a crime not to have a pass book and a crime to have the wrong signature in that book, a crime to be unemployed and a crime to be employed in the wrong place, a crime to live in certain places and a crime to have no place to live.

Mandela spent 27 years in prison after being convicted on charges of sabotage and conspiring to overthrow the apartheid government. In the following passage he discusses his incarceration.

Prison and the authorities conspire to rob each man of his dignity. In and of itself, that assured I would survive, for any man or institution that tries to rob me of my dignity will lose because I will not part with it at any price or under any pressure.

Mandela goes on to discuss the hopefulness that enabled him to survive his incarceration.

I never seriously considered the possibility that I would not emerge from prison one day. I never thought that a life sentence truly meant life and that I would die behind bars. Perhaps I was denying this prospect because it was too unpleasant to contemplate. But I always knew that someday I would once again feel the grass under my feet and walk in the sunshine as a free man.

Mandela’s father died when Nelson was a boy. Jongintaba, a Xhosa chief whom Mandela’s father had befriended, offered to become Nelson’s guardian. Mandela was sent to live with Jongintaba’s family at the Great Place in Mqhekezweni, the provisional capital of Thembuland. Tribal meetings that Mandela attended at the Great Place provided him with lessons in leadership, including the following:

As a leader, I have always followed the principles I first saw demonstrated by the regent at the Great Place. I have always endeavored to listen to what each and every person in a discussion had to say before venturing my own opinion. Oftentimes, my own opinion will simply represent a consensus of what I heard in the discussion. I always remember the regent’s axiom: 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.

In the book’s penultimate paragraph, Mandela writes of the challenge ahead for his nation.

When I walked out of prison, that was my mission, to liberate the oppressed and the oppressor both. Some say that has now been achieved. But I know that is not the case. 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.

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Travel

The Mandela capture site

mandela sculpture at capture siteOn August 5, 1962, Nelson Mandela was driving to Johannesburg from Durban when he was stopped by the police in Howick, about 20 miles northwest of Pietermaritzburg.

For Mandela, who had gone underground rather than surrender to the apartheid government that had issued a warrant for his arrest, the encounter set in motion events that led to 27 years of imprisonment. Mandela’s companion that day was Cecil Williams, a theater director and political activist who had helped Mandela move through the country without detection.

“Suddenly, in front of us, the Ford was signaling us to stop. I knew in that instant that my life on the run was over; my seventeen months of “freedom” were about to end,” Mandela wrote in his autobiography. Here’s how Mandela describes the encounter:

When our car stopped, a tall slender man with a stern expression on his face came directly over to the window on the passenger side. He was unshaven and it appeared that he had not slept in quite a while. I immediately assumed he had been waiting for us for several days. In a calm voice, he introduced himself as Sergeant Vorster of the Pietermaritzburg police and produced an arrest warrant. He asked me to identify myself. I told him my name was David Motsamayi. He nodded, and then, in a very proper way, he asked me a few questions about where I had been and where I was going. I parried these questions without giving him much information. He seemed a bit irritated and then, he said, “Ag, you’re Nelson Mandela and this is Cecil Williams, and you are under arrest!”

On Saturday, I visited the Mandela capture site, which is marked by a sculpture that consists of 50 steel columns between 21 and 31 feet tall. When viewed at a distance of about 114 feet, the columns form a flat portrait of Mandela.

The sculpture, by the South African artist Marco Cianfanelli, was dedicated last year on the 50th anniversary of Mandela’s arrest.

Beside a plaque that marks the actual spot of the arrest, people have left candles, notes and other tokens of their affection along with wishes that Mandela, who turned 95 in July and who reportedly is recovering at home in Johannesburg from a lung infection, might regain his health.