This evening it was reported on Television that Nelson
Mandela had passed away, several hours earlier, at the age of ninety-five. A great man has died, and something must be
said by way of recognition of his passing.
The word "great" is used promiscuously these days.
Winston Churchill was not a great man. Ronald Reagan was not a great man. John F. Kennedy was not a great man. Margaret Thatcher was not a great woman. But Nelson Mandela was truly a great man.
I never had the honor of meeting Mandela, though he was an
enormous presence during my visits to South Africa, starting in 1986 and
continuing until last year, when I made what may well be my last real trip to
that country, to receive an honorary degree at the University of the Western
Cape. In order to make clear the
lineaments of his greatness, some detailed history is required. I should caution you that what follows is
very much my own view, not at all the official hagiography associated with his
name.
The struggle against South African apartheid took many forms, as did the lives of those in the
struggle. Some, Like Thabo Mbeki, fled
the country and went into exile, fighting against the regime from abroad. Some, like Mandela and Mbkei's father, Govan,
went to prison, and fought the regime from their cells on Robben Island. And some remained unimprisoned in South Africa
to form what became the Mass Democratic Movement, fighting the regime from
within the country. Those outside the
country formed Umkhonto we sizwe
["The Spear of the Nation"], the armed wing of the struggle. Those elsewhere in the world organized
boycotts of South Africa -- academic boycotts, sports boycotts, cultural boycotts
-- and, most effective of all, economic boycotts. Both the disinvestment
movement [pulling investment capital out of the country] and the divestment movement -- urging funds to
sell stocks of companies doing business in South Africa] had by the early eighties
brought enormous pressure to bear on the business community, which in turn
pressured the Afrikaner government to make some sort of settlement with the
Black [i.e., African, Indian, and Coloured] population. My introduction to the movement came through
my decision to take part in a demonstration at Harvard to try to get that
august institution to divest. [We
failed. Even after I succeeded in
getting Archbishop Desmond Tutu elected to the Harvard Board of Overseers,
Harvard did not divest. Instead it
changed the rules for electing Overseers so that nothing like that would happen
again. Naturally after the struggle was
over and Mandela had been released from prison, Harvard gave him an honorary degree. That university is really a piece of work!]
The manifesto of the movement was a document called The Freedom Charter, adopted at a mass
meeting in 1955. The two most
controversial demands of the Freedom Charter were nationalization [which is to
say, socialism] and land reform. The
former should be clear enough, but the latter requires some explanation. The Afrikaner Nationalist government had
implemented a policy of apartheid, or
"separateness,' according to which South Africa was to be disaggregated
into "homelands," each of which would be the separate and rightful
place of one of the many peoples living within the borders of the country. The Whites, needless to say, would get all
the good stuff -- cities, factories, mines, and the rest. The Africans would be divided into cultural
and linguistic fragments and consigned to Homelands ruled by puppet Black
governments, complete with all the trappings of pseudo-governmental status --
KwaZulu, Lebowa, Bophutatswana, Ciskei, Transkei, and so on. Africans were ordered to go to their
"homelands," in many cases breaking up families on the grounds that
this member was a Northern Sotho and that member was a Zulu. The borders of the Homelands were carefully
drawn so that the richest and most fertile land was reserved for the White
homeland -- South Africa -- while the leavings were allocated to this or that
homeland. Thus land reform, the return
of fertile land to African farmers, whose ancestors had cultivated the land for
generations, was one of the key demands of the Freedom Charter.
By the early eighties, the armed struggle was pretty much a
failure. The government had successfully
infiltrated the ranks of the Umkhonto we Siswe, and the Mass Democratic
Movement, crippled by bannings and imprisonments, was stalled. But the economic boycott was cutting very
deeply indeed, and the business community was pressuring the government to do
something to regularize economic affairs.
South Africa, one must recall, was far and away the best developed and
most economically advanced country in Southern Africa, and its further
development required integration into the world capitalist system.
At this point, a draft of a revised Freedom Charter began to
circulate, although to the best of my knowledge it was never officially
promulgated. A friend of mine bootlegged
a copy to me. The biggest changes were
the omission from the demands of both nationalization and land reform. Instead, there was a heavy emphasis on formal
democracy -- one person, one vote. In
effect, the new Charter was prepared to trade the key economic demands for an
almost assured shot at control of the State.
I was very disappointed in the changes, but it seemed pretty clear to me
that Mandela and his colleagues had made a hard-eyed choice. They might just be strong enough to take
control of the State through free elections if they agreed to leave ownership
of the means of production in the hands of the business community and the good
land in the hands of the Afrikaner farmers.
The one puzzle was why De Klerk, the President, would agree
to such a deal. By this time, the state
was the power base of the Afrikaners. An
unusually large proportion of Afrikaner men held government jobs -- sinecures,
in effect. A deal along the lines of the
revised Freedom Charter would be acceptable to the business community -- they
didn't care about the color of anyone's skin, so long as they could retain
control of capital. The Afrikaner
farmers could keep their land. But De
Klerk and his retainers would be out on their ear if a Black government was
elected. What was in it for them?
I puzzled over this a good deal, and here is the explanation
I came up with. This is largely
speculation, but it may well be true. At
this time, the Black population was divided.
The large majority supported the African National Congress, the ANC,
Mandela's organization. But a
significant minority, based in KwaZulu with supporters on the mines and
factories, owed allegiance to Mangosuthu Buthelezi's Inkatha Freedom Party, the
IFP. In the middle 1980's, De Klerk's
government was feeding weapons and money to the IFP, encouraging its attacks on
ANC supporters. De Klerk was positioning
himself as a neutral party capable of making peace between the factions. I think that he actually thought he could
ride that role into a victory in an election in which the Black vote would be
split and the White [and Coloured] vote would go to the Nationalist party. In the end, of course, Mandela was elected
overwhelmingly as the first President of a free and democratic South Africa.
It would be natural, but wrong, to suppose that Mandela had
an easy time of it handling the transition to the new South Africa. The example of other successful liberation
struggles in Southern Africa was not promising.
What is more, there was a great deal of scary talk about Afrikaner
commando units forming to wreak havoc on the newly liberated Blacks. In retrospect, it is obvious that there was
never much danger of that. The
Afrikaners talked a good game, but they were fat and pampered and accustomed to
having their way without much effort, and the few attempts were pathetic and
easily put down. Much more serious was
the threat of internecine warfare among the liberated peoples of South Africa.
The true greatness of Mandela was revealed in the way in
which he guided the country into a new, free era without violence, and for the
most part, without the corruption that had so bedeviled other Southern African
nations.
The story after Mandela is not a terribly happy one. The scourge of HIV-AIDS, the failure of the
corporate world to create real opportunity for the impoverished African
population, the inadequacies of Thabo Mbeki and the clownishness of Jacob Zuma
have done much to tarnish Mandela's accomplishments. But with wisdom and skill and great strength,
he brought South Africa into the modern world.
He was a truly great man, and I count myself fortunate to have lived to
see him .
5 comments:
It should be said that the Afrikaners threatening to form commandos and ravage the new multiracial republic were a small and politically marginalised group (as these things always are), and officially marginalised even under the apartheid regime. During the referendum among whites (of whom Afrikaners are and were a clear majority) in 1992 on whether to accept the terms of the negotiated end of apartheid, the National Party government campaigning for a 'yes' vote partly by making a 'no' vote out to be a vote in support of those militias. The 'yes' vote passed with almost 69% of the vote (over two-thirds) and in every electorate bar one.
I think we need to speak ex ante, not ex post, about such things. Eugene Terreblanche may be seen now as the leader of a "small and politically marginalised group" but at the time, he constituted a serious threat to the transition to democracy. It was not foolish, at the time, to fear that he would succeed in fomenting a violent civil war in South Africa.
The racist bile, hatred and vitriol of the American Right assembled on this page is absolutely stunning. There are many crazy people out there.
http://publicshaming.tumblr.com/post/69146509766/republicans-remember-terrorist-commie-nelson-mandela
I can't say what qualifies an individual to rank greatness in world leaders.
The criteria for judging that quality may simply be how much they independently shaped events and how much independence in their struggle they displayed.
Reagan and Kennedy might be dismissed as historical accidents; but Churchill; didn't the man for all his flaws, stare down Hitler?
Mandela must have been a terrifically great man- this debate is like in a way comparing different levels of infinity, isn't it?
By the way, the BBC's Louis Theroux did an interview with Terreblanche shortly before he was murdered. It didn't go well...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPbExwBJiwY
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