Mandela's Struggle Continues
Tempo (Lagos)
February 16, 2000
Lagos - Ten years after his release from a 27-year jail sentence, President
Nelson Mandela rededicates himself to the struggle. Seidi Mulero writes
"I have been a member of the ANC for 56 years. I will be buried by my
family, the ANC....and when I leave this world to go to the new world, the
first thing I will do-I will register as a member of the ANC."
It was in those words that Nelson Mandela described the link between him and
his party, the African National Congress (ANC) on Friday, 11 February.
Mandela who was speaking on the occasion of the celebration of the 10th
anniversary of his release, in 1990, from a 27-year imprisonment, used the
occasion to re- dedicate his life to the cause of the ANC and the struggle
for equality of races in the world.
Mandela, now in his 81st year, was speaking in Umtata, a rural settlement
about 1000 killometres away from Johannesburg, in the Eastern Cape Province.
He was declaring open a museum which houses those hundreds of gifts and
awards given to him since his release on 11 February, 1990. He had, earlier
the same day, unveiled a plaque at a site where stood the preserved remains
of his birth homestead. That was in the hamlet of Mzevo where he spent the
first six years of his life. Then, he moved to Qunu, another settlement 20
kilometres away where he laid the foundation stone of a museum/youth centre
dedicated to his life history. Qunu is the village where the former
president now has a home.
Mandela, who was cheered on that occasion by thousands of people, including
Deputy President Jacob Zuma and the traditional kings of the Xhosa tribe-
Mandela's tribe-said that throughout the liberation struggle, especially in
the 1950s, South Africa's jails became a beehive of political prisoners from
different sectors of the liberation movement" and that "there is an
umbilical chord that binds us together."
Mandela's re-dedication of his life to the struggle is indeed, very
instructive. When he left the presidency in June 1999, he said "there is
life after politics." And his involvement in efforts at finding solutions to
various national and international problems outside South Africa since then
has really proved that there is life after the presidency, contrary to what
many African dictators think. His efforts at ending the wars in the
Democratic Republic of Congo and in Burundi are indeed, laudable even though
those efforts are yet to bear the expected fruits. His success in helping to
break the deadlock in the Lockerbie affair-between Libya and the Western
countries-speaks for itself.
In fact, historians have posited that since Mandela's release in 1990,
whatever he had laid his hands on had been successful. The only exception
had been making Sani Abacha, the megalomaniac Nigerian dictator see reason.
And as the African adage says, when an old man tries in vain to make a youth
see reason, that youth is in his way to perdition. This is because what the
youth cannot see standing on his toes, the old man can see seating down.
Mandela's return to Mzevo last Saturday was indeed, a very important event.
Having been born there on 18 July 1918 and left it six years later, the
octogenarian has gone through all the ebbs and peaks of life.
Eight years before Mandela's birth, the South African Union was created
through the merging of the states of Cape, Natal, Orange and Transvaal in
1910. However, only the white settlers or Afrikaans were recknoned with; the
Black indigenes who formed the majority of the population of the Union were
disregarded. This utter disregard was to be institutionalised in 1913 when
the first racial segregation law which put whites above blacks was
promulgated.
It was in a bid to pre-empt that law that Pixley Ka Seme created the African
National Congress in 1912. The opposition of the blacks to the racial
segregation would be sternly fought by the white minority through merciless
repression of the ANC militants. And, in 1948, the "Apartheid" proper was
enacted by a law which institutionalized systematic separation of races,
prohibited mixed marriages (between persons of different races such as
Blacks and Whites). Blacks were not to go into areas reserved for whites and
vice versa. Any Black wanting to go to whites' only areas was to get an
entry permit. Ten years later, when opposition against the system was
mounting, both within and outside South Africa, the then president, Dr.
Handrik Verwoerd justified it by referring to some verses of the Bible. And,
in a bid to contain the rising wave of anti-apartheid protests and sabotage
in the country, the government promulgated death penalty for sabotage in
July 1962.
That law was specifically meant for Nelson Mandela. The latter who entered
the Witwatersrand University in early 1943 became a genuine militant of the
ANC in August the same year. Between then and 1957, he had been banned from
making speeches in public, arrested, jailed and released times without
number. It was after his release in 1957 from one of such arrests that he
discovered that his first wife, Evelyn, whom he married in 1944 and with
whom he had already had two kids had already gone.
But that would not dampen Nelson's resolve for the struggle. Having
remarried in June 1958, now to Winnie Nomzano Madikizela, he became more
involved, especially because most African countries were to get independence
in 1960, a year after the Bantustan law became more vicious in South Africa.
To the rising discontent in South Africa, government responded with more
repression and arrests which led, on 21 March 1960, in Sharpville to an
uprising which was repressed the bloodiest possible: 70 deaths.
In response to the massacre, the Verwoerd regime did ban the Pan African
Congress, (PAC), a faction of the ANC which was set up in April 1959 by
dissident ANC members, and the ANC itself. Even before the ban, the then ANC
president, Oliver Tambo had already been forced to flee the country to
continue the struggle from abroad.
Mandela would not flee. Instead, he decided, against Tambo's advice, to set
up a paramilitary organization to be known as Umk oto We Sizwe-Mk (the Spear
of the Nation). In the attempts to raise the funds necessary for setting up
the MK, Mandela left South Africa on 10 January, 1962. After a tour which
took him to England, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Ghana, Tanzania and
Ethiopia, he came back home on 24 July 1962. The police came after him and
arrested him on 5 August, 1962. He was on 7 November 1962, sentenced to
three years in prison for "incitation to violence" and travelling abroad and
travelling abroad "without permission."
Though in jail, Mandela was still very much active outside, through the
various literature he had brought back from his tour abroad. Among such
literatures and quotations from Joseph Stalin, the late USSR leader and from
Liu Shao Chi. In 1963, the other ANC members still free, planned to topple
the white minority government through the use of foreign
volunteers/mercenaries who would be brought in through submarines or
parachuted into the country. Their place of meeting, Lilliesleaf (in
Rivonia) was invaded in July 1963 and many of the militants arrested. Though
Mandela was not physically there, his hand- written quotes and speeches
were. Mandela, as a result, was condemned to life imprisonment on 6 June,
1964. But not before he had defended himself creditably. The defence started
its pleas with a speech written by Nelson Mandela himself; it lasted for
four hours. In the speech, Mandela denied being a communist. If he had gone
into alliance with them, he said, it was because of expediency, the same
thing which made the former British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill go
into alliance with Stalin during world war II. The communists, he said, were
the first to have accepted the Blacks as human beings and as equals. What
the Blacks wanted, he said, was their fair share of South Africa, security
of life and property, a role-in the south African society and, above all, a
right to life. The concluding part of his speech went thus: "I have
cherished the ideal of a free and democratic society in which all would live
in harmony, with equal chances. It is an ideal that I hope to defend all my
life. And, if it becomes necessary, it is an ideal for which I am ready to
lay my life."
Mandela would be incarcerated in the prison of Robben Island till April
1982. Then he was sent to Poolsmoor where he stayed till December 1988 and
later at Victor Vester till 11 February 1990.
It was the hope of the apartheid regime to use the imprisonment to break him
morally and make people forget him. Which never was. A 1981 report on
Mandela's prison conditions concluded that the man had the physical,
political as well as charismatic qualities that made him good enough to be
the first black president.
Mandela's journey out of jail started taking shape on 4 July 1989 when the
then south African president, Pik Botha met with the illustrious prisoner.
Having replaced the ailing Pik Botha as chairman of the National Party - the
Apartheid regime's party - and having won the September 1989 general
elections, Frederik de Klerk became south African president. He was more
disposed towards releasing Mandela. Especially because the Berlin wall had
fallen and communism had died, the west encouraged him to free a Mandela who
could no longer be seen as a red communist danger. Thus, on 1 February 1990,
F. de Klerk told his country's parliament he had taken the irrevocable
decision to free Mandela "unconditionally." Which came to pass on 11
February 1990 at 15 hours.
Freed Mandela became ANC chairman on 10 April 1992. In that position, he was
able to negotiate a peaceful end to the Apartheid regime and this earned de
Klerk and Mandela, the 1993 Nobel peace Award, which was the third to go to
South Africa since 1960, Albert Luthuli got it in 1960 and then Bishop
Desmond Futu (1984).
Mandela won the 1994 presidential election which was the first multiracial
election in South Africa. Having refused to vie for the 1999 election, he
handed over to his successor, Thabo Nbeki on 16 June 1998. When he was born
on 18 July 1918, he was named "Rolihlahla." It was when he started schooling
at the British missionary school that he was baptised "Nelson." He was seven
then. When he lost his father at the age of nine in 1927, his poor mother
could not pay for his studies and thus took him, on foot, to the district
headquarters called "Mqhekezweni." That was the "capital" of the Tembus, a
variant of the Xhosa tribe. At Mqhekezweni lived a man called Jongintaba; he
was regent to the throne of the Tembus. Rolihlahla's great grand father was
Ngubengcka, the Tembu king who died in 1832. So, Jongintaba was a cousin of
Rolihlahla or Nelson.
The regent was to inculcate in Nelson, what the tembus called "Ubuntu" or
"human solidarity" because of the care he took of the young orphan,
especially because he financed his education and taught him the history of
the Xhosas. "By the time I went to the university, I already knew that our
community had its own heroes and I was proud of it;" Mandela would say many
years later.
But the first person to have a taste of Nelson's revolutionary values
inculcated into Nelson would be the regent himself. First Nelson had been
expelled from Fort Hare, the school he was attending, for having supported
his school mates who protested against the "poor quality of food served to
them by the school authorities. Then the regent went to arrange for him a
marriage he did not like. So, Nelson ran away and went to settle in
Johannesburg where he rose to become the person the whole world cherishes
today and who, on the occasion of his 80th birthday on 18 July 1998,
celebrated his third marriage, this time to Graca Machel.
Perhaps, there is no better way of summarising Mandela's tenth anniversary
of freedom than the way Rene Guyonnet put it in an article titled
"Radioscopy of a Miracle."
"Bourgiba (the first Tunisian president) was for more than 20 years, leader
of his party, the Neo-Destour. Seghor and Houphouet-Bougry rose by first
becoming legislators. Like Washington, Giap was a victorious general. Gandhi
himself was involved in many spectacular boycotts and hunger strikes. Nelson
Mandela is the only great personality in contemporary history who assumed
the dimensions of a myth from the depth of a jail house,who, once in power,
was able to transform a country torn apart into a stable democracy and hand
over power, with utmost legality and serenity, to an uncontested
personality. He has not only been a liberator like Bolivar, he equally
proved to be a great stateman. There is no doubt that.... through his
political ingenuity, his intellectual rigour, his moral force, his stature
and through the example of democracy and generosity he gave to the world,
Mandela is the African of the 20th century."
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(c) 2000 Tempo. Distributed via Africa News Online
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