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." ----------------------------------------------------------------------Copyright (c) 2000 Tempo. 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