Nobility and Grace

"It will not be long now before we, as South Africans, stand up to proclaim that the apartheid fountainhead of racism throughout the world is no more and that political power has passed into the hands of the whole people."
"Never should racism in our country, from whatever quarter, raise its ugly head again. All of us as South Africans, both blacks and white, must build a common sense of nationhood in which all ideas of vengeance and retribution are impermissible."
Nelson Mandela, 1990, Canadian House of Commons

We must have our heroes. And some of those proclaimed as heroes truly are such. Their presence in times of great national need and their actions and calls to action of their fellow citizens proclaim them national heroes. Some national heroes' exploits are so remarkable that their celebrity status and the awe and respect they inspire in ordinary people looking for role models cross national lines, and the figures of such huge repute become international idols.

Nelson Mandela, who died yesterday after a prolonged illness and weariness of life at age 95, was one of those ineluctable heroes, a man whose reputation went before him, a man revered for having retained a sense of moderation and reasonableness despite a 27-year incarceration of hard labour resulting from his political activities in resistance to the South African Apartheid regime. The regime eventually fell under the weight of its disrepute, and Nelson Mandela rose to heroic heights.

Nelson Mandela speaks to the press in Lusaka, Zambia, about a month after his release from prison Feb. 11, 1990. Op-ed contributor Kurt Shillinger writes of Mandela: 'Pressing his wardens for garden pots was one of his many smaller battles behind bars to compel the apartheid regime to acknowledge the dignity of its political prisoners. Yet he gladly graced his wardens’ tables with the vegetables he grew.'

Neal J. Menschel/The Christian Science Monitor/file

He was uniquely capable as a thinking intelligence to recognize that there are two sides to every story, and he wanted to hear the other story, he wanted to weigh it, consider it, and then continue to advance his agenda of anti-racist justness. And he prevailed. On the way bringing people to the cause, because it wasn't merely his cause, it represented a universal cause of the brotherhood of man.

He was a man of noble bearing, reflecting his noble birth. He thirsted for knowledge and he hungered for fair treatment. The deplorable institutionalization of racism through officially administered Apartheid rested on the theory that blacks were by nature inferior to whites. The Boers, an amalgam of people originally from France, Holland, Germany and Denmark, felt entitled to govern the hugely more numerous and native blacks of South Africa.

Their union of minority populations prevailed over the majority of indigenous people whose tribal antipathies ensured they were never unified adequately in opposition. As a young black lawyer educated in the British system Nelson Mandela helped to found the youth wing of the African National Congress. And when their civil disobedience tactics netted them a viciously violent response from government troops he helped to found a militant AFN group.

It was his activities in attempting to rouse people to a national civil war against oppression and racism which brought the country teetering to the brink of bloody divisional violence that had him convicted and sentenced to death. He was, instead, given a life sentence on Robbin Island, installed in a tiny cement cell, sent out daily to perform backbreaking manual labour, and there he stayed, for 27 years of his life.

Photo By Hans Deryk/The Canadian Press

He was utterly committed to freeing his people from the humiliating slavery of Apartheid; third-class people in their own country, brutally ruled by white colonialists. In the end, the white colonialists relented, peace was attained and a changeover to black majority rule resulted finally with Mr. Mandela at the helm, where black Africans, Indians and whites learned to live for a common purpose; the betterment of South Africa.

That might have been the joyous end, and it was for a while. Mr. Mandela was too old and infirm to run again for re-election and his vice-president, Thabo Mbeki was elected president of South Africa after Mr. Mandela stepped down and into retirement from politics. Promises made to poor black South Africans that their lot in life would be improved; housing provided, land for farming, poverty extinguished was easier to pronounce than to produce.

AIDs made horrible inroads in the country. South Africa, always a violent country, became even more lawlessly crime-ridden and violent. It is now known as the rape capital of the world. There, endemic poverty remains a blot on the government. Last year government soldiers shot to death dozens of striking miners, asking for better working conditions and better pay. Mr. Mbeki, as president, was a disaster for his ignorance about AIDs prevention.

His successor, Jacob Zuma, was elected because tribal Zulus insisted it was their turn to govern. Mr. Zuma has five wives, but that didn't stop him from raping a young woman who had HIV, and who trusted him as an 'uncle'. He had taken the precaution of showering immediately after the rape, to ensure he wouldn't be infected with HIV/AIDs. He was never held to account for the rape, but he was enthusiastically elected as head of the ANC and then President of South Africa.

He is now being investigated for having misappropriated millions in state funds to improve the housing dedicated to each of his five wives, and to his own tribal home, a palace away from the capital, where he insisted the millions he invested were for security purposes, which goes a long way to explaining why the place is now palatial by any standards.

When Mr. Mandela was still president, he had invited former Liberian ruler Charles Taylor, accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and of blood diamonds infamy to dinner where there were also present as guests Naomi Campbell and Mia Farrow. Graca Machel, Mr. Mandela's third wife, cautioned Ms. Campbell to have nothing to do with Mr. Taylor, as he was a nasty man; rather an understatement leading to the question: what was he doing there to begin with?

Another question might be why did Nelson Mandela not publicly, loudly, condemn Zimbabwe's tyrannical ruler Robert Mugabe for the dreadful damage he has done to the country, for beggaring it and inflicting poverty on his nation, forcing it to import food to feed the population when Zimbabwe was once an African breadbasket of plenty?

And then there is Mr. Mandela's loyalty to Palestinian strongman Yasser Arafat, and his commitment to Libya's tyrannical Moammar Ghaddafi whose links to terrorism was well enough known that Mr. Mandela himself sat on a commission relating to the Lockerby bombing. If there's an accounting ledger up in heaven and Saint Peter has any doubts, a smile from Nelson Mandela will put them to rest.