Mandela!

Nelson Mandela has been a part of my life throughout most of my adult years. We don’t remember when we first heard about him but when we did hear about him he made a profound impact on our life. Practically anyone who believes in civil rights and humanity could probably make that same statement. With his coming passage comes a great realization that this black African man ranks among the greatest leaders of and for humanity that has probably ever lived upon this earth.

The world that Nelson Mandela grew up in was a world not all that dissimilar to what we grew up in as a child living in the southernmost part of a northern state where segregation was the rule and not the exception. The only difference was the fact that Nelson Mandela was a member of the majority race in his nation that had been marginalized by the ruling white minority who ruled with an iron grip even though they had been colonized by those who did not any longer believe in this form of discrimination.

There is an almost indescribable contempt that comes from racial segregation and Nelson Mandela faced it for much of his life. To read Nelson Mandela’s quotes is to read the words of a very intelligent, insightful, and evolving human being, but to the whites in South Africa, he was simply a black man deserving of nothing but disrespect. It takes an individual with an enormous capacity for forgiveness and growth to over come that. And, there are lessons in this for an America that seems to be drifting ever closer to a discriminatory environment than it has in several generations.

Africa, at the time of Nelson Mandela’s birth in the first part of the twentieth century, was mainly in the grip of the colonial powers--France England, Belgium. He was to see that domination end across his lifetime and, all too often, be replaced by forces and factions that were, in their own way, just as bad as those who had ruled before their departure. Today, Africa is a checkerboard of various types and forms of governance ranging from thugs to ruthless dictators to the more enlightened. Some of the greatest human rights violations on this earth are being carried out in parts of Africa today. When one looks at South Africa in the post apartheid world, it almost seems to exist unto itself and Nelson Mandela is a large part of the reason for that fact. Mandela was not the first personage of some importance to fight the great fight for equality in South Africa. None other than Mahatma Gandhi began his public life as a crusading young attorney in South Africa. It is interesting to note that Mandela never seemed to be much influenced by Gandhi, choosing to follow the lead of other Indian leaders such as the Indian leader Jawaharlal Nehru who had, to a degree, been influenced by the great man himself.

Nelson Mandela grew up from birth as a part of one of black Africa’s traditional ruling royal societies. He was descended from a chief in the black African world and his lineage was of long duration in that way. Although he was never in the direct line of succession, Mandela was still of that line and it meant something and gave him a form of advantage in the world that he would so later affect. Mandela’s change from citizenship to an agent of radical change came, as with most, gradually as he saw the terrible effects that apartheid was having on his countrymen. He went from a position of demanding relatively small concessions to eventually demanding the greatest concessions of all.

Mandela strived for most of the first part of his life for a good education and this education would help him both with the respect that it gave him among his fellow blacks and also among those that he would constantly correspond with throughout his life for the betterment of both his own countrymen and those like them throughout the world. Nelson Mandela was a world figure from an early time as both he and others saw him as a fighter for what was right for those that had been and were oppressed. His rise to world celebrity came gradually but steadily as he opposed the white Afrikaner government and its constant crackdowns on the majority black population. He was frequently in jail before his twenty eight year imprisonment began that would feature long periods of hard labor cracking rocks on places such as the notorious Robbin Island where he had various periods with repressive prison wardens spaced out with those that seemed to care more for him.

During Mandela’s time, much of the world was following the lead of Gandhi and his complete adherence to non violence and indeed, Mandela espoused this philosophy for much of his life. But, not for all of it. One of the reasons that he ended up on Robbin Island was his flirtation with the violence espoused by some of the more radical revolutionaries of his time such as some of the Marxist leaders who were holding sway at the time of his rise to positions of prominence in both South Africa and the world. Indeed, Nelson Mandela did not ignore Marxist thinking and was somewhat influenced by it during a part of his life and his career. It was probably this fact that prompted both Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher to oppose his release from prison during the height of their cold war reigns. They saw him not as a champion for civil rights and equality but as a communist sympathizer to be held in check at all costs as they placed South Africa’s role as an opponent of Communism above all else.

In his personal life, Nelson Mandela was married and had children but he also had feet of clay. Both of his marriages ended up in divorce. The first one partially because of his rumored affairs and possibly fathering of a child by another woman. The second divorce occurred because of Winnie Mandela’s radicalism on many fronts and his inability to keep her on some sort of straight and narrow road. It is suspect that Mandela felt the same way about woman’s rights as he did about the rights of blacks to rule their own country.

Nelson Mandela only ruled South Africa for a brief time during his long and tumultuous life. But his presidency of the nation marked a watershed in both South Africa’s internal affairs and in the moral affairs of the world at large. Before, during, and since Mandela ruled South Africa, he had been a beacon for the entire world as it has constantly struggled with the rights of others in so many different forms and on so many different fronts. Former world leaders such as Jimmy Carter have flocked to his banner as he has brought so many of the world’s past leaders together in a coalition of those who are not any longer encumbered by the restrains of power and politics to say their piece on what should be going on in this world at large. Many people are currently comparing Mandela to Barack Obama but the fact that Obama still has a political part to play until his presidency ends will cloud what an Obama role might be similar to Mandela’s in the future world at large. If there has been a model for the world in promoting the rights of all people, Nelson Mandela has certainly filled it well and he will be missed by all who believe in the equal and just rights of mankind. Mandela will soon take his place along with Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Pope John Paul II and a handful of others who have had such a profound and beneficial affect on this world at large.

Personages such as Nelson Mandela do not come along often and we have been fortunate as human beings to have lived during his time on the world stage.

IOVHO,

Regards,

Joe

To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.