(Photo credit: Debris2008)
By Simon Hooper
Nelson Mandela will be celebrated primarily for the dignity with which he emerged onto the world stage after decades in prison and for the forgiveness that he displayed toward his former enemies in forging a democratic, multiracial South Africa from the poisoned legacy of apartheid.
As a global statesman of grace and humility, he was long courted by Western leaders drawn by his irresistible story of triumph over tyranny. Yet Mandela, who died on Dec. 5 at 95, was also a more radical and politically complex figure than has been commonly acknowledged by his admirers in the West.
As a young man, he had close ties to the South African Communist Party and plotted an armed uprising inspired by Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution in Cuba.
For many who followed his life closely, that commitment to socialist values and instinctive solidarity with those he saw as fellow strugglers against oppression, colonialism and imperialism continued to burn strongly even in the years after his release from prison and the end of apartheid.
“He came out of prison a senior statesman-in-waiting. He went into prison as a militant revolutionary leader,” said Peter Hain, a veteran anti-apartheid campaigner and friend of Mandela’s.
“He was seen as a burly freedom fighter, learning how to shoot in Ethiopia and traveling to revolutionary Algeria and other countries while he was underground. We must never forget he was a freedom fighter.”
Young radical
Stephen Ellis, a professor of African history at Free University and the African Studies Center in the Netherlands, believes that many people with only a vague awareness of Mandela’s struggle against apartheid are simply not aware of his youthful radicalism and commitment to violent means.
Mandela always denied being a card-carrying convert to communism. But Ellis, in his most recent book, “External Mission: The ANC in Exile,” claims to have uncovered documentary proof suggesting otherwise, though also suggesting that Mandela was more interested in securing support from Moscow or Beijing than in being a “heart and soul believer.”
“If you talk to many American liberals, they think Mandela was Martin Luther King,” Ellis said. “If you say, ‘No, Mandela started a guerrilla army, he was a communist, he did this, he did that,’ they just don’t get it. They don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Yet even later, as South African president from 1994 to 1999, Mandela would irk his friends in the West by expressing solidarity with leaders such as Cuba’s Castro and Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, as well as finding common cause with the Palestinians in their struggle for statehood.
At a banquet in 1998 honoring Yasser Arafat, the then-Palestinian president, Mandela said: “You come as a leader of a people who have shared with us the experience of struggle for justice. Now that we have achieved our freedom, we have not forgotten our friends and allies who helped us liberate ourselves.”
Read More Mandela’s radicalism often ignored by Western admirers | Al Jazeera America.
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How Nelson Mandela Changed My World
Angélique Kidjo (Photo credit: heartonastick)
By Angelique Kidjo
As I grew up on my continent, our own history was never told. Being a young girl raised in Benin, West Africa, I was even taught my ancestors were the Gauls!
At age nine, I discovered by accident the existence of slavery. I was looking at the cover of a Jimi Hendrix album and I asked my brother how you could be African and American at the same time. At fifteen, I had never heard about apartheid, unaware of much of the evils of this world when one day, as I was watching the Nigerian news on an old TV screen, I heard the voice of Winnie Mandela haranguing a crowd. My whole world collapsed as I learnt about the reality of the South African regime and the fate of Winnie’s jailed husband, Madiba.
This injustice was so blatant that my first reaction was hatred. My blood was boiling. I took a pen and wrote my first political song, “Azan Nan Kpe.” It was preaching vengeance and violence, wishing death upon all Afrikaners. Then I went out in our little courtyard and sung it in front of my family. Everyone was silent, tense. Then my dad, a tall and gentle man, took me apart and told me it was not right; music could not preach violence, not in our house. Music had a higher purpose: to inspire beauty, to empower people to be better. I had to take back my copy and rewrite the song. I went inside my bedroom, followed his advice and sung a world where there would be no more injustice, no more oppressed and no more oppressors.
Read More How Nelson Mandela Changed My World | Angelique Kidjo.