Remembering history in the making

Twenty years ago, on February 11th, 1990, Nelson Mandela was released from Victor Verster Prison in Paarl, South Africa, by order of the then State President, F. W. de Klerk.

His release kick-started negotiations that would lead to the advent of full democracy in that country in 1994, and bring an end to the racist policies of apartheid. He and President de Klerk would work closely together to achieve this, despite being political adversaries, and for their efforts would share the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993.

I was in Johannesburg at the time of Mandela’s release, and I recall vividly how very tense the whole city – indeed, the whole country – became as the day drew on. Most Black citizens were jubilant (and that’s an understatement!) at the prospect of the man whom they regarded as the natural leader of the ‘liberation struggle’ being set free. Many Whites, on the other hand, were fearful at what it portended, beginning to recognize that their days of privilege and legalized racial superiority were almost over.

When Mandela stepped out of the gates of the prison, his progress broadcast on national TV, I could hear from my apartment the roar of cheers from Black residents of the mixed-race suburbs of Berea and Hillbrow. (Technically, both suburbs were restricted to White residents only – apart from their Black servants, that is – but that prohibition had been widely ignored over the past decade, until both were de facto mixed-race areas, albeit illegally. That’s why I lived there, so that I could work in the townships with my colleagues of other races more easily, and they could come to visit me with minimal complications.) Later that night, mobs of excited, cheering Black people ran through the streets, ululating, celebrating wildly, whilst many White residents locked themselves inside their houses and apartments, fearing retribution if they stepped outside. (They needn’t have bothered . . . I’ve never been offered so many beers by so many Black people in my life as on that night! Everyone, including me, was too happy to want to fight about anything. It was quite a party.)

The next few years were hazardous in the extreme as the parties to the negotiations jockeyed for position, and many thousands of people died in internecine and inter-tribal violence . . . but the way forward had been irrevocably determined by Mandela’s release. Today, he lives in retirement in Johannesburg, dealing with health problems, but still regarded as the ‘Father of the Nation’ by most South Africans. It’ll be a sad loss to that nation and the world when he dies.

Many Americans misinterpret Mandela’s past by writing him off as just another ‘Communist terrorist’. Yes, he had Communist sympathies, but that was largely because Communist nations were the only ones who supported the African National Congress in its opposition to apartheid. Western nations were too busy making money out of the system. If you want to judge Mandela’s motivations, and what drove him to do what he did, I can only suggest reading his ‘Speech From The Dock‘, delivered at his trial in 1964. It’s a remarkable essay, one that I believe will, in time, be regarded as one of the great documents of world history, to rank alongside Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have A Dream‘ speech at the March on Washington in 1963 (only one year before Mandela’s ‘Speech From The Dock’). It’s worth the effort to read it for yourself.

Peter