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June 4, 2000 He Fought for Unity and Liberation. Today, His Country Is Healing the Wounds of Racism and Apartheid. When Nelson Mandela walked out of prison on Feb. 11, 1990, South Africa's future walked with him. If Mandela had raised a clenched fist and said, "We must purge this land with blood," an uprising would have surely ensued, and South Africa would have disappeared into the sea of anarchy that has engulfed so many other African nations. A lesser man would have felt justified in calling for a violent upheaval to bring down the white supremacist government. Anger is a powerful emotion and Mandela had reason to call for revenge. He had spent 27 years in prison, 18 of them on Robben Island, an inhospitable chunk of rock sitting in the cold Atlantic, off the coast of Cape Town. Day after monotonous day, Mandela performed menial jobs such as pounding rocks into gravel or working in the island's limestone quarry. Day after day, he endured the indignities heaped on him by the white guards who ran the prison. And day after day, he longed for friends, family and freedom as the best years of his life wasted away while he sat in a dank cell. In his autobiography, "Long Walk to Freedom," Mandela reflected on his years in prison: "It was during those long and lonely years that my hunger for the freedom of my own people became a freedom of all people, white and black. I knew as well as I knew anything that the oppressor must be liberated just as surely as the oppressed. A man who takes away another man's freedom is a prisoner of hatred, he is locked behind the bars of prejudice and narrow-mindedness. I am not truly free if I am taking away someone else's freedom, just as surely as I am not free when my freedom is taken from me. The oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of their own humanity. "When I walked out of prison, that was my mission, to liberate the oppressed and the oppressor both...." Mandela's words underscore the complexities of the man. For example, he is not a communist, but he embraces the communists who fought alongside him in South Africa's liberation struggle. He hated the apartheid government, but he does not hate white South Africans. He is a man of peace, but he headed a guerrilla group that waged a campaign of violence. Despite Mandela's complexities, one thing remains constant. Since his earliest days in the African National Congress, he has described his vision for South Africa, a vision that includes South Africans of all races living in harmony. Last month, I visited South Africa, Mozambique and Botswana with 10 other members of the National Conference of Editorial Writers. The highlight of our visit to South Africa was a meeting with Mandela. Soon after we arrived in Johannesburg, it became obvious that the United States does not have a Nelson Mandela. There is simply no figure in our society who enjoys the same degree of respect and adoration that South Africans, of all races, have bestowed upon him. Our visit came while squatters were taking over farms in neighboring Zimbabwe and the medical community and AIDS activists had turned their attention to South African President Thabo Mbeki, who stirred up a controversy by questioning the safety of the drug AZT and whether HIV causes AIDS. Meanwhile, in Pretoria, a trial was under way that served as a grim reminder of the horrors of apartheid. The defendant, Wouter Basson, is the alleged mastermind of South Africa's secret program to develop chemical and biological weapons. Under Basson's guidance, the program is alleged to have developed vaccines to make black women infertile, plans to contaminate water supplies with cholera and yellow fever, and a plot to poison Mandela while he was in prison. We met with Mandela in his home in an affluent area of Johannesburg. Tall and proud, at age 82 he still has a commanding presence. His face was drawn, and he looked tired, but his voice conveyed the strength of a man whom not even Robben Island could break. I shook his hand and gave him an Orioles cap. He politely thanked me, and placed the cap on the table in front of him. During the 1950s Mandela played a key role in the ANC's non-violent campaign to undermine apartheid, South Africa's system of racial segregation, through strikes, civil disobedience, and demonstrations. The government labeled him a communist--a name given to anyone who called for social and economic change--and issued a banning order which restricted his movements and prohibited him from attending public gatherings. Mandela continued to work with the ANC, but he abandoned nonviolence in March 1960 after 69 unarmed protesters were shot to death in Sharpeville, a town near Johannesburg. The demonstration was held to protest the "pass" law that required black South Africans to carry identification documents. In 1964, Mandela and other ANC leaders were convicted of sabotage and treason and sentenced to life in prison. Three years earlier, Mandela had become the head of Umkonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), an organization that launched a campaign of bombings and armed struggle against the South African government. During Mandela's 27 years in prison, he became the symbolic body and blood of the anti-apartheid campaign. The South African government, which was reeling from world condemnation, economic sanctions and a fear that if Mandela died in jail, a black revolution would follow, finally released him in 1990. Mandela negotiated with the white government to end apartheid. Four years later he was elected president and served for five years. Two days before meeting with Mandela, our group had traveled to Soweto where we were surprised by the lack of bitterness expressed by the people we met in the black townships. Although some had lost friends and relatives in the fight against apartheid, nobody spoke of revenge. Why? Mandela offered an answer. "Well, normally, people take that cue from the leadership. Some leaders of the African National Congress spent 30 years in exile, others went underground risking their own lives and those who were in prison have not time for revenge," he explained. "They know that you pass through this time only once and they want to use the opportunity that they now have to solve problems of the country. It is because of that we were able to avoid bloodshed in this country. "We confounded the prophets of doom, who had predicted that there would never be changes without this country being engulfed in rivers of blood. We confounded them because we had the ability to reconcile our emotions, which said, 'Don't talk to the apartheid government,' and our brains which said, 'If you don't talk to them, this country will go up in flames,' so let's go to them and sit down and say: 'We are South Africans, why are we slaughtering each other?' That is why there is no sense of revenge." Asked if South Africa was recovering from the racial wounds inflicted by apartheid, Mandela said: "You must remember that South Africa has been under white rule for almost three and a half centuries. Our policy [of the ANC] has been since 1955, when we issued our basic policy document [the Freedom Charter]...a formidable attack on all forms of racial discrimination. We called for a united South Africa in which all citizens regardless of their backgrounds, speak with one voice. When we issued that document, we were arrested and charged with treason...when we were elected in 1994, the new government adopted those principles. "Now you cannot expect policies which have been there for more than three centuries to be totally eliminated from the fabric of South African society within six years. Since then, we have made solid progress and we're happy at the way in which we are eliminating all forms of racism, the way in which we have united our country and the way in which we are promoting reconciliation." |