'The sun never sets on glorious achievements'
Douglas Tsiako | Friday December 13, 2013 17:18
Few men and women have lived to fulfill the ideals and goals that they set out for themselves. Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela is preeminent among such extraordinary people. To paraphrase a statement he made in court during the Rivonia Trial, freedom and racial equality was an ideal that he would live for, 'but if need be, an ideal for which I am prepared to die'.
He knew full well what he faced: the death sentence and life imprisonment were in prospect. In the event, he got the latter in the prime of his life. He had described his trial as that of a black man in a white man's court from which he expected no justice.
Yet, as president of a new South Africa several generations later, he haboured little bitterness for the monstrous injustice but instead said spending 27 of the best years of his life in prison had offered him an opportunity to examine mistakes that he may thus far have made in his quest for liberation. Indeed, he used his long imprisonment as an opportunity to study and learn Afrikaans, not quite because he loved the language but because he surmised that speaking to the oppressor in the oppressor's language might just bring out the best in the oppressor.
Similar evidence of Madiba's enigmatic nature can also be found in how, having recognised the 'iniquity' that the English had wrought upon his land, he was an Anglophile who had an almost immaculate command of the English Language in speech and used an impeccable grasp of it to deliver powerful ideas in potent prose that eventually dismantled resistance to common sense that had imprisoned white South Africa. It was to William Shakespeare that he turned to inspire others and - perhaps unwittingly - reflect upon his own disposition when he quoted from the Bard's Julius Caesar: 'Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once.'
Indeed, a giant of great valour has fallen; one of princely birth who - at a crucial time after he crossed the Rubicon to armed struggle following the banning of the ANC in 1960 - came to rely on the judgement of an ordinary man of little formal education and a patchy command of the English Language in Lobatse, a small frontier town in south eastern Botswana, Ntwaesele 'Fish' Keitseng, whom he embraced as a comrade-in-arms.
The significance of this lies also in the strange affinity among all classes of colonised peoples across the world for the language of the oppressor, which they actually venerate as a status symbol even after liberation in a holdover to a disagreeable and often pernicious past that is difficult to comprehend even in terms of brainwashing.
Self-effacing to a fault, Mandela viewed his struggle against the heresy of apartheid - a system he wrote of as 'diabolical in its detail and inescapable in its reach' - as never the achievement of a single individual, but the result of the collective effort of many other people. In that regard, Tata acknowledged the role of such others, particularly Oliver Tambo and Thabo Mbeki, for exposing the polecat of the world that white South Africa was. Indeed, the enigma even had the generosity of heart to recognise the role of FW de Klerk in mobilising white South Africans to join the process of transformation and to use their resources to build social amenities that remain sorely scarce in the country of two worlds.
Similarly, he embraced Mangosuthu 'Gatsha' Buthelezi, the leader of a movement that, fearing reprisals for long years of complicity with apartheid, unleashed an especially savage assault on South Africa during the delicate time of the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA). This is the process that had got off to a faulty start in 1991 when the ANC refused to disband its military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe, and its ally the South African Communist Party, the PAC and AZAPO baulked at the very idea of negotiations. Mercifully, a referendum in early 1992 revealed that more than two thirds of white South Africans were in favour of negotiations for a democratic future, thanks in great part to the force of Mandela's character and charisma.
Even so, CODESA soon collapsed over issues of majority rule and power sharing, prompting the ANC and its partners, the SACP and COSATU, to launch mass action campaigns. It was during these exceedingly troublous times on 17 June 1992 that Chris Hani led a demonstration in Boipatong that resulted one of the bloodiest and most brutal massacres when Inkatha Freedom Party impis descended on the marchers, killing 40 people. Similar bloodletting by Inkatha took place in Bisho on September 7 of the same year as Buthelezi aimed to draw his traditional allies in apartheid South Africa's verkrampte generals and other extreme rightwing forces into a campaign to scupper - once and for all - any chances of a negotiated settlement that could end with the ANC on the saddle.
To be true, the world owes it to both Mandela and de Klerk that the nefarious plot failed after two men - trade union leader Cyril Ramaphosa and verligte cabinet minister Roelf Meyer - conducted a series of behind-the-scenes meetings that resulted in the Multi-Party Negotiating Forum that began its work in April 1993 to pave way for a resumption of negotiations, CODESA 2, that soon followed. But such was the magnetism of Tata that Buthelezi accepted his offer of a cabinet post in South Africa's first democratic government in 1994.
Friends without borders
Although this is largely not chronicled, Botswana represents an important threshold and gateway in the course of Madiba's tortuous path to freedom. The Black Pimpernel took the first tentative steps to explore the feasibility of armed struggle in Botswana, then the Bechuanaland Protectorate, establishing a series of safe houses, first in the small frontier town Lobatse, and routes that would be followed by thousands of others after he himself had undergone military training in Algeria under Ben Bella in 1962.
Incidentally, it makes for a remarkable coincidence indeed that the North African liberation icon and former president of Algeria should have died in the same week as Mandela. Ben Bella passed away a day before Madiba on Wednesday last week. Those early safe houses and liberation routes - first in Lobatse - were established by Mandela alongside Fish Keitseng, who had been expelled from South Africa in 1959 for his work as an effective trade unionist and consummate organizer in the ANC underground.
It is significant that it was to Botswana that Madiba came to explore the possibility of establishing common ground with the PAC after the world's most famous prisoner was released. Gaborone also served as the venue, late in 1989, for talks between the ANC youth league and Jeugkrag, the youth league of the National Party that was led by Marthinus 'Kortbroek' van Schalkwyk, a young man who would transmogrify to join the ANC and become a minister in Thabo Mbeki's cabinet after he condemned apartheid for having 'brought suffering through a system grounded in injustice'.
The solid mass of humanity that went to meet Mandela at the National Stadium in Gaborone when he came to Botswana on a state visit in May 1996 signaled a mutual salutation between two nations whose connections go deep and far, with the late Fish Keitseng, Motsamai Mpho, Philip Matante, as well as Michael Dingake, among many other Batswana, standing as beacons on a course most illumined by a man who - in death as in life - straddles the world like a colossus. The mint new South Africa's Minister of Foreign Affairs, the late Alfred Nzo, took the opportunity of the visit to launch ASABO.
The visit was in recognition of Botswana's role in the liberation movement under extremely perilous circumstances. At one stage hemmed in on all sides by white minority regimes - including South Africa, Rhodesia and apartheid SA-occupied Namibia (even Mozambique at the eastern Limpopo node where Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Botswana and South Africa can stretch their arms to shake hands simultaneously) - Botswana's position was precarious in the extreme, prompting the country's first president, Seretse Khama, to craft a fragile but honourable policy that would not allow the setting up of military bases but welcomed refugees as a moral obligation it could not ignore with good conscience.
At one level, the inherently invidious policy must have been an instinct springing from Seretse's personal experiences at the coalface of apartheid after he took the hand of a white English maiden in marriage in June 1947. Among a raft of other irrational responses, apartheid South Africa enacted the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act in 1949 and amended the Immorality Act of 1927 to prevent interracial sex and marriages between Europeans and non-Europeans in 1950. Related laws banned interracial marriages even outside South Africa and regarded such 'foreign' unions as invalid and illegal. But most heartless was how Seretse and his family were forced into exile in 1951.
Having lived briefly at Kgosi Mokgosi's homestead in Ramotswa after his marriage to Ruth Williams was not accepted by tribal elders in Serowe - especially his uncle Tshekedi - a series of Kgotla meetings reaffirmed Seretse as Kgosi of BaNgwato in 1949. However, apartheid South Africa exerted pressure on Britain to have Seretse and his family removed from both the throne and the British protectorate because it could not afford to have a 'Kaffir King' with a white woman for a wife just across its border to the north.
Heavily in debt from World War II, the British Labour government took the expedient route and relented almost immediately, launching a parliamentary enquiry into Seretse's fitness for the throne. When the report declared Seretse supremely fit 'but for his unfortunate marriage', he and his wife were exiled primarily because Britain could not afford to lose cheap gold and uranium supplies from apartheid South Africa.
The gold standard was the measure of a country's wealth then, and uranium crucial in the further development of the Atomic bomb, especially in the United States where the Manhattan Project, a top-secret nuclear bomb programme, was underway.
So was the Cold War that - for the first time in history - would pit East against West ideologically for the next four decades. But other than Shinkolobwe - a small mine in the Katanga province of Congo Kinshasa (the DRC) - the new bipolar world at the time had only two known sources of uranium, the hateful Soviet Union and apartheid South Africa, and the West would and could not very well deal with the former.
Therefore, Seretse must abandon his throne so that member-countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) may gain and maintain superiority over the Warsaw Pact. And he did, renouncing his right - a birthright - to the throne as a part of the terms that kept under seal for 30 years. But this is a small digression intended to establish the depth of how far connections between Botswana and South Africa go and illustrate how a common source was responsible for the unhappy parallels in the lives of Mandela and Seretse.
Dining with the enemy
As a global model of racial equality, Madiba noted that having spent immense energy fighting white domination, he could not very well tolerate black domination. Such has been the enigma's special effect on people that his death is eliciting an outpouring of adoration, celebration, adulation and expressions of bereavement from the widest spectrum of society - including former US president George W Bush whose father had looked favourably upon Ronald Reagan's policy of Constructive Engagement that linked the independence of Namibia to an easing of the arms embargo on the apartheid regime and withdrawal of Cuban troops from Angola, delaying - under one ruthless arch - the dawning of freedom on the three countries. George W Bush's administration considered the ANC a terrorist organisation while Mandela's name remained on America's terrorism watch list until 2008.
Nevertheless, esteem for Mandela is such that sincere adulation is coming even from the white enclave of Orania where Karel Boshof, the grandson of the architect of apartheid, Henrik Verwoerd, has characterised his passing as the falling of a mighty tree. Indeed, Madiba once arrived unannounced at the Orania house of Verwoerd's wife, Bettie, and sat down for tea and koeksisters with her. Most astoundingly, Mandela invited to dinner a man who 30 years previously had made it the sole purpose of his existence to bring an end to Madiba's. Today, Percy Yutar, who obtained life imprisonment for Mandela and his colleagues from a judge that Advocate George Bizos (for the defence) has said was so nervous that he was hardly audible when he pronounced the sentence, embodies freedom from the burden of false convictions so much so that he refers to his erstwhile archenemy as a 'saintly man.'
A fountain of humour to boot, Mandela once joked to one of South Africa's eminent radio personalities, Tim Modise, that you eat breakfast alone, invite friends to lunch and dine with your enemies!
Yutar's eulogy rhymes more with the wondrous tapestry of words woven by African American poet, Maya Angelou, as a tribute to Mandela. Titled 'His Day Is Done,' Angelou speaks of Mandela's passing as Madiba being carried by 'the wings of a wind reluctant to carry its burden'.
For several years, Mandela had had only one blanket, no bed, and a sanitation bucket in his prison cell on Robben Island where even sugar was an expression of apartheid, with black inmates getting the least amount in their porridge, a matter that nearly drove the prisoners to protest. His fellow Rivonia trialist and Robben Island inmate, Ahmed Kathrada - a man of Indian rootstock whose share of sugar was accordingly a measure bigger than Mandela's - remembers that Tata counselled against the 'Sugar Rebellion', saying theirs was a struggle for equality on a higher level.
Father to all
Madiba's love for children was not a mere figure of speech to pout for parochial political mileage. Early in his presidency, he announced that he would contribute R100,000 towards improving the state of his county's children. His charm in athletics and sports has been legendary, in one stroke taking South Africa out of isolation and writing one of the world's greatest sports stories when he donned Francois Pinaar's Number 6 rugby jersey, inspiring the Springboks to win the World Cup in 1995.
A few years before, in 1992, Madiba had inspired the International Cricket Council to meet for 45 minutes in order to re-admit the erstwhile pariah state to the world stage upon which the entire comity of nations cavorted in joyous competition after he answered a journalist's question in Cape Town with these simple words: 'Of course, I would play.'
The choice of South Africa's 'white sports' was deliberate and significant. When Bafana Bafana played 'like gladiators' to win the Africa Cup of Nations in 1996, inspiration had come in no small measure from a massive banner that was unfurled at the stadium that read: 'Amabokoboko Support Bafana Bafana'. White South Africa was singing Nkosi sikelel' iAfrika, Black South Africa was singing Die Stem. The unison was breathtaking. Madiba Magic was in evidence before a rainbow audience.
The death of Mandela invokes the words intoned by Bishop Makhulu at the memorial service for Botswana's first President, Seretse Khama, at the National Stadium in Gaborone in 1980: 'The souls of the just are in the hands of God.' Indeed, the souls of the just must repose in the Almighty's hands because although Madiba has opposed any attempts at canonizing him - formal or in the common parlance of 'the poor who live on the floor of our planet (Maya Angelou)', he had an immanence that transcended the boundaries of human frailty, and seemed to be in such harmony with cosmic circles that the final segment of his Long Walk to Freedom can only be the Concourse on High. There is something of an eternal ring to Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela's words when he was inaugurated as President of South Africa on May 10, 1994: 'The sun never sets on such glorious a human achievement.'
A man of conscience, this partly Methodist-educated icon was never to be counted among doctrinaire revolutionaries who misinterpret Karl Marx's famous words in his tome, The Communist Manifesto, that religion is the opium of the people, and pretend to dispense with God.
Robala Ka Kagiso, Tata. A ba lapa la gago ba gomotsege.