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Nelson Mandela (19182013)

The world has lost one of its principal heroes of reconciliation, and heaven knows these are rare.

On a revenge-crazy planet, Nelson Mandela, who passed away today, showed the limits of retribution and the power of redress.

“If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy then he becomes your partner,” he famously said.

The former guerilla leader had discipline and grace, and history won’t forget what he taught us about never giving up – and then winning with class.

Toronto once seemed much closer to Cape Town than it does today, the Nelson Mandela Park Public School notwithstanding. It’s easy to forget how the 80s uprising of civil society in South Africa, and the government’s punishing State of Emergency there, ignited politics here.

Anti-apartheidism was the Arab Spring of its day – except that it lasted for decades, and had a stellar boycott effort in tow.

NOW followed its course for a riveted local audience, and at the centre was Mandela, sitting in jail, first on Robben Island, and later in Pollsmoor and Victor Verster Prison, the globe’s most legendary political prisoner.

Solidarity activists, of which there were many in the city, revered his resilience they didn’t know yet what he would accomplish as a statesman.

It seems amazing now, but the anti-apartheid movement was so influential in T.O. that the African National Congress had its own local office, on the Danforth actually, just down the street from the old NOW office.

That’s where everyone headed on that electrifying February night in 1990 when Mandela was released from prison. Celebrants shouted the ANC war cry, Amandla’ (power), and stopped traffic on the Dan.

It didn’t matter that Mandela had witnessed the massacres, the repression, and the daily heartbreak of enforced racial segregation: he walked out of those prison gates after 23 years and resisted nationalist calls for an all-black state. In doing so, he did nothing less than spare South Africa an extended genocidal war.

“A united, democratic, and nonracial South Africa,” he insisted, was “the only way to peace and racial harmony.”

He had traversed political territory that would have defeated lesser spirits.

When the ANC was declared illegal in 1960, Mandela went into hiding, and in 1961 co-founded the Umkhonto we Sizwe, the aim of which was sabotage of government facilities, military operations, police stations and economic infrastructure.

Later the org morphed into more traditional people’s war activities targeting officers of the apartheid state.

In reports to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the ANC revealingly lamented the number of unnecessary civilian casualties which had occurred, particularly those involving the use of anti-tank landmines.

Mandela didn’t have long at the helm of the insurgent army. In 1962, he was convicted of conspiracy to overthrow the government and sentenced to life imprisonment.

In the late 80s, the Botha government began a series of exploratory discussions with the incarcerated ANCer, the trajectory of which was detailed in a fascinating New Yorker piece of April 11, 1994.

And then, with the grassroots movement tearing up South Africa and international disdain peaking, newbie president F.W. de Klerk legalized the ANC and sprung Mandela.

What followed was three years of white-knuckled negotiations for one-person, one-vote rule (they called it one-man, one-vote), and finally the 1994 election where the ANC won 62 per cent of the vote and Nelson Mandela – at 77 – became South Africa’s first democratically elected president.

In NOW’s pages, we followed the proceedings with atonishment, via correspondents in Soweto, Johannesburg and Cape Town.

This wasn’t your typical social transformation it had a forgiveness motif, and part of that was Mandela-made. One of his very early moves after his release was the 1993 establishment of an inquiry to investigate long-rumoured cases of ANC members torturing dissidents and suspected spies in their own organization.

It was a startlingly brave deed, and there aren’t many former guerilla commanders-in-chief who have done similarly. Our reporter in Capetown noted at the time that human rights groups saw the move as a “new moment in revolutionary candour.”

Mandela expressed his “profound regret” and apologized for every transgression, saying the ANC accepted “collective responsibility” for the atrocities, though, it must be said, Bishop Desmond Tutu lamented that the organization had failed to take appropriate actions against the culprits.

The peacemaking imperative went deeper. Mandela initiated the pathbreaking Truth and Reconciliation Commission in June of 1995, mandated to probe past abuses on all sides, provided victim support and reparation, and granted amnesty to perpetrators.]

His gig as president was short-lived, though – and he soon became more of an inspirational figure than a political engineer.

By 1999, he was out of the electoral arena and shifted his focus to the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund and trying to leverage his huge experience on behalf of the international fight for human rights.

On his 89th birthday, at the instigation of musician Peter Gabriel and entrepreneur Richard Branson, he created The Elders, a mentoring force of luminaries committed “to promoting the shared interests of humanity and the universal human rights we all share,” composed of Jimmy Carter, Tutu, Mary Robinson, and more. The group promised from the start to “act boldly, speaking difficult truths and tackling taboos.”

Mandela was a revolutionary, but he didn’t make the revolution, and no one knows it more than the two-thirds of the country’s young people who live in poor households.

There are many activists who believe the leader’s reemergence from prison as a globally respected guru of rationality blunted the ideological drive for major economic transformation.

Many former ANCers have similar complaints, as does Ronnie Kasrils writing in the June 24 Guardian, who says the ANC lost its soul in the mid 90s to corporate power.

“We were entrapped by the neoliberal economy… What I call our Faustian moment came when we took an IMF loan on the eve of our first democratic election.”

No, the social overhaul in South Africa has not yet occured, but Mandela did move aside a boulder that appeared steadfastly and forever in the way. The moral imperative of his life will, no doubt, make the ongoing moves for equality, there and elsewhere, just a little easier – and certainly more dignified.

ellie@nowtoronto.com

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