By Diana Cariboni, 6 December 2013
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| Mandela meets with castro |
Perhaps it's a false contradiction. But today there are many who
stress the pacifist message with which South Africa's Nelson Mandela
(1918-2013) emerged from prison in 1990, while few put an emphasis on
his rebellion against apartheid, including armed rebellion, which landed
him in prison.
Mandela was a political activist and a revolutionary at least since
1942. Two years later he joined the African National Congress, becoming a
founding member of the Youth league, and leading the movement, which
had been inconsequential for decades, to more radical positions.
Mandela was a rebel when he headed the civil disobedience campaign
against the unjust laws of the white segregationist regime in 1952, and
when, although he was a poor student, he qualified as a lawyer and set
up the country's first black law firm.
Because he was a rebel he was banned more than once, arrested and
prosecuted in the Treason Trial, before he was finally acquitted in
1961. He was a rebel when he went underground.
But above all he stayed true to his rebelliousness after the
Sharpeville massacre of 69 unarmed demonstrators during a Mar. 21, 1960
protest against the apartheid laws, the subsequent state of emergency,
the arrest of 18,000 people and the banning of the ANC and other
organisations.
He understood then that demonstrations, strikes and civil
disobedience were not enough to shake the foundations of apartheid,
whose structure had become more sophisticated, to the absurd extent of
creating the Bantustans or territories set aside for blacks.
It was an act of rebellion to lead the armed struggle in 1961 and
help create the military wing of the ANC, Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of
the Nation). And to secretly leave the country and seek support and
guerrilla training.
South Africa was a useful bridgehead for the Western powers - the
same ones that today honour Mandela as a hero - in a region convulsed by
anti-colonial liberation struggles and the Cold War.
In the 1970s the United States, France and Britain, trading partners
of the regime, vetoed a motion to expel South Africa from the United
Nations. And although the United Nations Security Council established a
voluntary arms embargo against South Africa in 1963, it only became
mandatory in 1977.
By the 1980s, apartheid had made South Africa an international
pariah. But it wasn't until 1985 that the authorities in the United
States, Britain and the European Community adopted economic sanctions
against the regime - in large part to appease the growing public outrage
in their countries.
Mandela spent years in prison, starting in 1962. In 1964 he was tried
for sabotage and sentenced to life. His rebelliousness sustained him
for 27 years in prison, during which time he turned down three offers of
parole.
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| Nelson Mandela |
The universal right to rebel against oppression has often been the
object of suppression and above all of distortion and misrepresentation.
In the case of South Africa, it took the United States a long time to
think it through. Not until 2008 did it remove the ANC from the State
Department list's of terrorist organisations - nine years after the end
of Mandela's term as president.
When he emerged from his years behind bars in
1990, and especially when he was sworn in as president in 1994, Mandela
knew that dismantling apartheid would serve no purpose if the country
fell apart in the process as a result of divisions and a thirst for
vengeance.
And he then became the most active and dedicated of pacifists, taking
his rebelliousness into a new terrain - the exercise of democracy and
of dialogue as a solution to conflicts.
As an IPS article states, many South Africans today are still bogged
down in poverty and inequality. And the ANC is widely accused of falling
prey to nepotism and a lack of transparency.
It is no simple task to shake off a legacy that dates back to British
colonial times. Segregation and its economic causes leave deep marks.
It's not enough just to have a black president, as illustrated by the
United States, whose prisons still hold a disproportionate number of
blacks.
But now South Africans can channel their rebelliousness against those
scourges in a democratic state under the rule or law - for which
Mandela, the rebel, must be thanked.
Diana Cariboni is IPS co-editor in chief.
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