Nelson Mandela: a symbol turned politician

The heroic image of the prisoner Mandela was created without his participation, but already at large he justified the hopes placed on him

Nelson Mandela passed away on December 5, 2013, at the age of 96 after a long-term lung disease.

Born in 1918, Mandela went through a very difficult path during the First World War. His childhood was quite pre-civilizational – the son of one of the leader’s several wives lived in about the same way as the people of his tribe lived before the arrival of the white people as you can read in essays on the website

https://samploon.com/free-essays/nelson-mandela/ to discover more. But as a representative of the tribal aristocracy, he was lucky to get into school (his parents were illiterate), where he mastered English, and then studied. He became almost the first black lawyer in South Africa, but Mandela’s advocacy was disappointing. He did not see that she was capable of changing something in the unequal position of her compatriots in their native land. Back in his student years, Mandela was carried away not by the study of law, but by political activity, joining the African National Congress.

Then he was not yet radical, he opposed Marxism, primarily for religious reasons: his mother brought him up in a Christian spirit, and it was difficult for young Mandela to accept the godless doctrine. But rapprochement with the communists was helped by the then authorities of South Africa, which proclaimed apartheid a state policy in 1948.

The division of races was a 19th-century Victorian utopia and, at the same time, a response to the threat of decolonization.

Boers and English-speaking whites saw no way to maintain their familiar existence, except to separate themselves from the blacks with an impenetrable barrier and take power into their own hands. But the peculiarity of South Africa, in contrast to Australia or New Zealand, was that Africans were sharply outnumbered. They were not a minority like the Australian Aborigines or the Maori. It was impossible to drive them into the Bantustan reservations.

The policy of apartheid caused enormous pressure on South Africa, including the suspension of its de facto membership in the UN. True, the world community preferred to punish South Africa for racism and at the same time applaud the speeches of Idi Amin and Muammar Gaddafi in the same UN. At the same time, Africans from the “liberated” countries by hook or by crook rushed to work in South Africa. In the former colonies that became free, there was a sharp drop in the standard of living of the population, general savagery, hunger and epidemics returned, instead of democracy, cannibal dictatorships were established with the obligatory cult of the personality of the leaders-liberators, civil wars flared up, and a total of millions and millions of people died.

South Africa was the only country where the standard of living of the black population was rising.

It did not occur to anyone here to prohibit African beliefs, national clothes, in general, to break the usual way of life. The kind of social engineering that was practiced in Ethiopia or Equatorial Guinea was not observed there. But in the specific conditions of the past century, the experiment with apartheid was a priori doomed to failure and could not bring anything but harm, for all its external harmlessness, they say, Europeans live in a European way, Africans in an African way, and no one to anyone.

Nelson Mandela was “lucky” to get to jail relatively early. While isolated, he was not involved in terrorist activities and close cooperation of the ANC with the communists in the 1960s and 1980s. (Although he managed to found the ANC militant group – “Spear of the Nation”, for which he was arrested in 1962.) Another kind of “luck” – because of life imprisonment, Mandela became a symbol of the struggle of blacks for their rights. Mandela’s beliefs and views played a secondary role in the process of his lifetime canonization. The “promotion” of his image began somewhere in the mid-1970s, and the main thing in it was his personality of an unyielding fighter languishing on the terrible Robben Island.

For the third time, Mandela was lucky, and with him the whole of South Africa, when the collapse of the apartheid system coincided with the collapse of the “world socialist system.” Leftist ideas at the time the black majority came to power were discredited, the Soviet Union did not exist, Cuba was in a severe economic crisis, and China was successfully carrying out capitalist reforms and was not interested in a socialist experiment in South Africa.

Therefore, South Africa under the rule of the ANC did not follow the path of neighboring Zimbabwe, although all the prerequisites for that existed.

Centenarians Mugabe and Mandela are actually twin brothers, just the first came to power in 1980 when socialism was taking off and advancing all over the world – from Nicaragua to Afghanistan. And the greatest historical merit of Nelson Mandela lies in the fact that he went contrary to his former beliefs and did not engage in the implementation of utopian projects, but resigned himself to the realities of the 1990s and began to build, albeit boring and banal, but the rule of law with a market economy. More precisely, South Africa was such a society, but with the exclusion of black and colored people from the “common law” system. In a sense, apartheid South Africa was like the southern states of the United States before the civil awakening of the 1960s. And in this sense, Mandela can be compared to Martin Luther King. Only in America was racism informal, rooted in customs, not laws, and in South Africa, a legal basis was laid for it. Like Dr. King, Mandela, after his release from prison, renounced violence and played a prominent role in the peaceful transition from apartheid to democracy.

Mandela’s strongest move was the organization of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, designed to investigate the country’s dark past on the basis of sincere remorse, without sentencing, with both sides being held accountable.

The glory of Mandela led to the installation of a monument in London during his lifetime (there are dozens and dozens of objects named after him in the world). She could not be harmed by her friendship with Gaddafi and Castro, nor by the scandals around her second wife, who was involved in banal crime. Nothing stuck to him, and Madiba, as he was called in his homeland, deservedly enjoyed in his last years the status of the father of the nation.

Here is Nelson Mandela Association https://www.nelsonmandela.org/