Rest
in peace Madiba
We wake up to digest such sour new as our breakfast.
We have waited for thek day to come as he fought for his life. Many of us have
admired his simple life. Many of our leaders have talked and talked about him
but few or none at all has picked a leaf from his exemplary life.
Madika is not Jesus Christ the son of God. He was a
true human being like me and you. He came from a humble background like many of
us but rose to prominence to the extent that fetus can have a word for our
departed father.
Childhood and Education
Nelson Mandela was born on July 18,
1918, into a royal family of the Xhosa-speaking Thembu tribe in the South
African village of Mvezo, where his father, Gadla Henry Mphakanyiswa (c.
1880-1928), served as chief. His mother, Nosekeni Fanny, was the third of
Mphakanyiswa’s four wives, who together bore him nine daughters and four sons.
After the death of his father in 1927, 9-year-old Mandela—then known by his
birth name, Rolihlahla—was adopted by Jongintaba Dalindyebo, a high-ranking
Thembu regent who began grooming his young award for a role within the tribal
leadership.
The first in his family to receive a
formal education, Mandela completed his primary studies at a local missionary
school. There, a teacher dubbed him Nelson as part of a common practice of
giving African students English names. He went on to attend the Clarkebury
Boarding Institute and Healdtown, a Methodist secondary school, where he
excelled in boxing and track as well as academics. In 1939 Mandela entered the
elite University of Fort Hare, the only Western-style higher learning institute
for South African blacks at the time. The following year, he and several other
students, including his friend and future business partner Oliver Tambo
(1917-1993), were sent home for participating in a boycott against university
policies.
After learning that his guardian had
arranged a marriage for him, Mandela fled to Johannesburg and worked first as a
night watchman and then as a law clerk while completing his bachelor’s degree
by correspondence. He studied law at the University of Witwatersrand, where he
became involved in the movement against racial discrimination and forged key
relationships with black and white activists. In 1944, Mandela joined the
African National Congress (ANC) and worked with fellow party members, including
Oliver Tambo, to establish its youth league, the ANCYL. That same year, he met
and married his first wife, Evelyn Ntoko Mase (1922-2004), with whom he had
four children before their divorce in 1957.
Life
in African National Congress
Nelson Mandela’s commitment to
politics and the ANC grew stronger after the 1948 election victory of the
Afrikaner-dominated National Party, which introduced a formal system of racial
classification and segregation—apartheid—that restricted nonwhites’ basic
rights and barred them from government while maintaining white minority rule.
The following year, the ANC adopted the ANCYL’s plan to achieve full
citizenship for all South Africans through boycotts, strikes, civil
disobedience and other nonviolent methods. Mandela helped lead the ANC’s 1952
Campaign for the Defiance of Unjust Laws, traveling across the country to
organize protests against discriminatory policies, and promoted the manifesto
known as the Freedom Charter, ratified by the Congress of the People in 1955.
Also in 1952, Mandela and Tambo opened South Africa’s first black law firm,
which offered free or low-cost legal counsel to those affected by apartheid
legislation.
On December 5, 1956, Mandela and 155
other activists were arrested and went on trial for treason. All of the
defendants were acquitted in 1961, but in the meantime tensions within the ANC
escalated, with a militant faction splitting off in 1959 to form the Pan
Africanist Congress (PAC). The next year, police opened fire on peaceful black
protesters in the township of Sharpeville, killing 69 people; as panic, anger
and riots swept the country in the massacre’s aftermath, the apartheid
government banned both the ANC and the PAC. Forced to go underground and wear
disguises to evade detection, Mandela decided that the time had come for a more
radical approach than passive resistance.
In 1961, Nelson Mandela co-founded
and became the first leader of Umkhonto we Sizwe (“Spear of the Nation”), also
known as MK, a new armed wing of the ANC. Several years later, during the trial
that would put him behind bars for nearly three decades, he described the
reasoning for this radical departure from his party’s original tenets: “[I]t
would be wrong and unrealistic for African leaders to continue preaching peace
and nonviolence at a time when the government met our peaceful demands with
force. It was only when all else had failed, when all channels of peaceful
protest had been barred to us, that the decision was made to embark on violent
forms of political struggle.”
Under Mandela’s leadership, MK
launched a sabotage campaign against the government, which had recently
declared South Africa a republic and withdrawn from the British Commonwealth.
In January 1962, Mandela traveled abroad illegally to attend a conference of
African nationalist leaders in Ethiopia, visit the exiled Oliver Tambo in
London and undergo guerilla training in Algeria. On August 5, shortly after his
return, he was arrested and subsequently sentenced to five years in prison for
leaving the country and inciting a 1961 workers’ strike. The following July,
police raided an ANC hideout in Rivonia, a suburb on the outskirts of
Johannesburg, and arrested a racially diverse group of MK leaders who had
gathered to debate the merits of a guerilla insurgency. Evidence was found
implicating Mandela and other activists, who were brought to stand trial for
sabotage, treason and violent conspiracy alongside their associates.
Mandela and seven other defendants
narrowly escaped the gallows and were instead sentenced to life imprisonment
during the so-called Rivonia Trial, which lasted eight months and attracted
substantial international attention. In a stirring opening statement that
sealed his iconic status around the world, Mandela admitted to some of the
charges against him while defending the ANC’s actions and denouncing the
injustices of apartheid. He ended with the following words: “I have cherished
the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together
in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live
for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to
die.”
Nelson Mandela spent the first 18 of
his 27 years in jail at the brutal Robben Island Prison, a former leper colony
off the coast of Cape Town, where he was confined to a small cell without a bed
or plumbing and compelled to do hard labor in a lime quarry. As a black
political prisoner, he received scantier rations and fewer privileges than
other inmates. He was only allowed to see his wife, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela
(1936-), who he had married in 1958 and was the mother of his two young
daughters, once every six months. Mandela and his fellow prisoners were
routinely subjected to inhumane punishments for the slightest of offenses;
among other atrocities, there were reports of guards burying inmates in the
ground up to their necks and urinating on them.
These restrictions and conditions
notwithstanding, while in confinement Mandela earned a bachelor of law degree
from the University of London and served as a mentor to his fellow prisoners,
encouraging them to seek better treatment through nonviolent resistance. He
also smuggled out political statements and a draft of his autobiography, “Long
Walk to Freedom,” published five years after his release.
Despite his forced retreat from the
spotlight, Mandela remained the symbolic leader of the antiapartheid movement.
In 1980 Oliver Tambo introduced a “Free Nelson Mandela” campaign that made the
jailed leader a household name and fueled the growing international outcry
against South Africa’s racist regime. As pressure mounted, the government
offered Mandela his freedom in exchange for various political compromises,
including the renouncement of violence and recognition of the “independent”
Transkei Bantustan, but he categorically rejected these deals.
In 1982 Mandela was moved to
Pollsmoor Prison on the mainland, and in 1988 he was placed under house arrest
on the grounds of a minimum-security correctional facility. The following year,
newly elected president F. W. de Klerk (1936-) lifted the ban on the ANC and
called for a nonracist South Africa, breaking with the conservatives in his
party. On February 11, 1990, he ordered Mandela’s release.
After attaining his freedom, Nelson
Mandela led the ANC in its negotiations with the governing National Party and
various other South African political organizations for an end to apartheid and
the establishment of a multiracial government. Though fraught with tension and
conducted against a backdrop of political instability, the talks earned Mandela
and de Klerk the Nobel Peace Prize in December 1993. On April 26, 1994, more
than 22 million South Africans turned out to cast ballots in the country's
first multiracial parliamentary elections in history. An overwhelming majority
chose the ANC to lead the country, and on May 10 Mandela was sworn in as the
first black president of South Africa, with de Klerk serving as his first
deputy.
As president, Mandela established
the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate human rights and
political violations committed by both supporters and opponents of apartheid
between 1960 and 1994. He also introduced numerous social and economic programs
designed to improve the living standards of South Africa's black population. In
1996 Mandela presided over the enactment of a new South African constitution,
which established a strong central government based on majority rule and
prohibited discrimination against minorities, including whites.
Improving race relations,
discouraging blacks from retaliating against the white minority and building a
new international image of a united South Africa were central to President
Mandela’s agenda. To these ends, he formed a multiracial “Government of
National Unity” and proclaimed the country a “rainbow nation at peace with
itself and the world.” In a gesture seen as a major step toward reconciliation,
he encouraged blacks and whites alike to rally around the predominantly
Afrikaner national rugby team when South Africa hosted the 1995 Rugby World
Cup.
On his 80th birthday in 1998,
Mandela wed the politician and humanitarian Graça Machel (1945-), widow of the
former president of Mozambique. (His marriage to Winnie had ended in divorce in
1992.) The following year, he retired from politics at the end of his first
term as president and was succeeded by his deputy, Thabo Mbeki (1942-) of the
ANC.
Treated
for prostate cancer in 2001 and weakened by other health issues, Mandela grew
increasingly frail in his later years and scaled back his schedule of public
appearances. In 2009, the United Nations declared July 18 “Nelson Mandela
International Day” in recognition of the South African leader’s contributions
to democracy, freedom, peace and human rights around the world.
As the good book says
there is time for everything. Time to be born and time to die…. Rest in peace
NELSON MANDELA, the world’s first and last greatest political icon
........... to be continued
No comments:
Post a Comment