NELSON MANDELA, 1918-2013
Friday, December 6, 2013 THE NEW MEXICAN
A-5
Remembering Mandela: Gracious, tough, endearing poverty were ablaze with guns and violence as ANC activists and backers of the governmentNEW YORK — The thing encouraged and Zulu-dominated about Nelson Mandela was that Inkatha Freedom Party fought he made the rest of us want to with terrifying ferocity. In Gugube almost as noble as he. letu, outside Cape Town, a young Imprisoned for 27 years, the American Fulbright scholar from anti-apartheid leader who had Santa Fe, Amy Biehl, was chased declared at his 1964 trial that he down and killed by a mob of was willing to die for his beliefs youths shouting racial taunts of in human dignity and racial “Kill the farmer.” equality emerged from that expeThe nation felt like a tinderrience not filled with hatred, but box, a stage set for a bloodbath. courtly, magnanimous, humble But what Mandela ushered and good-humored. into history instead was his His very demeanor served profound regard for the rights as the rebuttal to all those who peddled fear and foretold disas- of all South Africans to claim a ter and bloodshed should black share of the national patrimony. South Africans get the vote and It was a point he boldly made on almost every public occasion, take power in Pretoria. whether to householders in the It is easy to forget what a seething cauldron South Africa white and affluent Johannesburg suburb of Houghton or on a had become by the early 1990s stage thrown up at a dilapidated as part of its white minority football stadium crammed to the struggled to hang on to the rafters with township dwellers three centuries of privilege clamoring for economic justice. made possible by apartheid. Through tedious and patient Khaki-clad farmers with pisnegotiations over several years tols at their side were setting off bombs and pledging never after his release from prison, to submit to majority rule. The the framework was set for the townships with their shantytown country’s first all-race elections
By John Daniszewski The Associated Press
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in April 1994, even though almost until the last minute it was not clear that all the conflicting parties would participate. When the day finally dawned cold and clear, South Africans saw themselves as the rainbow nation they really were. More than 22 million people voted, their lines snaking over the verdant green hills, and it was evident to the majority that they were now, at last, full citizens in the land of their birth. Part of the privilege of being around Nelson Mandela in those days was to see the undiluted joy he spread whenever he entered a township or a small settlement in one of the dusty impoverished homelands set up by apartheid governments to separate black from white South Africans. As the cars carrying Mandela and his supporters jolted along the rutted dirt tracks, they soon would be joined by school children running alongside as fast as
they could, shouting deliriously for “Madiba, Madiba,” the clan name that he is affectionately called. Finally, when the cars could move no farther, Mandela would unfold himself from the vehicle and slowly walk through the people, smiling and waving and occasionally raising his fist in an ANC salute with a different brightly colored and patterned shirt on every day. He could be firm with his followers, upbraiding them like a stern uncle — saying they were embarrassing the cause when they tore down posters of opponents or heckled members of the National Party of F.W. de Klerk, his Nobel Peace Prize colaureate and (to Mandela) littleloved partner in South Africa’s peaceful transition. “People will believe that we are unfit for government,” he would warn followers when they showed any signs of hooligan behavior.
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him busy, but made clear nevertheless that he was still energetic and still relishing the burden of leading his nation and serving as an icon for Africa and for the cause of truth and reconciliation everywhere. “At the end of day, I have often felt that I have spent my time very fruitfully,” he told us with his typical understatement and a slight twinkle in the eye. Remembering now, and contemplating one man’s long and momentous journey into history, I can only agree. John Daniszewski covered Nelson Mandela in the mid-1990s as AP’s bureau chief in Johannesburg.
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He was loyal as well to the Third World and to the NonAligned Movement, the countries that had formed the antiapartheid front. Even when he was firmly embraced by the U.S. government, he would not forsake his old revolutionary allies Yasser Arafat, Moammar Gadhafi or Robert Mugabe — those who had befriended his cause at a time when the world’s richer and more powerful countries were still supporting apartheid South Africa. In a meeting for a group of foreign journalists when he was then 77, he recounted all the affairs of state and problems of the country that were keeping
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