He was very old and very frail, was in and out of hospital for many months, was unable to speak and was out of the public view in recent years. Yet, the death last night of Nelson Rolilahla Mandela must have registered a maximum 10 on the political equivalent of the Richter scale.
Throughout the years when we were growing up, Nelson Mandela was referred to by Nigerian as well as foreign newspapers as “the world’s most famous political prisoner.” In our intellectual discussion circles during the 1980s, we often said that release from Robben Island and later Pollsmoor Prisons could be dangerous for Nelson Mandela because no one could possibly live up to that legendary image if he were out in the open. How wrong we were. Within a few years of his release, Mandela graduated from being a famous anti-apartheid prisoner to becoming the conscience of the world.
Throughout the tumultuous period from the 1950s to the 1980s, the great years of African decolonization and freedom fighting, no single phenomenon concentrated the African mind quite as much as the fight against apartheid in South Africa. Freedom wars and struggles were being fought all over the African continent, some of them exceptionally bitter such as the Algerian War of Independence and the wars in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau. None was however as titanic as the struggle against apartheid, for human beings have invented no political system more revolting than apartheid since the heydays of the Nazis.
As such, the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa produced the greatest concentration of heroes, villains, famous and infamous scenes, events and episodes in all of Africa. Beginning from the infamous, there was Hendrick Verwoerd, John Voster, P.W. Botha, Roelof “Pik” Botha, Connie Mulder and the notorious Minister of Justice, Police and Prisons Adriaan Vlok. There were the black sell outs such as Inkatha Freedom Party and its leader, Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi. Among very infamous institutions there was the Ministry of Law and Order, the Bureau of State Security [BOSS], the Broederbond, Bantustans and Sasol. Among the most infamous events and episodes there was the Rivonia Trial, Sharpville massacre, Soweto massacre, pass laws and “banning.”
Among the famous and the legendary, there was Albert Luthuli, Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki, Oliver Tambo, Winnie Mandela, Albertina Sisulu, Yusuf Dadoo, Chris Hani, Joe Slovo, Ruth First, Desmond Tutu, Steve Biko, Solomon Mahlangu, Terror Lekota, Cyril Ramaphosa, Tokyo Sexwale and the Maroka Three. Apart from the ANC, other legendary anti-apartheid institutions included Umkhonto we Sizwe, the South African Union of Mine Workers, United Democratic Front [UDF] and the Pan Africanist Congress [PAC] with its unforgettable slogan “one settler, one bullet.” Also unforgettable was the UDF slogan of the 1980s student street protests, “liberation before education.”
However, the father and grandfather of all legendary anti-apartheid activists and institutions was Nelson Mandela. The 27 years that he spent in prison from 1963-1990 galvanised the world’s conscience like never before since the Nazi pogroms. He had been sentenced to “two consecutive life sentences” in prison, something that greatly puzzled me as a primary school student. I was thinking, “After he finishes the first sentence and dies, how do they bring him back to serve the second sentence?”
I remember a discussion we had at the university in Sokoto in 1988. The question was posed as to whether the Palestinians would get a homeland earlier than black South Africans will be liberated from apartheid. Everyone present thought so; we reasoned that unlike the Israeli Jews that have serious ideological differences amongst themselves, the Boers appeared to present to solid and very determined front and were very unlikely to give up the fight.
Again we were wrong. In 1989, President Frederick Willem DeKlerk who succeeded “Der Groot Krokodil” P. W. Botha began to talk about a settlement and a reform of the apartheid system. In January 1990 he announced that Mandela would be set free; he abandoned Botha’s line for many years, that Mandela will be released “if he promises not to conduct himself in such a manner that he would have to be rearrested.”
In the week leading up to Mandela’s release from prison, the whole world virtually stood still. No one was sure how he looked since no one outside the prisons had seen him in 27 years. TIME magazine commissioned top artists to sketch out how he looked; it turned out to be dead wrong. We were all glued to the radio when he walked out of the prison; the BBC reporter said, “He has walked through the gates! Nelson Mandela is a free man!” Every one of us around shed tears of joy.
Once out of prison, Mandela displayed the stuff of greatness such as the world never thought was possible. Beginning with his forgiving spirit; men who spend a few weeks in prison are known to come out with vengeful spirits but from the day he walked out after 27 years, Mandela never showed any bitterness against his former captors. He preached peace day and night and he patiently led the difficult “talks about talks” and then the actual talks that led to the dismantling of apartheid.
His loyalty to his party, the African National Congress [ANC] was the stuff of legend. When Mandela came out of prison, ANC’s president Oliver Tambo was incapacitated by a stroke. Mandela however accepted the position of vice president under Tambo. He announced that he was a loyal ANC member and would only act according to the party’s wishes. That began with his Thank You tours; the ANC drew up a list of countries that Mandela would visit according to the level of their contribution to the liberation struggle. As such, he went to Mozambique, Zambia, Ethiopia and Libya before he came to Nigeria in April 1990; those were the nations that either provided sanctuary or training for ANC guerillas while Nigeria only gave money.
Mandela came to Nigeria a week after the Orkar coup so the Babangida regime did not want any large scale movements. However he addressed rallies in Lagos, Enugu and Kaduna. From Sokoto where I lived then, I journeyed to Kaduna to see him. The crowd was immense and I lost my money and driving license in the melee, but it was worth it. After all I had been wearing a “Free Nelson Mandela” button on my shirts since 1980.
He reluctantly became the first post-apartheid President of South Africa. From day one he made it clear that he would serve for only a term and even in those five years, that vice president Thabo Mbeki would do all the real work. It was a miracle on a continent where sit-tightism and aggrandizement of power were and still are the norm. Mandela pushed away power when many African rulers wanted more power than the constitution gave them.
Out of power, Nelson Mandela set other legendary examples of humility, of wisdom, of charitable work and of what it means to be a father of the nation and the conscience of the world. With his death last night, the world has lost its moral compass. He was the greatest African of the last 100 years; he was the greatest world statesman of the last 20 years and he would in all probability be the most concentrated focus of political role modeling in Africa and across the world in the next 100 years or more.
Madiba, adieu. We are shedding tears again [sob, sob].
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