The Legacy of Nelson Mandela
At 94, Nelson Mandela is still kicking, inspiring an international day of community service on Juy 18th in his name. This seems to be an idea that Barack Obama borrowed for similar events in the USA.
While activists and athletes and entertainers, are honoring him by responding to his call for engagement, journalists in the obit departments of the world’s news networks are quietly, even secretly, combing their archives for footage and tributes that will air when he moves on to the next world. They are getting ready and seem to think it will happen sooner rather than later.
I have already seen a program length obit that a major network has ready to go.
Barring some major disaster at the same time, Mandela’s death may receive more visibility than the achievements of his long life.
The question is: which Mandela will be memorialized? Will it be he leader who built a movement and a military organization to fight injustice or a man of inspiration with a great smile who we admire because of the many years he suffered behind bars?
Having spent many years as a network producer, I know that the TV News industry’s instinct is to “humanize” the fallen by focusing on their symbolic importance.
He was a symbol of a commitment to forgiving his enemies and promoting reconciliation, a man who was cut off from his family and, in the end, lost storybook love story with Winnie Mandela after years of painful incarceration.
This approach also involves softening, celebratizing and depoliticizing a completely political person who said famously, “the struggle is my life” in the name of presenting someone who anybody can relate to, a big name to admire but not necessarily to learn from or get a balanced picture about. The idea is that Mandela will be likeable if he is like everyone else not that it is his stature as a leader that sets him apart.
In the United States civil rights icon Martin Luther King has, in the popular media, been reduced to four words, “I have A Dream,” as if that was the sum of his thinking and the extent of his contribution. Ask any school kid about him and your will hear a recycling of those famous four words with no context or background.
In South Africa Mandela has become a demi-God, he is seen as the man who unilaterally freed the country and who virtually walks on water. He is reated more in terms of a heroic myth than as a man who rose to an enormous challenge. He is certainly not a mere politician.
His achievements or lack of them in office are not known while the story of how South Africa ended apartheid is reduced to the waving of his magic wand. There was lots of media attention on pressure from the Boers, not the banks. We heard about the public demands of Chief Buthelezi’s IFP, but not the hidden pressure by the Washington dominated IMF and World Bank,
Little attention was paid to how he saw himself as an organizational man, a “loyal and disciplined” member of the African National Congress and the movements it inspired.
The accent on TV is always on top-down change by the great and the good, not the bottom-up pressure by freedom fighters at the community level who made the country ungovernable with help from armed fighters in exile, UN resolutions, economic and cultural sanctions, pressure by anti-apartheid militants the world over , and even the might of the Cuban army that defeated the South Africans in Angola.
Media likes to personalize the story but its complexities are rarely linked together or told.
Mandela’s own trajectory of contradictions is also not fully appreciated,
He was born to a Royal family in a tribal culture and was. in his early years, an apolitical aristrocrat in South African terms who only slowly became a leader of the masses, who moved to the city to become a successful lawyer, who was initially part of an elite, a nationalist distrustful of radicals in a non-violent organization.
He was also known as a lady’s man uncertain of his direction.
But events and new friends helped transform him from a captive of the suites to a man of the streets, His law partner Oliver Tambo and the mild-mannered ANC colleague Walter Sisulu influenced his thinking. His exposure to the ravages and violence of apartheid on the lives of ordinary Africans radicalized him. He was soon working with communists and people of all races,
As a member of ANC’s Youth League, he questioned the organization’s conservatism and challenged its mass base by recognizing after massacres of his people, that they would have to fight back.
He became the leader of a group within his party committed to armed struggle, and traveled to other African states for military training. He was denounced as a terrorist but was careful to insure that that the bombs his comrades planted did not kill civilians.
In short, he became a guerrilla fighter tthat the South Africans hunted along with the CIA. In fact it was the Americans who tipped the police off on where to capture him.
There was no Julian Assange in this days to blow the whistle on their covert surveillance.
This is not a part of his history that corporate media likes to project for fear of what it could encourage. The corporates and foundations that fund his foundation prefer to treat him as an icon that everyone loves, not an agitator that the establishment hated.
His years in prison turned him into a non-person. He could not be quoted in South Africa and his picture could not be shown. The South Africans not only incarcerated him in their most remote and brutal dungeon, but they insured that he disappeared from public view.
Despite the isolation, he was not forgotten, organizing the men around him into a unit of resistance, and politically educating younger captives in what was called Mandela University. He and his comrades did not let themselves or the growing ranks of their fellow priosners get discouraged. They stressed discipline to combat despair.
As one former inmate on “The Island,” told me, “We became prisoners of hope.”
How they did this, how he co-opted and befriended prison guards by speaking their language and finding out about their families, weakened their hostility and violence. He was always very strategic. He learned to contain his anger and not succumb to hatred to insure survival.
Sure, he was lonely, but who in prison isn’t?
He was so successful that, at one point, one of the prison chiefs asked him, “Mr. Mandela, may I have my prison back?”
As he mounted a protracted personal battle, he went inside, often hiding his personal feelings and vulnerabilities. He realized he was a role model and acted the part.
On the outside, his comrades decided to turn him into a poster boy, to project him as the symbol of their struggle. The demand to “free all political prisoners” was replaced with the demand to Free Mandela.” He was an easier to market brand that way, and quickly became the focus of media attention. Soon, there were songs, concerts, TV documentaries and marches.
He became the best-known prisoner in the world.
As the world discovered his courage, South Africa had to take him more seriously as well after the regime was flooded him from people worldwide of all walks of life.
with demands to release him.
He was a risk taker— from his vow that he “was prepared to die”—a strident view his lawyers counseled against— to his willingness to talk with his enemies even as his personal pre-negotiating initiative bypassed his organization and worried many of its members.
He had guts as well as charm. His stoicism and patience were legendary. He acted thoughtfully and leveraged his visibility to help his comrades who he insisted be released before him. He never lost his political focus.
All of his utterances seemed profound to his growing ranks of followers even if they weren’t.
He went on to make deals with Apartheid leaders, to blast his negotiating partner F.W. DeKlerk and then embrace him. He helped organize the country’s first democratic election and didn’t just run in it. All parties were welcome.
He consciously built alliances across racial, political and tribal lines. He made compromises of his own principles in the name of avoiding a bloody civil war or reviving the economy.
He then stepped down after one term, a rarity in Africa, He recognized the scourge of AIDS early on when some his colleagues wouldn’t.
This was his genius. It is a story of great passion and perseverance over decades. It’s the story behind his “long walk to freedom”
His love life, problems with his wife and his children and grandchildren my pull at our heart strings, but they are not as important as the epic battles he led against injustice and for freedom,
After his death, this fight for freedom that inspired the world that deserves telling but which story do you think the networks will tell?
Will they present him as victim or victor, as a flawed person, as he sees himself—or as a saint cleaned up and repackaged for mass consumption?
Will they give us the Hollywood one-dimensional picture of the soft and endearing gentle giant that turns him into a grandfatherly cuddly bear or the real saga of a liberation leader that won against the odds?
Which Narrative will prevail?
News Dissector Danny Schechter produced the globally distributed South Africa Now TV series for three years and then was a director of six films focused on Nelson Mandela. He first came to South African on an anti-apartheid mission in 1967. Comments to dissector@mediachannel.org.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-legacy-of-nelson-mandela/25642
How the Western Media Distorts the Historical Legacy of Nelson Mandela
There’s anger amidst the apprehension in South Africa as the numbers of “journalists” on the Mandela deathwatch grows. Members of his family have about had it, comparing what even the New York Times called a “media swarm” to African vultures that wait to pounce on the carcasses of dead animals.
President Obama was soon in South Africa, carrying a message that he hyped as one of “profound gratitude” to Nelson Mandela. The Times reported,
“Mr. Obama said the main message he intended to deliver to Mr. Mandela, “if not directly to him but to his family, is simply our profound gratitude for his leadership all these years and that the thoughts and prayers of the American people are with him, and his family, and his country.”
It doesn’t seem as if the South Africa’s grieving for their former president’s imminent demise are too impressed with Obama seeking the spotlight. Some groups including top unions protested his receiving an honorary degree from a university in Johannesburg.
Interestingly, NBC with its team buttressed by former South African correspondent Charlayne Hunter-Gault did not bother to cover the protest but relied on Reuters reporting “nearly 1,000 trade unionists, Muslim activists, South African Communist Party members and others marched to the U.S. Embassy where they burned a U.S. flag, calling Obama’s foreign policy “arrogant and oppressive.”
”We had expectations of America’s first black president. Knowing Africa’s history, we expected more,” Khomotso Makola, a 19-year-old law student, told Reuters. He said Obama was a “disappointment, I think Mandela too would be disappointed and feel let down.”
South African critics of Obama have focused in particular on his support for U.S. drone strikes overseas, which they say have killed hundreds of innocent civilians, and his failure to deliver on a pledge to close the U.S. military detention center at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba housing terrorism suspects.” (Oddly, The South African police detained a local cameraman who used his own drone to photograph the hospital from above. He was stopped for “security” reasons.)
For symbolic reasons, as well as because of his global popularity, Nelson Mandela seems to be of special interest to the American media with the networks, nominally in an austerity mode, busting their budgets to have a dominant presence.
South African skeptic Rian Malan writes in the Spectator, “Every time Mandela goes into hospital, large numbers of Americans (up to 50) are flown here to take up their positions, and the South African network is similarly activated. Colin, (A cameraman who works for a US network) for instance, travels to Johannesburg, hires a car and checks into a hotel, all on the network’s ticket. Since last December, he’s probably spent close to 30 days (at $2000 a day, expenses included) cooling his heels at various poolsides. And he has yet to shoot a single frame.
As Colin says, this could be the worst disaster in American media history, inter alia because all these delays are destroying the story. When the old man finally dies, a lot of punters are going to yawn and say, Mandela died? Didn’t that already happen a year ago?”
Hostility to the this media is satirized in an open letter by Richard Poplak from the foreign media to South Africa that appears in The Daily Maverick:
“As you may have noted, we’re back! It’s been four long months since the Oscar Pistorius bail hearing thing, and just as we were forgetting just how crappy the Internet connections are in Johannestoria, the Mandela story breaks.
We feel that it is vital locals understand just how big a deal this is for us. In the real world—far away from your sleepy backwater—news works on a 24-hour cycle. That single shot of a hospital with people occasionally going into and out of the front door, while a reporter describes exactly what is happening—at length and in detail? That’s our bread and butter. It’s what we do.
And you need to get out of the way while we do it.”
Why all the fanatical interest? The US media loves larger than life personalities, often creating them when they don’t exist. Mandela has assumed the heroic mantle for them of Martin Luther King Jr. whose memory enjoys iconic status even as his achievements like Voting Rights Act was just picked apart by right-wing judicial buzzards in black robes. (Kings image was also sanitized with his international outlook often muzzled).
It wasn’t always like this. For many years, The US media treated Mandela as a communist and terrorist, respecting South African censorship laws that kept his image secret. Reports about the CIA’s role in capturing him were few and far between. Ditto for evidence of US spying documented in cables released by Wikileaks.
In the Reagan years, his law partner Oliver Tambo, then the leader of the ANC while he was in prison, was barred from coming to the US and then, when he did, meeting with top officials. Later, Dick Cheney refused to support a Congressional call for his release from jail.
In 1988, I, among other TV producers, launched the TV series South Africa Now to cover the unrest the networks were largely ignoring as stories shot by US crews ended up on “the shelf,” not on the air.
A 1988 concert to free Mandela was shown by the Fox Network as a “freedom fest” with artists told not to mention his name, less they “politicize” all the fun. When he was released in 2000, a jammed all-star celebration at London’s WembleyStadiumwas shown everywhere in the world, except by the American networks.
Once he adopted reconciliation as his principal political tenet and dropped demands for nationalization anchored in the ANC’s “Freedom Charter,” his image in the US was quickly rehabilitated. He was elevated into a symbolic hero for all praised by the people and the global elite alike. Little mention was made of his role as the creator of an Armed Struggle, and its Commander in Chief,
US networks also did not cover the role played by the US dominated IMF and World Bank in steering the economy in a market -oriented neo-liberal direction, assuring the new government could not erase deep inequality and massive poverty and that the whites would retain privleges.
The American press shaped how Mandela was portrayed in the US. The lawyer and anti-nuclear campaigner, Alice Slater, tells a story of her efforts to win Mandela’s support for nuclear disarmament.
“(When)… Nelson Mandela announced that he would be retiring from the presidency of South Africa, we organized a world-wide letter writing campaign, urging him to call for the abolition of nuclear weapons at his farewell address to the United Nations. The gambit worked. At the UN, Nelson Mandela called for the elimination of nuclear weapons, saying, “these terrible and terrifying weapons of mass destruction –why do they need them anyway?” The London Guardian had a picture of Mandela on its front page, with the headline, “Nelson Mandela Calls for the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons.” The New York Times had a story buried on page 46, announcing Mandela’s retirement from the Presidency of South Africa and speculating on who might succeed him, reporting that he gave his last speech as President to the UN, while omitting to mention the content of his speech.”
And so it goes, with his death seeming to be imminent, he has become reduced to a symbolic mythic figure, a moral voice, not the politician he always was. He became an adorable grandfather praised for his charities with his political ideas and values often buried in the either of his celebrity. He has insisted that he not be treated as a saint or a savior. Tell that to the media.
As ANC veteran Pallo Jordan told me,
“To call him a celebrity is to treat him like Madonna. And that’s not what he is. At the same time, he deserves to be celebrated as the freedom fighter he was.”
Watch the coverage and see if that message is coming through, with all of its implications for the struggle in South Africa that still lies ahead.
News Dissector Danny Schechter made six documentaries about Nelson Mandela. He blogs at newsdissector.net and edits Mediachannel.org. Comments to dissector@mediachannel.org
http://www.globalresearch.ca/how-the-western-media-distorts-the-historical-legacy-of-nelson-mandela/5341283
Nelson Mandela’s New Book
This collection features more than 2,000 quotations over 60 years
AS MANDELA TURNS 93, HE RELEASES A NEW BOOK OF QUOTATIONS
JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA: Nelson Mandela, icon-hero of the world, turns 93 this month. He is hanging on despite family tragedies that claimed another great-grandchild in June. The child was born premature and died after just four days,
The man known by his clan name, Madiba, still evokes wonder and admiration and almost god-like reverence, with airport stores selling We Love Mandela posters and T-shirts. He is the one South African that most of South Africans take pride in, including the older generation that first knew him as an apartheid government designated terrorist.
So feared was he that his picture could not be shown in the media and his words could not be quoted for 27 years.
Ironically, all these years later he has released a book of authorized quotations (‘By himself”) that cull his thoughts from a life time of public and private utterances in letters, private papers, audio recordings as well from generations of speechifying,
Mandela doesn’t really get out much anymore although a select few can still get in to see him especially if their name is Michelle Obama, whose comment on being given an advanced copy of the quotations was a not very quotable, “Wow!” (I have that on good authority from someone who was in the room.)
The last big book of political quotations that went to the top of the sales charts that I remember was Mao’s Little Red Book. China’s Communist party assured it would be a global bestseller given the size of the population, their control over the country and penchant for disseminating propaganda. Mao’s idea appealed to Moammar Gadaffy who then released his own Little “Green Book” to thunderous yawns.
Mao used his book to fight his ill-fated cultural revolution; Now, Mandela’s collection that could be called a little book of struggle and solidarity is out to promote the fight for democracy he led.
Its mission is spelled out in a letter he wrote from his prison cell to his daughter Zindzi back in 1980. That quotation explains: “A good pen can also remind us of the happiest moments in our lives, bring noble ideas in our dens, our blood and our souls, It can turn tragedy into hope and victory.”
It wasn’t just his words that brought his victory but they surely helped. This collection features more than 2,000 quotations over 60 years, organized into 300 categories including “character” “courage” and “reconciliation.” Many have never been published before and were archived by the Nelson Mandela Foundation’s Memory Project. The editors, Sello Hatang and Sahm Venter “ say their aim is to offer an accurate and extensive resource.
“In editing the book,” they write, “ we were struck as much by the gravitas of his words…as by their simplicity.”
I was fortunate to be at the book’s launch in the offices of the Foundation in Johannesburg.
It was an appropriate place for me to spend my June 27th birthday reflecting on Mandela’s triumphs and my own small role in bringing some of them to public attention with six films documenting some of what happened after his release from prison—his election campaign in 1994 and two visits to America, among other memorable markers in his amazing life.
The event was typically low key with a few talks by people who knew him well, worked with him in the ANC and served alongside him in the cells on Robben Island. I knew some of the stalwarts who were there and they were very welcoming to have me back among them.
Doing what I could as a journalist and TV producer to help free South Africa is work that I am very proud of. In the end, I received far more than I gave. It was a great privilege.
In the formal program, his daughter from his first marriage told of visiting her father in prison and being asked if she had had a pap smear. Despite his reputation as a Victorian patrician, he was open about personal matters, and shocked her by talking about intimate subjects even urging her not to have unprotected sex.
Ahead of his time, that orientation led him years later to become a global leader in the fight against AIDS, a pandemic that also claimed one of his sons.
A former ANC leader described him as someone who was open to, and welcomed disagreement and debate to correct him when he was “wrong.” She read quotes that showed Mandela’s openness to criticism and self-criticism, qualities we don’t see in many world leaders better known for arrogance and elitism.
Two quotes in the book offer insight to his approach and humility. This comes from a speech he gave in September 1953:
“Long speeches, the shaking of fists, the banging of tables and strongly worded resolutions out of touch with the objective conditions do not bring about mass action and can do a great deal of harm to the organization and the struggle we serve.”
Although he often looks stern he also values a good sense of humor, explaining in 2005:
“You sharpen your ideas by reducing yourself to the level of the people you are with and a sense of humor and a complete relaxation, even when you are discussing serious things does help to mobilize friends around you. And I love that.”
Next was Ahmed “Kathy” Kathrada, one of the eight convicted activists including Mandela assigned to a special section in the draconian Robben Island prison. The apartheid government practiced its racism there openly, giving Kathrada, an Indian, more privileges than his black comrades. He joined Mandela in protesting discriminatory practices.
Mandela always “led from the front,” he explained, taking principled stands and refusing any special treatment unless it was also given to his colleagues. Kathrada’s description of their life together on the inside for decades was vivid and matter of fact, even if his words brought tears to the eyes of people who have heard his stories before. These prisoners had nothing but contempt for the court’s verdict because they knew was made on a political basis, not a legal one.
Mandela himself embraces the notion of the role of people in the front. He puts it simply in this quotation: “Good Leaders Lead.” And leading he still is with several foundations, one for children, one focused on Aids, and the principal one encouraging community dialogues to fight xenophobia and violence,
Sitting in the front row and listening was one of the lawyers who represented Kathrada and Mandela in their famous treason trial. He is a legal legend by the name of George Bizos who came to South Africa from Greece, the cradle of democracy.
It was Bizos who convinced Mandela to add three small words to his most famous quotation, the one in which he told his Judges he was prepared to die for his ideals.
Bizos persuaded him not to be so categorical by, in effect, challenging the state to kill him. Before the phrase vowing he was ready to die, his lawyer interjected the words “If needs be” to the statement of defiance giving Mandela some political wriggle room. In the end, he was not sentenced to death and lived to outlast his warders and go from prison to the presidency.
Mandela is right: words and ideas matter, but he also insists they must lead to action. The movement he led was admired for its moral stance. Today, that movement is in power, known for the progress it brought but also for a pervasive corruption that threatens the legacy of his beloved African National Congress (ANC).
Cry the Beloved Country was one of South Africa’s greatest novels. Today, many of those who fought for its freedom are crying about its many self-inflicted crises. That’s an issue I will return to.
News Dissector Danny Schechter produced the globally broadcast TV series South Africa Now and was a director six documentary films about Nelson Mandela. Comments to dissector@mediachannel.org
http://www.globalresearch.ca/nelson-mandela-s-new-book/25476