Nelson Mandela: Death of a Legend

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Nelson Mandela: Death of a Legend

by Kim Petersen / December 5th, 2013

Nelson Mandela will be eulogized as a great man and a hero. He led the resistance to apartheid and White South African rule, and he was jailed for many years. Upon his release he became president and sought reconciliation rather than vengeance. He served only one term as president before stepping aside. All this is laudable.

He bathed in the adulation of his people and also internationally, and he received many awards and statues erected in his honor.¹

Mandela spoke out for justice elsewhere.

He spoke on the Palestinian struggle:

The temptation in our situation is to speak in muffled tones about an issue such as the right of the people of Palestine to a state of their own. We can easily be enticed to read reconciliation and fairness as meaning parity between justice and injustice. Having achieved our own freedom, we can fall into the trap of washing our hands of difficulties that others faces.

Yet we would be less than human if we did so.

It behooves all South Africans, themselves erstwhile beneficiaries of generous international support, to stand up and be counted among those contributing actively to the cause of freedom and justice.

Even during the days of negotiations, our own experience taught us that the pursuit of human fraternity and equality — irrespective of race or religion – should stand at the centre of our peaceful endeavours. The choice is not between freedom and justice, on the one hand, and their opposite, on the other. Peace and prosperity; tranquility and security are only possible if these are enjoyed by all without discrimination.

It is in this spirit that I have come to join you today to add our own voice to the universal call for Palestinian self-determination and statehood.²

Not muffled tones.

He was not muffled on George W. Bush and Tony Blair’s part in the aggression of Iraq.

“One power with a president who has no foresight and cannot think properly is now wanting to plunge the world into a holocaust,” Mr Mandela said in a speech to the International Women’s Forum.³

“Why is the US behaving so arrogantly?” he asked. “All that [Bush] wants is Iraqi oil.”

Condemning Mr Blair, he said: “He is the foreign minister of the United States. He is no longer prime minister of Britain.”⁴

Yet, Mandela is criticize-able on some accounts, even for the acceptance of honors.

White South Africans studied colonialism in Canada as a model for apartheid in South Africa. Some of Turtle Island’s Indigenous people were displeased with Mandela’s lack of solidarity with their struggle against White colonialism.

It is ironic that Nelson Mandela would come to this country [Canada] to thank the Canadian government for opposing apartheid policies. I had the greatest respect for this man’s defiance of the Botha Regime’s segregationist governments of South Africa. Still I believe Brother Mandela should have made due on hius promise to visit the Original Peoples of North America. He should have come and took a first hand look at the hideous policies and conditions in our territories, that his people, the African National Congress, so vigilantly fought against and defeated. … If Mandela accepts [honorary Canadian citizenship] then he will have turned a blind eye to our colonial repression.⁵

Mandela accepted honorary Canadian citizenship.

Perhaps the most damning part of the legacy is the economic apartheid that still exists in South Africa today.⁶

South Africa fares poorly in comparison to the rest of the world when measuring income distribution.

Mandela sacrificed a lot. He lost much, and he was rewarded much. The Blacks in South Africa are today freer than under apartheid, but the masses are still bound by the chains of capitalism.

1. “List of awards and honours bestowed upon Nelson Mandela,” Wikipedia. [↩]
2. Address by President Nelson Mandela at the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, Pretoria, ANC, 4 December 1997. [↩]
3. Toby Reynolds, “Nelson Mandela Blasts Bush on Iraq, Warns of ‘Holocaust’,”Indymedia, 30 January 2003. [↩]
4. AP, “Mandela attacks Blair and Bush,” Guardian, 31 January 2003. [↩]
5. Dacajeweiah [Splitting the Sky] (John Boncore Hill) with She Keeps the Door (Sandra Bruderer), From Attica to Gustafsen Lake: Unmasking the Secrets of the Psycho-sexual Energy and the Struggle for Original People’s Title (Chase, BC: John Pasquale Boncore, 2001): 64-65. [↩]
6. Nicoli Nattrass and Jeremy Seekings, “‘Two Nations’? Race and Economic Inequality in South Africa Today,” Daedalus, 130(1), Why South Africa Matters (Winter, 2001): 45-70. [↩]

Kim Petersen is co-editor of Dissident Voice. He can be reached at:kim@dissidentvoice.org. Read other articles by Kim.

This article was posted on Thursday, December 5th, 2013 at 2:36pm and is filed under Canada, Obituary, Poverty, Resistance, South Africa.

http://dissidentvoice.org/2013/12/nelson-mandela-death-of-a-legend/

The Guardian / By Jesse Jackson

 8 COMMENTS

How Nelson Mandela Changed the Course of History – for South Africa and the US

The South African president, who was labelled a terrorist, became more than a historical figure; he was a transformer.

A file photo taken on June 14, 2005 shows former South African President Nelson Mandela giving a press conference in Johannesburg voicing his support for President Thabo Mbeki

December 5, 2013  |  

 

President Nelson Mandela was truly a transformative force in the history of  South Africa and the world. My heart weighs heavy about his transition, but we are reassured because his life was full, and we know the  imprint he left on our world is everlasting.

If ever the teaching that "Suffering breeds character. Character breeds faith. In the end faith will not disappoint" rang true, it did in the life of Mandela.

Despite imprisonment in Robben Island for 25 years and 8 months, Mandela never lost faith in winning freedom for the South African people. Suffering breeds character.

Mandela was a transformational figure; to say he was a "historical figure" would not give him his full due. Some people move through history as being the "first this or that" – just another figure in a lineage of persons. To be a transformer is to plan, to have the vision to chart the course, the skills to execute. To be transformational is to have the courage of one's convictions, to sacrifice, to risk life and limb, to lay it all on the line. "Historical figures" will reference  Nelson Mandela.

I recall marching against apartheid with  Oliver Tambo and the enormous rally at Trafalgar Square in November 1985. I later met with the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher to decry Britain's economic, political and military support of the apartheid regime. Let us not forget that Britain, the US, all of the western powers, labelled Mandela a terrorist and steadfastly propped up the apartheid regime – they were on the wrong side of history. I appealed to her to support the release of Mandela, and departed for South Africa.

My heart burst with excitement on that day of Mandela's release from Victor Verster prison, 11 February 1990. When word got out about his impending release, maids started doing the toya toya in the hallways, beating pots and pans, weeping and demonstrating. "In the end, faith will not disappoint."

I met Mandela and Winnie at City Hall, and when we spoke later at our hotel, he thanked me and recalled hearing about my 1984 convention speech. Even from his jail cell, he was keenly aware of the outside world, and the ebbs and flows of the world. Three years later, as part of the official US delegation, I was honoured to celebrate Nelson Mandela's inauguration as president of the new, free South Africa.

We forged an everlasting relationship. We've welcomed him to our home and headquarters in Chicago. We've met numerous times in South Africa – the last time in 2010 where we spoke about boxing, sports, politics and traded baseball caps.

Mandela was a giant of immense and unwavering intellect courage and moral authority. He chose reconciliation over retaliation. He changed the course of history.

Now, both South Africa and the US have unfinished business to complete.

Nelson Mandela is not gone, he remains with us always. He'll always be a chin bar to pull up on. He has indeed forged South Africa as a new "beauty from ashes". He has left this earth, but he soars high among the heavens, and his eloquent call for freedom and equality is still heard amongst the winds and the rains, and in the hearts of the people the world over.

http://www.alternet.org/how-nelson-mandela-changed-course-history-south-africa-and-us

Victorious over Apartheid, Defeated by Neoliberalism

Nelson Mandela: A dissenting opinion

by Jonathan Cook / December 6th, 2013

Offering a dissenting opinion at this moment of a general outpouring of grief at Nelson Mandela’s death is not likely to court popularity. It is also likely to be misunderstood.

So let me start by recognising Mandela’s huge achievement in helping to bring down South African apartheid, and make clear my enormous respect for the great personal sacrifices he made, including spending so many years caged up for his part in the struggle to liberate his people. These are things impossible to forget or ignore when assessing someone’s life.

Nonetheless, it is important to pause during the widespread acclamation of his legacy, mostly by people who have never demonstrated a fraction of his integrity, to consider a lesson that most observers want to overlook.

Perhaps the best way to make my point is to highlight a mock memo written in 2001 by Arjan el-Fassed, from Nelson Mandela to the NYT’s columnist Thomas Friedman. It is a wonderful, humane denunciation of Friedman’s hypocrisy and a demand for justice for the Palestinians that Mandela should have written.

Soon afterwards, the memo spread online, stripped of el-Fassed’s closing byline. Many people, including a few senior journalists, assumed it was written by Mandela and published it as such. It seemed they wanted to believe that Mandela had written something as morally clear-sighted as this about another apartheid system, an Israeli one that is at least the equal of that imposed for decades on black South Africans.

However, the reality is that it was not written by Mandela, and his staff even went so far as to threaten legal action against the author.

Mandela spent most his adult life treated as a “terrorist”. There was a price to be paid for his long walk to freedom, and the end of South Africa’s system of racial apartheid. Mandela was rehabilitated into an “elder statesman” in return for South Africa being rapidly transformed into an outpost of neoliberalism, prioritising the kind of economic apartheid most of us in the west are getting a strong dose of now.

In my view, Mandela suffered a double tragedy in his post-prison years.

First, he was reinvented as a bloodless icon, one that other leaders could appropriate to legitimise their own claims, as the figureheads of the “democratic west”, to integrity and moral superiority. After finally being allowed to join the western “club”, he could be regularly paraded as proof of the club’s democratic credentials and its ethical sensibility.

Second, and even more tragically, this very status as icon became a trap in which he was required to act the “responsible” elder statesman, careful in what he said and which causes he was seen to espouse. He was forced to become a kind of Princess Diana, someone we could be allowed to love because he rarely said anything too threatening to the interests of the corporate elite who run the planet.

It is an indication of what Mandela was up against that the man who fought so hard and long against a brutal apartheid regime was so completely defeated when he took power in South Africa. That was because he was no longer struggling against a rogue regime but against the existing order, a global corporate system of power that he had no hope of challenging alone.

It is for that reason, rather simply to be contrarian, that I raise these failings. Or rather, they were not Mandela’s failings, but ours. Because, as I suspect Mandela realised only too well, one cannot lead a revolution when there are no followers.

For too long we have slumbered through the theft and pillage of our planet and the erosion of our democratic rights, preferring to wake only for the release of the next iPad or smart phone.

The very outpouring of grief from our leaders for Mandela’s loss helps to feed our slumber. Our willingness to suspend our anger this week, to listen respectfully to those watery-eyed leaders who forced Mandela to reform from a fighter into a notable, keeps us in our slumber. Next week there will be another reason not to struggle for our rights and our grandchildren’s rights to a decent life and a sustainable planet. There will always be a reason to worship at the feet of those who have no real power but are there to distract us from what truly matters.

No one, not even a Mandela, can change things by him or herself. There are no Messiahs on their way, but there are many false gods designed to keep us pacified, divided and weak.

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. He won this year’s Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). Read other articles by Jonathan, or visit Jonathan's website.

This article was posted on Friday, December 6th, 2013 at 5:28am and is filed under Obituary.

http://dissidentvoice.org/2013/12/victorious-over-apartheid-defeated-by-neoliberalism/

How the Western Media Distorts the Historical Legacy of Nelson Mandela

By Danny Schechter

Global Research, July 01, 2013

Region: sub-Saharan Africa

Theme: Media Disinformation

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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