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When speaking of the extensive
travelling he has undertaken since his release from prison,
Nelson Mandela says: I was helped when preparing for my
release by the biography of Pandit Nehru, who wrote of what
happens when you leave jail. My daughter Zinzi says that she
grew up without a father, who, when he returned, became a
father of the nation. This has placed a great responsibility
of my shoulders. And wherever I travel, I immediately begin
to miss the familiar - the mine dumps, the colour and smell
that is uniquely South African, and, above all, the people.
I do not like to be away for any length of time. For me,
there is no place like home.
Mandela accepted the Nobel Peace
Prize as an accolade to all people who have worked for peace
and stood against racism. It was as much an award to his
person as it was to the ANC and all South Africa s people.
In particular, he regards it as a tribute to the people of
Norway who stood against apartheid while many in the world
were silent.
We know it was Norway that
provided resources for farming; thereby enabling us to grow
food; resources for education and vocational training and
the provision of accommodation over the years in exile. The
reward for all this sacrifice will be the attainment of
freedom and democracy in South Africa, in an open society
which respects the rights of all individuals. That goal is
now in sight, and we have to thank the people and
governments of Norway and Sweden for the tremendous role
they played.
Personal Tastes
- Breakfast of plain
porridge, with fresh fruit and fresh milk.
- A favourite is the
traditionally prepared meat of a freshly slaughtered
sheep, and the delicacy Amarhewu (fermented corn-meal).
Biographical Details
Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela was
born in a village near Umtata in the Transkei on the 18 July
1918. His father was the principal councillor to the Acting
Paramount Chief of Thembuland. After his father s death, the
young Rolihlahla became the Paramount Chief s ward to be
groomed to assume high office. However, influenced by the
cases that came before the Chief s court, he determined to
become a lawyer. Hearing the elders stories of his ancestors
valour during the wars of resistance in defence of their
fatherland, he dreamed also of making his own contribution
to the freedom struggle of his people.
After receiving a primary
education at a local mission school, Nelson Mandela was sent
to Healdtown, a Wesleyan secondary school of some repute
where he matriculated. He then enrolled at the University
College of Fort Hare for the Bachelor of Arts Degree where
he was elected onto the Student's Representative Council. He
was suspended from college for joining in a protest boycott.
He went to Johannesburg where he completed his BA by
correspondence, took articles of clerkship and commenced
study for his LLB. He entered politics in earnest while
studying in Johannesburg by joining the African National
Congress in 1942.
At the height of the Second
World War a small group of young Africans, members of the
African National Congress, banded together under the
leadership of Anton Lembede. Among them were William Nkomo,
Walter Sisulu, Oliver R. Tambo, Ashby P. Mda and Nelson
Mandela. Starting out with 60 members, all of whom were
residing around the Witwatersrand, these young people set
themselves the formidable task of transforming the ANC into
a mass movement, deriving its strength and motivation from
the unlettered millions of working people in the towns and
countryside, the peasants in the rural areas and the
professionals.
Their chief contention was
that the political tactics of the old guard' leadership of
the ANC, reared in the tradition of constitutionalism and
polite petitioning of the government of the day, were
proving inadequate to the tasks of national emancipation. In
opposition to the old guard', Lembede and his colleagues
espoused a radical African Nationalism grounded in the
principle of national self-determination. In September 1944
they came together to found the
African National Congress Youth League (ANCYL).
Mandela soon impressed his
peers by his disciplined work and consistent effort and was
elected to the Secretaryship of the Youth League in 1947. By
painstaking work, campaigning at the grassroots and through
its mouthpiece Inyaniso' (Truth) the ANCYL was able to
canvass support for its policies amongst the ANC membership.
At the 1945 annual conference of the ANC, two of the League
s leaders, Anton Lembede and Ashby Mda, were elected onto
the National Executive Committee (NEC). Two years later
another Youth League leader, Oliver R Tambo became a member
of the NEC.
Spurred on by the victory of
the National Party which won the 1948 all-White elections on
the platform of Apartheid, at the 1949 annual conference,
the
Programme of Action, inspired by the Youth League, which
advocated the weapons of boycott, strike, civil disobedience
and non-co-operation was accepted as official ANC policy.
The Programme of Action had
been drawn up by a sub-committee of the ANCYL composed of
David Bopape, Ashby Mda, Nelson Mandela, James Njongwe,
Walter Sisulu and Oliver Tambo. To ensure its implementation
the membership replaced older leaders with a number of
younger men. Walter Sisulu, a founding member of the Youth
League was elected Secretary-General. The conservative Dr
A.B. Xuma lost the presidency to Dr J.S. Moroka, a man with
a reputation for greater militancy. The following year,
1950, Mandela himself was elected to the NEC at national
conference.
The
ANCYL programme aimed at the attainment of full
citizenship, direct parliamentary representation for all
South Africans. In policy documents of which Mandela was an
important co-author, the ANCYL paid special attention to the
redistribution of the land, trade union rights, education
and culture. The ANCYL aspired to free and compulsory
education for all children, as well as mass education for
adults.
When the ANC launched its
Campaign for the Defiance of Unjust Laws in 1952, Mandela
was elected National Volunteer-in-Chief. The Defiance
Campaign was conceived as a mass civil disobedience campaign
that would snowball from a core of selected volunteers to
involved more and more ordinary people, culminating in mass
defiance. Fulfilling his responsibility as
Volunteer-in-Chief, Mandela travelled the country organising
resistance to discriminatory legislation. Charged and
brought to trial for his role in the campaign, the court
found that Mandela and his co-accused had consistently
advised their followers to adopt a peaceful course of action
and to avoid all violence.
For his part in the Defiance
Campaign, Mandela was convicted of contravening the
Suppression of Communism Act and given a suspended prison
sentence. Shortly after the campaign ended, he was also
prohibited from attending gatherings and confined to
Johannesburg for six months.
During this period of
restrictions, Mandela wrote the attorneys admission
examination and was admitted to the profession. He opened a
practice in Johannesburg, in partnership with Oliver Tambo.
In recognition of his outstanding contribution during the
Defiance Campaign Mandela had been elected to the presidency
of both the Youth League and the Transvaal region of the ANC
at the end of 1952, he thus became a deputy president of the
ANC itself.
Of their law practice, Oliver
Tambo, ANC National Chairman at the time of his death in
April 1993, has written:
To reach our desks
each morning Nelson and I ran the gauntlet of patient
queues of people overflowing from the chairs in the
waiting room into the corridors... To be landless (in
South Africa) can be a crime, and weekly we interviewed
the delegations of peasants who came to tell us how many
generations their families had worked a little piece of
land from which they were now being ejected... To live
in the wrong area can be a crime... Our buff office
files carried thousands of these stories and if, when we
started our law partnership, we had not been rebels
against apartheid, our experiences in our offices would
have remedied the deficiency. We had risen to
professional status in our community, but every case in
court, every visit to the prisons to interview clients,
reminded us of the humiliation and suffering burning
into our people.
Nor did their professional
status earn Mandela and Tambo any personal immunity from the
brutal apartheid laws. They fell foul of the land
segregation legislation, and the authorities demanded that
they move their practice from the city to the back of
beyond, as Mandela later put it, miles away from where
clients could reach us during working hours. This was
tantamount to asking us to abandon our legal practice, to
give up the legal service of our people... No attorney worth
his salt would easily agree to do that, said Mandela and the
partnership resolved to defy the law.
Nor was the government alone
in trying to frustrate Mandela s legal practice. On the
grounds of his conviction under the Suppression of Communism
Act, the Transvaal Law Society petitioned the Supreme Court
to strike him off the roll of attorneys. The petition was
refused with Mr Justice Ramsbottom finding that Mandela had
been moved by a desire to serve his black fellow citizens
and nothing he had done showed him to be unworthy to remain
in the ranks of an honourable profession.
In 1952 Nelson Mandela was
given the responsibility to prepare an organisational plan
that would enable the leadership of the movement to maintain
dynamic contact with its membership without recourse to
public meetings. The objective was to prepare for the
contingency of proscription by building up powerful local
and regional branches to whom power could be devolved. This
was the M-Plan, named after him.
During the early fifties
Mandela played an important part in leading the resistance
to the Western Areas removals and to the introduction of
Bantu Education. He also played a significant role in
popularising the
Freedom Charter, adopted by the Congress of the People
in 1955.
In the late fifties, Mandela
s attention turned to the struggles against the exploitation
of labour, the pass laws, the nascent Bantustan policy, and
the segregation of the open universities. Mandela arrived at
the conclusion very early on that the Bantustan policy was a
political swindle and an economic absurdity. He predicted,
with dismal prescience, that ahead there lay a grim
programme of mass evictions, political persecutions, and
police terror. On the segregation of the universities,
Mandela observed that the friendship and inter-racial
harmony that is forged through the admixture and association
of various racial groups at the mixed universities
constitute a direct threat to the policy of apartheid and
baasskap, and that it was to remove that threat that the
open universities were being closed to black students.
During the whole of the
fifties, Mandela was the victim of various forms of
repression. He was banned, arrested and imprisoned. For much
of the latter half of the decade, he was one of the accused
in the mammoth Treason Trial, at great cost to his legal
practice and his political work. After the Sharpeville
Massacre in 1960, the ANC was outlawed, and Mandela, still
on trial, was detained.
The Treason Trial collapsed
in 1961 as South Africa was being steered towards the
adoption of the republic constitution. With the ANC now
illegal the leadership picked up the threads from its
underground headquarters. Nelson Mandela emerged at this
time as the leading figure in this new phase of struggle.
Under the ANC's inspiration, 1,400 delegates came together
at an All-in African Conference in Pietermaritzburg during
March 1961. Mandela was the keynote speaker. In an
electrifying address he challenged the apartheid regime to
convene a national convention, representative of all South
Africans to thrash out a new constitution based on
democratic principles. Failure to comply, he warned, would
compel the majority (Blacks) to observe the forthcoming
inauguration of the Republic with a mass general strike. He
immediately went underground to lead the campaign. Although
fewer answered the call than Mandela had hoped, it attracted
considerable support throughout the country. The government
responded with the largest military mobilisation since the
war, and the Republic was born in an atmosphere of fear and
apprehension.
Forced to live apart from his
family, moving from place to place to evade detection by the
government s ubiquitous informers and police spies, Mandela
had to adopt a number of disguises. Sometimes dressed as a
common labourer, at other times as a chauffeur, his
successful evasion of the police earned him the title of the
Black Pimpernel. It was during this time that he, together
with other leaders of the ANC constituted a new specialised
section of the liberation movement, Umkhonto we Sizwe, as an
armed nucleus with a view to preparing for armed struggle.
At the Rivonia trial, Mandela explained : "At the beginning
of June 1961, after long and anxious assessment of the South
African situation, I and some colleagues came to the
conclusion that as violence in this country was inevitable,
it would be wrong and unrealistic for African leaders to
continue preaching peace and non-violence 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, and to form Umkhonto we
Sizwe...the Government had left us no other choice."
In 1961 Umkhonto we Sizwe was
formed, with Mandela as its commander-in-chief. In 1962
Mandela left the country unlawfully and travelled abroad for
several months. In Ethiopia he
addressed the Conference of the Pan African Freedom
Movement of East and Central Africa, and was warmly received
by senior political leaders in several countries. During
this trip Mandela, anticipating an intensification of the
armed struggle, began to arrange guerrilla training for
members of Umkhonto we Sizwe.
Not long after his return to
South Africa Mandela was arrested and charged with illegal
exit from the country, and incitement to strike.
Since he considered the
prosecution a trial of the aspirations of the African
people, Mandela decided to conduct his own defence. He
applied for the recusal of the magistrate, on the ground
that in such a prosecution a judiciary controlled entirely
by whites was an interested party and therefore could not be
impartial, and on the ground that he owed no duty to obey
the laws of a white parliament, in which he was not
represented.
Mandela prefaced this
challenge with the affirmation: I detest racialism, because
I regard it as a barbaric thing, whether it comes from a
black man or a white man.
Mandela was convicted and
sentenced to five years imprisonment. While serving his
sentence he was charged, in the Rivonia Trial, with
sabotage. Mandela s statements in court during these trials
are classics in the history of the resistance to apartheid,
and they have been an inspiration to all who have opposed
it. His
statement from the dock in the Rivonia Trial ends with
these words:
I have fought against
white domination, and I have fought against black
domination. 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.
Mandela was sentenced to life
imprisonment and started his prison years in the notorious
Robben Island Prison, a maximum security prison on a small
island 7Km off the coast near Cape Town. In April 1984 he
was transferred to Pollsmoor Prison in Cape Town and in
December 1988 he was moved the Victor Verster Prison near
Paarl from where he was eventually released. While in
prison, Mandela flatly rejected offers made by his jailers
for remission of sentence in exchange for accepting the
bantustan policy by recognising the independence of the
Transkei and agreeing to settle there. Again in the
'eighties Mandela rejected an offer of release on condition
that he renounce violence. Prisoners cannot enter into
contracts. Only free men can negotiate, he said.
Released on 11 February 1990,
Mandela plunged wholeheartedly into his life's work,
striving to attain the goals he and others had set out
almost four decades earlier. In 1991, at the first national
conference of the ANC held inside South Africa after being
banned for decades, Nelson Mandela was elected President of
the ANC while his lifelong friend and colleague, Oliver
Tambo, became the organisation's National Chairperson.
Nelson Mandela has never
wavered in his devotion to democracy, equality and learning.
Despite terrible provocation, he has never answered racism
with racism. His life has been an inspiration, in South
Africa and throughout the world, to all who are oppressed
and deprived, to all who are opposed to oppression and
deprivation.
In a life that symbolises the
triumph of the human spirit over man s inhumanity to man,
Nelson Mandela accepted the 1993
Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of all South Africans who
suffered and sacrificed so much to bring peace to our land. |
