Free Mandela

We begin chronologically. Madiba comes from the Xhoza clan and becomes a lawyer. He morphs into a firebrand of the African National Congress and gets sentenced to life in prison for crimes committed by the ANC of which Nelson Mandela was the head. In his trial in 1964, he said: “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.”

The international community, in response to the apartheid policies of South Africa and in light of legal civil rights advances in the United States, pressured SA to divest itself of its white supremacist bias. UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, speaking at Mandela’s funeral, talked of the sanctions imposed on South Africa. The handwriting was on the wall when the enigmatic F. W. de Klerk effected the recognition of the ANC and released Nelson Mandela from 27 years in jail.

Warmly called F.W., de Klerk traced early India ancestry and a descent of a Khoikhoi interpreter (Hottentots to Europeans), most recently of Austrian lineage. He presided over the dissolution of the apartheid policy and served as deputy president to Nelson Mandela when the latter was elected president. Both men were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993. They were adversarial partners full of caustic remarks about and against each other. Still, they moved a nation into new times.

On BBC in early 2010, F.W. said: “When Mandela goes it will be a moment when all South Africans put away their political differences, will take hands, and will together honor maybe the biggest known South African that has ever lived.” The day after the Madiba’s death, he intoned: “He was a great unifier and a very, very special man in this regard beyond everything else he did. This emphasis on reconciliation was his biggest legacy.”

The freeing of Mandela was also the freeing of de Klerk, perhaps one freer than the other but nonetheless both freed. This is instructive to all the proud and fledgling democracies, councils, legislatures, plenums, diets, presidiums, parliaments, and congresses of the realm. The program of freedom is not an ideological battle but a pragmatic one, the incarnation of visualized possibility made flesh in actual time and space on persons and peoples.

The dramatic changes of imaginal metaphors required were unmistakable to Mandela. When de Klerk decided to release him from prison, F.W. wanted it done immediately where Nelson would be flown to Johannesburg and set free. Madiba refused. He needed 10 days for the ANC to prepare for his changed status. This was an audacious refusal of a jailbird being released on pressure from the jailer. They settled for a week, with time for Nelson to walk out of prison in his own magnanimous style and forgiving humility, paving the road toward unimaginable reconciliation in a culture mired in the scars of divisiveness and discord. Mandela did not walk out to freedom; Mandela was already free when he walked out of his prison door!

Barack Hussein Obama, half-Kenyan, the first Afro-American President of a country that also has its history of racial segregation, sat in the stands at the Soweto memorial service, a living example of one influenced by Mandela’s political expression of his freedom.

Gandhi used “salt” to rally South Asia against the British Empire; MLK Jr. got mileage out of having a dream, a concrete one for himself, his children, and America, to be free at last! Mandela took sports to mellow the Afrikaners’ resistance to change and calm the reflexive lust for retribution from oppressed parties.

In the 2009 movie Invictus, Matt Damon plays the Springboks rugby team captain Francois Pienaar, and Morgan Freeman, Mandela, the beleaguered first black President of a nation only a year old in office challenged by rampant poverty and crime. He noticed his black constituency cheered for the opposing team when South Africa played England. Mandela refused to be defeated. On the way to hosting the 1995 World Cup, Mandela and Pienaar got the home crowd on its side, and triumphed over their traditional rivals, the All Blacks of New Zealand, in the Cup’s final. The movie is a great Francois-in-Wonderland story. It also happens to be true.

Freeman comments on Mandela’s death: “As we remember his triumphs, let us, in his memory, not just reflect on how far we’ve come, but on how far we have to go. Madiba may no longer be with us, but his journey continues on with me and with all of us.” Quite to the point. As we bid the Xhoza bushman adieu, it is not his freedom that is at stake. Ours is.

Free Mandela happened even before our picayune efforts to get him out of prison was successful. F.W. get the statesman awards he deserves, but Mandela has the open field of the fresh air of freedom all to his own. He walks and flies with angels, to use an earlier metaphor. “Let freedom reign,” he said. “The sun never set on so glorious a human achievement.” We invite you to say, Amen!

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