Mandela

Nelson Mandela July 18, 1918–December 5, 2013

It is February 1985, in the Jabulani Stadium, Soweto, South Africa, and Mandela’s daughter Zinzi reads his response to the offer of PW Botha, then the state president of South Africa, that if he, Mandela, “unconditionally rejected violence as a political weapon” he would be free. Mandela’s response begins with a reminder: “I am a member of the African National Congress and I will remain a member of the African National Congress until the day I die.” He ends his statement, “Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter contracts … I cannot and will not give any undertaking at a time when I and you, the people, are not free. Your freedom and mine cannot be separated. I will return.”

In that moment, after twenty-one years in prison, the twentieth century’s most famous political prisoner publicly weaved his life into the fabric of the ordinary black South African. He had been arrested previously, and in 1962 received a five year sentence. The apartheid regime had banned him many times before for his defiance. Since the Rivonia Trial in 1964, and his incarceration with his co-defendants on Robben Island, he had become the iconic figure of the anti-apartheid struggle with its “Free Nelson Mandela” slogan a rallying cry, a mobilizing slogan for thousands of people all over the world. And here, in February 1985, he was with determination tying his freedom from the travails of Robben Island to the ending of apartheid in South Africa. In that moment he emerged as the moral force and a voice and figure for new possibilities in a world which was then politically becoming an increasingly bleak place under the aegis of the likes of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.

Five years later, Mandela walked out of the Victor Verster Prison, after the last apart-heid President De Klerk lifted the ban on all the major political organizations opposed to the apartheid regime. That moment engraved in memory of millions who watched it on television became one of hope. The twentieth century can be characterized as a time in which the rule of various colonial empires came to an end. Anti-colonial movements had shattered the fantasy of perpetual tutelage and the civilizing mission of colonial power. During the twentieth century African Americans challenged the color line which W. E. B. DuBois had identified as the problem of the twentieth century, forcing the end of Jim Crow and formal segregation. Yet in all of this the South Africa apartheid regime remained entrenched. So when Mandela walked out of prison, it seemed as if in the middle of what was then becoming the onslaught of neo-liberalism, there was the possibility of at least something else. In that moment the figure of Mandela was transformed from the world’s most famous political prisoner to a figure in which not only the hopes of ordinary South African were invested but also of individuals from all over the world. That he was an African was critical to what he had now become. Because if the end of the nineteenth century was about the imperial scramble for Africa; was about what Aimé Césaire has called in his Discourse of Colonialism a process of colonialism as “thingification,” then Mandela walking out of prison was the sign that that old world had come to an end.

In the most profoundest of ways Mandela was the last major figure of African Liberation and decolonization. When he was elected to the presidency of the ANCYL in 1944, it was three years before India’s political independence. His political life traversed the various turns and complications of anti-colonial decolonization. As a figure of African decolonization, Mandela absorbed all the politics of that movement, from the armed struggle to the “positive action” campaigns of Nkrumah. But he brought something different to the table of political praxis. By the time Mandela’s statement was read in the Jabulani stadium, apartheid had become a regime which was considered repugnant and morally wrong. In...