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  • Added August 9th, 2013
  • Filed under 'All Sorts'
  • Viewed 1790 times

Forgiveness and freedom

By Helen Watson White in All Sorts

reflections on the Christ-like inspiration of Nelson Mandela

I am writing this on 6 August, Hiroshima Day, as different groups meet in the city and all around the world to mark the devastating loss of life caused by the atom bombs dropped in 1945 on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and to join together in working for peace.
As I finished Nelson Mandela's 750-page autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, I found - on p702 -- that this day marked another important milestone for the peace movement. On 6 August 1990, six months after Mandela's release from prison on Robben Island, the African National Congress (ANC) and the South African government signed what became known as the Pretoria Minute, in which the government set target dates for the release of political prisoners, promising some a degree of indemnity, and the ANC agreed to suspend the armed struggle against apartheid.
Interestingly, the move had come at the suggestion of Joe Slovo, who was both Communist Party general-secretary and an ANC member. Slovo had been part of the 11-strong ANC delegation to the first round of talks with the government in May of that year, but a few months after the various parties shook hands, President de Klerk's security forces arrested 40 ANC members, claiming they were part of a communist plot to overthrow the government. (In the past, the National government had much preferred to deal with the Pan African Congress than with the ANC, because the PAC was so determinedly anti-communist.) Although he had himself felt antipathy to communism in his youth, Mandela realized he was ignorant about it and studied Marxist writings, becoming drawn to the idea of a classless society which was actually very like traditional African culture, "shared and communal".
I remember how groups like Moral Re-Armament and many western media framed the whole anti-apartheid struggle as led by militant communists. Much more of a case could be made for the idea that the movement for a multi-racial and democratic South Africa was led by the Church.
From its beginning in 1912, the ANC was a broad-based movement, in Mandela's time including church groups, whites - women as well as men, Jews as well as Christians - unionists and communists who shared the vision of universal human rights expressed in such international statements as Roosevelt and Churchill's 1941 Atlantic Charter.
Mandela himself identifies as a Methodist/Wesleyan, deeply affected by African nationalism and the culture of his Xhosa tribe, but also - through his Christian mother -- by his western-style liberal education received at a mission-station school and later at university. The Church, he realized, "was as concerned with this world as the next", and its representatives, such as the "popular and beloved" Revd Matyolo, a fire-and-brimstone prophet- preacher, would ever be remembered for the powerful impression they made on him.
A succession of Christian (and Jewish) mentors accompanied Mandela on his journey to adulthood and towards leadership in the ANC: the Anglican Revd Mabutho, for instance, looked after him even after he'd gone off the rails briefly, saying "Our ancestors have taught us to share"; Lazar Sidelsky, partner in a law firm, took him on as an articled clerk - "something unheard of in those days" - saying Africans needed education, pointing out that "an educated man could not be oppressed because he could think for himself"; then in 1952 when Mandela became a deputy president of the ANC, the new president, the son of a Seventh Day Adventist missionary and himself a "devout Christian" teacher, was Chief Albert Luthuli. In his statement of principles entitled "The Road to Freedom is via the Cross" Luthuli affirmed his support for nonviolent passive resistance, in the struggle for equality.
Luthuli was a pacifist, and did not support the idea that the ANC should become a more militant organization. When it did, Mandela headed a wing that planned acts of sabotage on state installations -- but only where people would not be killed. Nothing further was ever planned or enacted, and the black-on-black violence which erupted towards the end of the apartheid era was much more to do with the desperation of hardline National Party leaders trying to pin crimes on the ANC to discredit their purpose of power- sharing in the new democracy.
Mandela calls himself a freedom fighter, but most of his fighting was done not with weapons but - even from a prison cell over several decades - with words. If he had not initiated months of negotiations with the government, and painstakingly carried them through, "freedom" would have been forever a pipe dream. When he first set up as a lawyer in Johannesburg, it was with Oliver Tambo, who "was deeply religious and had for a long time considered the ministry to be his calling"; their policy to help any who needed legal assistance had a strong component of pastoral care. This part of Mandela's character never left him, and he could feel compassion for a person of any colour or kind.
Chief Luthuli received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1960. In 1984 it was given to Archbishop Desmond Tutu, "who selflessly fought the evils of racism during the most terrible days of apartheid"; then in 1993 it was awarded to Mandela and de Klerk together, which was extremely symbolic. The thing that Mandela will always be remembered for, in my view, is the most Christ-like: the forgiveness of enemies.
-- Helen Watson White