Portside Date: December 6, 2013

Date of source: December 6, 2013

We Must Celebrate the Life and Work of Nelson Mandela

Dec 6, 2013

By Bill Fletcher, Jr.

I expected to hear the news. I did not know when it would arrive. I did not believe that he had much longer to live. So, when, this afternoon, I heard that Nelson Mandela, at the age of 95, had passed away, I was nevertheless surprised at my reaction. Actually there were two reactions.

The first reaction was that of the loss of an elderly relative. I know that sounds melodramatic but I feel that I grew up with Nelson Mandela. From my earliest days as a young radical I heard the name “Nelson Mandela”. I learned about the African National Congress, the Pan Africanist Congress, and later the other forces that contributed to the South African Freedom struggle. His picture was in my home in the form of a poster. He was present in my life. And, at the age of 95, one could not be surprised in hearing of his passing.

The second reaction was very different, and I am almost afraid to share it. It was one of celebration, that is celebrating the very fact that this man lived and made the immense contributions that he made. Celebrating his commitment and integrity; celebrating the extent of his courage, a courage that few of us can every imagine. I found myself celebrating his comrades, some alive, many dead, who, against all odds, took up a multi-decades struggle for freedom and social transformation. I celebrated the fact that Mandela believed so passionately in organization and did not wish to be worshiped as the ‘supreme leader.’ He saw in organization, that is the organization of the people, the key to liberation.

Nelson Mandela will be mourned and celebrated. But something else will happen. There will soon, probably very soon, be efforts to reinterpret his life. I do not mean leaving things out, as happened in the otherwise excellent film just released about his life. Rather, as we have experienced here in the USA with great leaders like King and Malcolm, there will be efforts to convert Mandela into a very safe character in order to advance the ends of the global elite. We will, for instance, not hear much about Mandela’s refusal to renounce armed struggle against apartheid, even though such a renunciation could have resulted in his release much earlier. We will not hear much about his expressions of gratitude to the Cuban people for their consistent support to the people of Angola, Namibia and South Africa who were fighting the South African apartheid regime. We will not hear about Mandela’s consistent, unwavering support for the Palestinian people’s struggle for national liberation.

The battle over Mandela’s legacy will not await his burial nor will it await a period of mourning. It happens immediately. And for that reason how we interpret his life and work will determine which Nelson Mandela we are actually recognizing and praising.

Mandela was not a saint, a point that he himself frequently made. He was also someone who made decisions and choices with which others in the South African movement–people of character and integrity–may not have agreed. None of that should distract us from appreciating his significance. After all, Mandela served to introduce the people of the world to the South African people. He opened a door, through his presence and struggle, to the battle that was waged by millions of otherwise faceless but very human, men and women.

Mandela will be missed. But we cannot end our thought there. We must express our appreciation to the Creator of all things that this planet was blessed with Nelson Mandela and those who stood with him when the global elite declared the situation hopeless.

Amandla!

Bill Fletcher, Jr. is the immediate past president of TransAfrica Forum; a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies; an editorial board member of BlackCommentator.com; and in the leadership of several other projects. 

The Anti-Anti-Apartheid Right & Memory

Reactionary Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry

Nelson Mandela didn't make it to this year's reunion of the old gang of former student activists who get together each summer to celebrate their friendship, political activism and solidarity. He'd of course never actually been there, to our "Return of the Secaucus Seven"-style alumni fire circle and lefty hootenanny, except in spirit. The closest I and my one-time anti-apartheid pals ever got to the actual movement leader, political prisoner and revolutionary was at his LA Coliseum stop on the prison release world tour of thanks he made in between release from Robben Island, getting the Nobel Peace Prize and becoming the democratically elected president of the new South Africa.

I was there, in the crowd welcoming Mandela. And, years earlier, I pitched a tent with residents of "Mandela City" at UCLA, one of hundreds of shanty town encampments student-organizers named after him. Organized specifically to lobby the University of California Regents to divest from the apartheid government, and more generally to support the worldwide liberationist movement to free up millions from the harshest form of segregation, it's sometimes forgotten that in California we actually won that struggle, achieving a modest but important goal and educating a lot of people along the way.

In August a group of about three dozen of those activists - now in our late forties and early fifties - pitched camp on the comfortable south shore of Lake Tahoe, compare notes, admire each other's smart, handsome kids, reflect with joking irony on our well-spent (!) youths, perhaps assess and even reconsider our youthful positions and actions - often strident (if arguably correctly) - and this summer celebrated some real political successes (ruling on DOMA). As usual, we confronted and embraced the ongoing social justice struggles (stopping wars, stopping drones, and stopping nukes) which still define most of our lives, and certainly our continuing lives together.

Today I edit a literary magazine, and represent my union at the university where I teach. Carolyn became a therapist. Matt is a city transportation planner. Leila designs web pages. Anne is a fundraiser. Lisa runs a writers' workshop. Elena is an attorney. Everybody does good, solid work in their communities. Along with the other defining struggles of the nightmare Reagan years, we are all very much defined by our small role in the international anti-apartheid struggle that also achieved important victories, so that the worldwide appreciation that follows Mandela's passing offers a chance to tell our stories again, consider lessons learned, and celebrate Mandela and other heroes.

But if you are an asshole like me, it will also be a chance to look for an apology, or an explanation from the right-wing creeps who ridiculed not only our domestic efforts, but either did nothing or opposed outright the international consensus as regards apartheid. Those women and men (mostly men) all about our age will likely not be asked to consider, or reconsider their history with Mandela and the freedom struggle. They were of course on exactly the opposite side of the struggle for freedom (and history) which meant so much not just to us, but to millions. I'm talking about David, who became a "moderate" and reasonable Republican columnist and this year called Code Pink "reprehensible narcissists." And Dinesh, who most recently produced a scurrilous fake documentary about President Obama. Ross, who proselytizes for his archaic moral universe. Laura, who screams on the AM radio. Jonah, who produces National Enquirer-style ad hominem attack. All were political reactionaries then, and are political reactionaries today. So I am guessing they are having a tough time coming up with something to say about Nelson Mandela. It's a "What did you do in the war, Daddy?" kind of problem, especially when your kids, however "conservative" have probably learned the story in elementary school about the brave black man who freed his own children, and everybody's, black or white.

I'd like to be the first to suggest they won't say they are sorry, as did (late, if not never) the hateful religious conservative bigots who advanced the scurrilous phony "conversation therapy" and apologized for it and, even better, closed up shop after being wrong, wrong, wrong. (Let's see if they give back the money!)

No, for most of the former Dartmouth Review crowd who physically and politically attacked our movement being reactionary and, yes, wrong, means never having to say you are sorry. Not sorry for attacking the ANC, calling Mandela a communist, supporting Reagan's absurd "constructive engagement" or standing there across the street from us at the South African consulate, as did the Young Americans for Freedom, with a homemade sign reading "Hang Mandela." I was there.

I saw it.

Maybe they aren't sorry? Those contemporaries of ours, the rightist "thinkers" whose positions and actions were represented in that provocative sign, those junior storm troopers of Dartmouth funded by rightist foundations and stink tanks (yes, the Koch Brothers), must be scrambling to write up their thought pieces, commentaries and revisionist analyses just now. They are all smart women and men, with power to write about anything they want, appear on television, and get paid for it too. So I imagine it's gonna be a challenge to come up with something new and still not say anything at all. Or to obscure, deny, rewrite or ignore the actions of citizens young and old who made the right choice. Or explain their own positions. Would they do the same today as they did then? I look forward to seeing how the middle-aged anti-freedom activists of the 1980s will look backward. I wonder who they will find there, standing on the other (wrong) side of the street with their mean signs and too-easy flags and hateful jeers.

I'm eager to always remember and never forget Mandela. And I'm willing to consider an apology from those who stood on the wrong side of history. But I'm absolutely not willing to let them forget. I was there. So were they.

Remember Mandela and SNCC

Sit It Out, Or Dance - Mandela’S Legacy

What did you do during the 27 years Nelson Mandela was in prison between 1962 and his release in 1990? 

I will be 75 years old next April and Nelson Mandela was 95 when he died this past Thursday. There are two people in my life who remind me strongly of our hero, Mandela. One is James Forman of SNCC, an architect of the modern civil rights movement. The other is Dr. William Barber, the architect of the current upsurge of southern grassroots organizing.

Forman and Barber look and sound at times just like Mandela. This is fitting because of the synergy existing between our freedom movement in the South and the freedom movement in Africa, especially South Africa. Apartheid was based on what the Boers and Afrikaans learned from the segregationist South and Jim Crow.

I remember in the early days of SNCC being inspired by African liberation struggles and was not entirely awake that they in turn were energized by what we were doing in the US. Many of us can be rightly proud of what we did while Nelson Mandela was in prison, but as Ms Baker said, "We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes."

What is happening even as we speak in NC proves once again the truth of another song we sang, "Freedom is a constant struggle. " After Reconstruction the freed women and men and their abolitionist allies no doubt thought our country could never go back to the all white ballot box. By the end of that century the all white ballot box was firmly reestablished. Likewise following the freedom struggle during the middle of the last century, we thought we could be secure in the thought that voting rights and women's rights would never again be threatened. Wrong, once again! The ultra right wing is using NC as a test tube perfecting the poison they've prepared for us all.

Dr. King, another one who reminds me of the giant, Mandela, famously said we would reach the promise land. Maybe what he meant is that the journey to freedom itself is the Promised Land. I believe the journey is the Promised Land and sure nuff, freedom is a constant struggle. Rise up!

From Selma to Soweto: Nelson Mandela and the Southern Freedom Struggle

By Chris Kromm

December 6, 2013

In 1994, at a speech celebrating his inauguration as the first black president of South Africa, Nelson Mandela glanced over to Coretta Scott King and echoed the words of her slain husband's address at the March on Washington more than 30 years earlier: "Free at last, free at last!"

After his release from prison in 1990 and rise to the presidency, Mandela would often pay homage to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern civil rights movement, which he said were an inspiration to him and other anti-apartheid activists in South Africa.

In the early 1960s, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. joined fledgling efforts to change the U.S. government's support of the South African apartheid regime, which he denounced as "modern-day barbarians."

But the influence went both ways: Mandela and the anti-apartheid struggle were also an inspiration to civil rights activists in the South, especially African-American organizers who, in the course of the 1960s, sought to link their fight against Jim Crow with liberation movements unfolding in Africa and around the world.

Several people were key to connecting the movements in South Africa and the U.S. South. George Houser, a white minister and early supporter of U.S. civil rights, helped found the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in 1942, and along with colleague Bayard Rustin organized one of the first "freedom rides" in the South in 1947. A child of Methodist missionaries, Houser had an internationalist perspective that led him to found what would become the American Committee on Africa (ACOA) in 1952 to support African liberation movements, especially in South Africa.

"We always conceived our work as part and parcel of the civil rights struggle," Houser would later say. "The struggle in Africa was to us, as Americans, an extension of the battle on the home front."

In 1960, the Sharpeville massacre -- where South African police opened fire on black demonstrators in a Transvaal township, killing 69 people -- helped propel apartheid into the news headlines, inspiring more U.S. civil rights leaders to take action. In 1962, Dr. King and Albert Luthuli -- a leader of the African National Congress when Nelson Mandela became active -- issued an Appeal for Action Against Apartheid with ACOA signed by 150 world leaders.

In December 1965, a year after Mandela had been jailed for life, Dr. King was asked to speak at a benefit for the American Committee on Africa, a New York-based group founded in 1953 to support African independence movements. King's speech began:

Africa has been depicted for more than [a] century as the home of black cannibals and ignorant primitives ... Africa does have spectacular savages and brutes today, but they are not black. They are the sophisticated white rulers of South Africa who profess to be cultured, religious and civilized, but whose conduct and philosophy stamp them unmistakeably as modern-day barbarians.

Noting that "the shame of our nation is that it is objectively an ally of this monstrous government," King called for a "massive international boycott" involving the U.S. and other industrialized nations.

King was never able to witness the situation in South Africa first-hand: According to reporter Jason Strazioso, King applied for a visa after being invited by student and church groups to visit, but the apartheid government denied it.

THE AFRICA CONNECTION

U.S. civil rights activists were learning about Africa through other channels. One event frequently mentioned in memoirs by activists is a 1964 trip organized by entertainer and progressive leader Harry Belafonte, who led 18 activists in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee on a three-week tour to meet African independence leaders.

The visit had a big impact on SNCC organizers like John Lewis, who would return a year later and report to his SNCC co-workers [pdf]: "I am convinced more than ever before that the social, economic, and political destiny of the black people in America is inseparable from that of our brothers in Africa."

Even as Vietnam dominated the public debate, the growing identification among civil rights activists with Africa helped keep apartheid on the movement's agenda in the 1960s. In March 1965, SNCC and CORE joined Students for a Democratic Society protest at Chase Manhattan Bank's New York headquarters for their loans to the South African regime; in 1969, Chase and nine other banks cancelled a $40 million loan to the government after church groups threatened to dump their Chase accounts.

In 1967, SNCC would submit a paper to the United Nations identifying with the South African struggle, even noting the parallels between the jails that held Mandela and King:

We can understand South Africa because we have seen the inside of the jails of Mississippi and Alabama and have been herded behind barbed wire enclosures, attacked by police dogs, and set upon with electric prods -- the American equivalent of the sjambok. There is no difference between the sting of being called a "kaffir" in South Africa and a "nigger" in the U.S.A. The cells of Robin Island and Birmingham jail look the same on the inside. As the vanguard of the struggle against racism in America, SNCC is not unfamiliar with the problems of southern Africa.

U.S. activists may have also drawn concrete organizing ideas from South Africa. Part of the inspiration for the "Freedom Vote" organized by Mississippi activists in 1963 -- mock elections that showed how African-Americans would vote if given real access to the ballot -- appears to have come from Allard Lowenstein's travels to South Africa, where he observed blacks using similar tactics to protest voting exclusions under apartheid. While Lowenstein's exact role in giving birth to the Mississippi "freedom vote" idea is contested, historians seem to agree his South Africa experience contributed in some way.

This rising consciousness about Africa would later find expression in the 1970s in groups like the African Liberation Support Committee and the TransAfrica Forum, which is credited with launching the first sit-ins to demand U.S. action in South Africa, precipitating the successful sanctions movement of the 1980s.

COMMON FOES

The freedom movements in the U.S. South and South Africa had another connection: They shared many of the same antagonists in the U.S. government.

The most visible common foes were Southern politicians like North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms. Helms bitterly opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which he called "the single most dangerous piece of legislation ever introduced in the Congress." He was also a staunch foe of King, whom he castigated as a "communist" who used "nonviolence as a provocative act to disturb the peace of the state and to trigger, in many cases, overreaction by authorities." When the Senate moved to create a holiday honoring Dr. King, Helms fillibustered.

Helms' animosity to King and civil rights was uncannily similar to his opposition to Mandela and the anti-apartheid struggle. In the U.S. Senate's 1985 deliberations over sanctions against South Africa, Helms moved to block debate on the bill but was outnumbered. After sanctions eventually passed, Helms was defiant, arguing that "[t]he thrust of this legislation is to bring about violent, revolutionary change, and after that, tyranny."

Helms specifically attacked Nelson Mandela as a "communist," saying, "Before we get his halo in place too securely, let's examine this guy." When Mandela came to address Congress after being freed in 1990, Helms reportedly didn't attend; when Mandela came again in 1994, Helms turned his back.

But Helms was just the most visible face of a broader Cold War perspective in the U.S. establishment that viewed both the civil rights and anti-apartheid movements with at best suspicion, and often as enemies of the state. The U.S. government feared the civil right's movement's ties to leftist groups, and an internal Department of Defense memo on SNCC from 1967 shows they took an especially deep interest in the travels of SNCC activists to South Africa and other countries and its impact on their political outlook.

U.S. opposition to Mandela and the anti-apartheid movement was similarly justified on the grounds of Cold War politics: Today, the U.S. State Department openly acknowledges that support for South Africa's apartheid government was defended largely because the regime was viewed as a "bulwark against communism."

But in both the U.S. South and South Africa, the combination of organized resistance and international solidarity was able overcome legalized segregation, if not fulfill the larger ambitions of both movements for broad social change. In his 1990 visit to Atlanta, Mandela invoked the legacy of both freedom movements in calling for a continuation of the struggle for human rights:

We are ... conscious that here in the southern part of the country, you have experienced the degradation of racial segregation. ... Let freedom ring. Let us all acclaim now, 'Let freedom ring in South Africa. Let freedom ring wherever the people's rights are trampled upon.'

For two interesting accounts of the U.S. anti-apartheid movement and its connections to U.S. civil rights, see the book "No Easy Victories" and the film series "Have You Heard from Johannesburg," the fifth episode of which is titled "From Selma to Soweto."

Chris Kromm is executive director of the Institute for Southern Studies and publisher of Facing South magazine in Durham, NC.

Nelson Mandela - A Memory

By Conn Hallinan

December 5, 2013

"One thing alone I charge you. As you live, believe in life. Always human beings will live and progress to greater, broader and fuller life. The only possible death is to lose belief in this truth simply because the great end comes slowly, because time is long."

W.E.B. DuBois, historian, activist, founder of the Niagara Movement, and author of the "The Souls of Black Folk."

Those words are taped on my desk next to James Baldwin's searing quote from "The Fire Next Time": "A civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that they be wicked but only that they be spineless." Nelson Mandela, the great clarion of African freedom, whose history was the very embodiment of courage, above all else believed in life. And like DuBois and Baldwin, he understood perseverance.

With the news that Mandela's breath finally failed him - his lungs were savaged by the tuberculosis he acquired during his 27 years of imprisonment in South Africa - two memories came to mind.

In the spring of 1961, I stood in a vast crowd of people in London's Trafalgar Square to hear a stream of speakers denounce apartheid, a term I had never before encountered. In part my ignorance was because I was an 18-year-old, fresh out of high school, where I had majored mainly in football and beer, but also because I was an American, and the word was simply not on my political radar screen. A few of us knew about the Sharpeville massacre the previous year, when South African police had murdered 69 peaceful demonstrators, but "apartheid" was as yet an exotic vocabulary word for me.

When I returned home to San Francisco to start college, a few of us tried to get some traction on the issue. The UN had called for an international boycott in 1962, but it had been almost completely ignored by the West. Even Britain's supposed anti-apartheid Labor Government rejected joining the UN boycott. It is hard to get Americans to look beyond their shores unless a lot of body bags are coming home. In any case, most of us were swept up in the civil rights movement, the free speech movement, and then the fight to end the war in Southeast Asia. The anti-apartheid movement went on the back burner.

It was not that Americans were unaware of apartheid - even though I doubt that a lot people, even in the civil rights movement, could have given the definition of the Afrikaner word: "the state of being apart" - it was that no one quite knew what to do about it. Until the anti-apartheid movement came up with the idea of divesting in companies that did business with the Pretoria regime, it seemed a bridge too far.

But starting in the 1970s that began to change and, without belittling any other area of the country, Oakland and Berkeley led the way. As the singer and activist Harry Belafonte said, San Francisco's East Bay was "The birthplace of the U.S. anti-apartheid movement."

But it was a long, slow slog.

In 1972 Berkeley Congressman Ron Dellums (D-Ca) introduced the "Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act," which ended up dead on arrival in Washington. The following year Berkeley Mayor Lonnie Hancock tried to get the city to divest from companies investing in South Africa, but the effort failed. It took six years of repeated efforts to get Berkeley to divest. When it finally did, it became one of the first in the nation to do so.

The turning point in the fight against apartheid came in 1984, when students and faculty at the University of California, Berkeley demanded that the biggest university in the world divest its billions of dollars of investments in companies that did business with South Africa. At the time I was a reporter, who wished them well, but had no great hopes of success. I kept thinking of a line from a poem by Irish revolutionary Padraic Pearse about those who had gone out "to break their strength and die, they and few, in bloody protest for a glorious thing. They shall be spoken of among their people. The generations shall remember them, and called them blessed."

How wrong I was. Memories of the past can sometimes blind us to the potential for the future.

The students built shantytowns on campus, besieged the Board of Regents and took over historic Sproul Plaza for six weeks. The University responded in typical fashion: tear gas, arrests, expulsions and stonewalling, all of which was like trying to douse a fire with gasoline. Civil rights groups and trade unionists joined the demonstrations, along with people throughout the Bay Area. The University soon found itself at war with the whole East Bay.

The pressure was just too much, even for the powerful and wealthy Board of Regents. In 1986 UC withdrew $3 billion from companies doing business with South Africa, dwarfing modest divestment decisions by universities like Harvard. Dellums re-introduced the divestment legislation, and in 1986 the U.S. Congress passed it. It was the death knell for apartheid.

Mandela remained in prison until 1990, when it became clear to the South African government that it could no longer withstand the international pressure to release him and terminate the system that had enchained a people for over 40 years. While apartheid was officially ended in 1990, it was not until Mandela was elected president in 1994 that it was finally buried.

And that leads to the second memory.

On July 1, 1990, Mandela came to the Oakland Coliseum and told 58,000 people, "It is clear beyond any reasonable doubt that the unbanning of our organization [the African National Congress] came as a result of the pressure exerted on the apartheid regime by yourselves." He thanked the crowd and held his fist in the air. No, Berkeley students, faculty, civil rights organizations, town residents and trade unionists did not bring down apartheid by themselves, but because they persevered and had spine, they started the avalanche.

It is sometimes hard to remember these lessons because DuBois was right: ends come slowly and history is long. But in the end it is those who fill the plazas, who chain themselves to doors, who shrug aside tear gas and billy clubs - who persevere in the face of prison, exile, even death - to whom history's laurels go.

We shall miss this dear man who loved freedom and humanity so much that, no matter what was done to him, would not break. He set the bar high. We honor him by clearing it.

Conn M. Hallinan is a columnist for Foreign Policy In Focus, and an independent journalist. He oversaw the journalism program at the University of California at Santa Cruz for 23 years