Read 21 Great Leaders: Learn Their Lessons, Improve Your Influence Online
Authors: Pat Williams
In May 1954, Mandela’s wife, Evelyn, gave birth to a daughter. Their marriage was crumbling (Evelyn suspected him of adultery). She joined the Jehovah’s Witnesses religion, which rejects political involvement. When Nelson tried to convince her to join the struggle, she tried to convert him to her religion. He insisted he was serving the people; she said serving God was a higher calling.
In December 1956, Mandela and 155 other resistance leaders were arrested and charged with high treason. The government placed the arrestees in large communal holding cells in Johannesburg Prison. Mandela could not have been happier. He recalled, “Many of us had been living under severe restrictions, making it illegal for us to meet and talk. Now, our enemy had gathered us all together under one roof.”
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While awaiting trial, the activists made plans and exchanged ideas.
After two weeks in prison, Mandela returned home. Evelyn and the children were gone, the house had been emptied to the walls, and his marriage was over. The divorce was finalized in March 1958. In the midst of the divorce proceedings, Mandela courted a social worker, Winnie Madikizela, and they were married in June.
The Treason Trial began in August 1958 before a three-judge panel in Pretoria. The trial lasted until 1961, when Mandela and his codefendants were acquitted. The verdict vindicated Nelson Mandela. It also humiliated and enraged the apartheid government.
At this point, Mandela was fully radicalized. He studied Fidel Castro’s violent takeover of Cuba and the guerrilla tactics of Mao and Che Guevara. Though Mandela denied ever being a member of the Communist Party, he cooperated with party leaders. The Communists were violent people, yet Mandela remained committed to avoiding violence.
As a young man in his thirties, Mandela had a vision of South Africa’s future in mind. He did not want a bloody civil war between the races. He envisioned reconciliation between whites and blacks in a future South Africa—a South Africa at peace with itself. He did not oppose sabotage, since the cutting of power lines could be forgiven. But he feared that the loss of even one life might ignite an unending blood feud.
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The ANC named Nelson Mandela to be a secret delegate to the Pan-African Freedom Movement for East, Central, and Southern Africa, which met in Ethiopia in February 1962. He met with Emperor Haile Selassie and also visited Egypt, Morocco, and other African nations.
In August 1962, after he returned to Durban, South Africa, police raided his home and took him into custody. Mandela was pleased with his arrest. He believed his trial would give him a platform to make his case for equality in South Africa. The government later moved him to Pretoria, where his wife, Winnie, could visit him.
Mandela’s trial, known as the Rivonia Trial, began November 26, 1963. Mandela showed up in his traditional African kaross. The charges included sabotage and collaborating with Communists to overthrow the government. Mandela represented himself and called no witnesses in his own defense. On April 20, 1964, Mandela was given time for a “plea of mitigation,” a speech asking the court for mercy. Mandela delivered, instead, a political speech, his famous “I Am Prepared to Die” speech.
He explained how he and the ANC engaged in sabotage against property—but carefully avoided any risk of injury or death. These acts of sabotage were, he said, acts of nonviolent opposition to the state in the spirit of Mahatma Gandhi. The ANC, he said, had exhausted all other nonviolent means, and the white government had only increased its oppression of black African people. “Each disturbance,” he said, “pointed clearly to the inevitable growth amongst Africans of the belief that violence was the only way out—it showed that a government which uses force to maintain its rule teaches the oppressed to use force to oppose it.”
Sabotage, he asserted, was a last resort. “It was only when all else had failed,” he said, “when all channels of peaceful protest had been barred to us, that the decision was made to embark on violent forms of struggle…. We did so not because we desired such a course, but solely because the government had left us with no other choice.”
As to the charge that he and the ANC had collaborated with Communists, Mandela recalled the alliance between Britain and the Soviet Union during World War II. The two nations had joined forces to defeat Hitler. In the same way, he said, the ANC and the Communists had joined forces to end apartheid. The Communists, he added, “were the only political group in South Africa who were prepared to treat Africans as human beings and as their equals.”
Then Mandela looked the judge square in the eyes and stated his vision for South Africa’s future: “I have dedicated my life to this struggle of the African people. 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 will live together in harmony and with equal opportunities…. If it needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”
Mandela’s words echoed in the stunned courtroom for several seconds. Then, from the black African side of the room, came a collective sigh of relief. Unmoved, the judge called the next witness.
Mandela’s speech was never supposed to be heard outside the courtroom. The South African government imposed official censorship on the press. But excerpts of the speech soon appeared in newspapers around the world. A clamor arose in the United Nations and the World Peace Council, demanding Mandela’s release. The South African government turned a deaf ear to the world.
Years later, Mandela said he believed the judge was prepared to condemn him to death. Because Mandela had essentially dared the court to impose death, the judge was practically forced to impose a lesser sentence. When the trial ended on June 12, 1964, Mandela was found guilty on all charges and sentenced to life in prison at hard labor.
Mandela was shipped to South Africa’s harshest prison, Robben Island, where he remained for the next eighteen years. His cell measured eight feet by seven feet, and he slept on a straw mat. He broke rocks into gravel and worked in the limestone quarry, where the glare from the white stone permanently damaged his eyesight. His mother died in 1968, and his firstborn son was killed in a car accident in 1969; Mandela was barred from attending either funeral.
Though the world was aware of Nelson Mandela at the time of his trial, the man and his plight faded from public consciousness. Then, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a global resurgence of interest in South Africa brought Mandela’s name to the fore. An international “Free Mandela!” campaign prompted the United Nations to press for his release. Again, the white government turned a deaf ear to the world.
Because of the Cold War, the United States took a convoluted approach to South Africa and Nelson Mandela. President Ronald Reagan wanted to send a strong antiapartheid message to South Africa, so he sent Edward Perkins, a politically independent black American diplomat, as ambassador to South Africa. The Reagan administration wanted to tilt South Africa toward equality and freedom, but without shoving South Africa into the arms of the Communists. The ANC had received direct support from the Soviet Union, so the Reagan administration didn’t feel the United States could openly press for the release of Mandela.
Through Edward Perkins, Reagan quietly pushed for Mandela’s release. Reagan gave Perkins full authority to make policy in Reagan’s name. Perkins, in his memoir
Mr. Ambassador: Warrior for Peace
, wrote, “I do not think either [Secretary of State George] Shultz or the president [Reagan] has been given the credit they deserve for the decision to turn around the apartheid policy. Against the advice of his political advisers in the White House, the president said, ‘Go to it.’ ”
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In 1982, the government moved Nelson Mandela to Pollsmoor Prison in Tokai, Cape Town. South Africa was changing. International sanctions were working and fears of a potential civil war were increasing. British prime minister Margaret Thatcher also called for Mandela’s release. Under growing pressure, South African foreign minister Roelof Frederik “Pik” Botha offered to release Nelson Mandela. But Mandela refused to walk free while the ANC was still banned.
Mandela was troubled by word that his wife, Winnie, had been involved in the torture and murder of political opponents in Soweto. In 1986—one year after Winnie Mandela received the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award—she gave a notorious speech in Munsieville Township, encouraging the practice of “necklacing,” hanging gasoline-filled tires around victims’ necks and burning the victims alive. She said, “We shall liberate this country” with “our boxes of matches and our necklaces.”
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Political violence damaged the reputation of the antiapartheid movement in the mid-1980s.
In August 1989, F. W. de Klerk became president of South Africa. Unlike his predecessors, de Klerk believed apartheid could not be sustained. Either the government would grant equality to black Africans—or the nation risked a race war. In November 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, signaling a new hunger for freedom around the world. F. W. de Klerk met with his cabinet to discuss change in South Africa, including the legalization of the ANC.
The government freed Nelson Mandela in February 1990. The event was broadcast around the world. Mandela delivered a stirring speech at Cape Town’s City Hall, asking all people to join him in a commitment to peace and reconciliation between the black African majority and the white minority. He stayed for a while in the home of his friend Archbishop Desmond Tutu and later gave a speech before a crowd of one hundred thousand people at Johannesburg’s Soccer City.
Free at last, Mandela went on a worldwide speaking tour, meeting with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of England, Cuban president Fidel Castro, Pope John Paul II, President George H. W. Bush of the United States, and many others. His old prison cell on Robben Island is now a United Nations World Heritage Site.
Mandela’s marriage to Winnie was shattered by her violent activities and her infidelity. Mandela separated from Winnie in April 1992; the divorce was finalized in 1996.
Nelson Mandela and F. W. de Klerk met together to negotiate South Africa’s future. They knew they had to avert civil war—or the blood of countless people, black and white, would be on their souls. They hammered out an interim constitution that included an American-style bill of rights.
In July 1993, Mandela and de Klerk went to the White House, where President Bill Clinton awarded each man the Liberty Medal. Soon afterward, they were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of their achievements for peace—and as an incentive to continue their quest.
The election of April 1994 ended apartheid and transformed South Africa into a multiracial democracy. F. W. de Klerk represented the National Party; Nelson Mandela represented the ANC. The two men debated on South African TV, and the debate ended with Mandela reaching out to shake de Klerk’s hand—a symbol of Mandela’s vision for South Africa.
The ANC swept into the National Assembly with 62 percent of the vote, and the National Assembly elected Nelson Mandela as the nation’s first black African president. He was inaugurated in Pretoria on May 10, 1994, and the ceremony was televised globally.
It was a stunning triumph. The black African majority of South Africa had achieved political power without bloodshed. Nelson Mandela headed an ANC-led government of national unity. Former president F. W. de Klerk became the nation’s first deputy president and a top adviser to President Mandela.
During his presidency, Mandela visited his boyhood village, Qunu. He walked around, greeted the townspeople, and even helped settle some tribal disputes. He was a leader who enjoyed (as Tom Peters put it) “leading by walking around.” He lived simply and donated a third of his income to the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund.
Did Nelson Mandela have his political blind spots? Absolutely. After spending most of his life either fighting for human rights or being unjustly imprisoned, Mandela made friends with some of the worst dictators and human rights violators in the world: Muammar Qaddafi of Libya, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani of Iran, Suharto of Indonesia, and Fidel Castro of Cuba (he praised Castro as “a source of inspiration to all freedom-loving people”).
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These errors in judgment do not, in my view, take anything away from his remarkable achievement in liberating South Africa from apartheid—and doing so without a bloody civil war.
Nelson Mandela’s personal trademark was the array of colorful batik shirts he wore, which came to be known as Madiba shirts (Madiba was Mandela’s Xhosa clan name). He would change his shirts four or five times a day, wearing every hue of the rainbow. It was fitting, because the rainbow symbolized his vision for the country.
In Mandela’s inaugural address on May 10, 1994, he said, “We shall build a society in which all South Africans, both black and white, will be able to walk tall, without any fear in their hearts, assured of their inalienable right to human dignity, a Rainbow Nation at peace with itself and the world.”
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South Africa is a nation of many colors and many cultures. Mandela had dreamed of bringing them all together, unified and strong, free and equal. The rainbow metaphor resonated deeply in Nelson Mandela’s soul. The rainbow, after all, was the metaphor God used to symbolize a covenant of peace in the biblical story of the flood of Noah. This appealed to the Christian soul of Nelson Mandela. The rainbow was also important in Mandela’s Xhosa culture, where it was identified with a vision of hope for the future.