b2o: boundary 2 online

  • Mandela's Reflections: Nelson Mandela: Decolonization, Apartheid, and the Politics of Moral Force

    Nelson Mandela was one of the world’s most important twentieth-century political prisoners. At a moment when world politics was in the throes of the “Cold War,” Mandela’s imprisonment focused much of the world’s attention on the authoritarian racial system in South Africa—apartheid.

    At the beginning of the twentieth century, the white settler country, the Union of South Africa, became independent. By then, South Africa was a society where all the processes of colonialism, its ways of life, its forms of rule, its ideology of white and European supremacy, its construction of African ethnic groups into “natives,” making them nonhuman, had congealed into a specific historical form. As Njabulo Ndebele writes about twentieth-century South Africa, “Everything [in South Africa] has been mind-bogglingly spectacular: the monstrous war machine developed over the years; . . . mass shootings and killings; . . . the mass removals of people; . . . the luxurious life-style of whites. . . . It could be said, therefore, that the most outstanding feature of South African oppression is its brazen, exhibitionist openness.” Apartheid was a regime of death and murder, and as Antjie Krong tells us, deaths were often “so gruesome as to defy the most active imagination.”

    Murder_at_Sharpeville_21_March_1960It was against this regime of white racial domination, death, and murder that Mandela began his political life. During that life, he was a radical member of the ANC Youth League, a member of the South African Communist Party, an advocate of peaceful confrontation, then of armed struggle. In his early political life, Mandela was an African nationalist with a radical anticolonialist outlook who belonged in the late 1950s and ’60s to that historic cluster of African anticolonial figures. At the same time, he was a courageous figure, one who took physical risks.

    For years, the armed wing of the ANC, Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the nation), had its headquarters in South Africa, until a South African police raid captured the leadership. At the famous Rivonia trial after the raid, the leadership, including Mandela, all expected to be sentenced to death. Instead, they were sent to Robben Island.

    There, during a period Mandela calls the “dark days,” he developed a practice of politics in which moral force was the critical element. The struggles he waged for the dignity of prisoners on Robben Island, the relationships he developed with racist warders, turning them from foes into his “honor guard” when he was allowed to meet his lawyers, were the result of an extraordinary practice of a politics in which human dignity was deployed against brutality, where there was the constant effort to construct a kind of politics in which moral force would force oppression to yield ground. It was the kind of politics in which, as he says, “we fought injustice to preserve our own humanity.” This is a form of politics in which creating a dignified, unbroken self is the most profound of political acts done under the most adverse of conditions.

    This kind of politics has a long history in anticolonial and antiracist political practices. Mandela’s practice of politics as a moral force led him to attempt to produce a process of reconciliation and, if possible, justice once the apartheid regime ended. Forgiveness was not a personal matter; rather, it was a political calculation of great risk. Could the politics of moral force bend the beneficiaries of the apartheid regime into themselves taking the risk, not of support for the ANC but of doing the necessary work to build a new South Africa? Nearly twenty years after the 1994 election, which ushered in political equality, this remains one of the unanswered questions of South Africa.

    In the politics of moral force, the political personality is central. Mandela was well suited for this role. He had devoted his life to ending the system; he had been jailed for his beliefs and his political practice; he had suffered and therefore had the moral authority to turn that suffering into a political force of change.

    The April 1994 election in South Africa was a twentieth-century watershed. When Mandela walked out of jail that day in 1992, the joy many experienced was an acknowledgment that, at long last, the final bastion of racial oppression that had accompanied colonial power was at an end. Mandela was central to that drama, and he represented both the end as well as the possibility of a new beginning. That currently what was seen in South Africa as this exceptional moment of possibility has now stalled gives us all pause and should be generative of new thinking. But in that moment of 1994, in that moment when it seemed that Africa would lead the world in a new way of politics and rule, would redefine politics—in that moment, we remember a possibility, and in that memory we have hope.

    I met Mandela twice, once in Jamaica and then again in South Africa on the eve of the 1994 general election. It is the second meeting that stays with me. Late at night in a Johannesburg hotel, he recalled the highlights of the struggle against the apartheid regime. There was nothing about him, not one story of self, in the recounting. Instead, he talked about the young people who were in rebellion in the townships, about Chris Hani, the African general secretary of the South African Communist Party, who had then just been recently assassinated, and about the support given to the ANC and the general Southern African liberation movements by Cuba. The most searching segment of the discussion that night was his preoccupation with the question, what would become of the ANC after the elections? In the room, we were all aware of the fate of twentieth-century national liberation movements in political office, and so there was a robust debate about what could be done in order to ensure that the ANC would not go down that path. This was Mandela the party leader thinking about the possible future of the political party he led. When he left us that night, those of us in the meeting knew that we had been in the presence of a rare political figure, whose every fiber had been honed by one of the central questions of politics, of all politics—how do we construct a just and equal association of humans into a polity?

    –Anthony Bogues

  • Mandela's Reflections: Mandela Memories: An African Prometheus

    I first met Mandela in 1991 in Johannesburg, at the offices of the ANC during my visit to South Africa, while a guest of the Congress of South African writers, who had invited me to talk at various community centers to share ideas and experiences in the unfolding postapartheid democratic process. Mandela had just resumed the presidency of the ANC after twenty-seven years in prison. I could never have imagined that my very first engagement in the country would be with the legend of that struggle.

    Mandela had been part of my literary and political imagination since his days as the Black Pimpernel who, time and again, made a fool of the pursuing apartheid police. A Makerere student at the time, I had just read Orczy’s novel The Scarlet Pimpernel, set during the French Revolution, and it was easy to equate the French reign of terror with apartheid’s and Mandela with the Percy character, the master of disguises and elusive moves. The real Mandela of the Rivonia trial, Robben Island, and worldwide celebrity added to the legend. He had been the subject of poetry, politics, and popular performance. In London, I had worked with the ANC in exile, even met with the hardworking Oliver Tambo, his legal partner, the one that held together a party then dubbed terrorist by the West. So Mandela’s name was always in the horizon of my being, and now, at last, I was going to meet the man.

    I did not know what to expect. For some reason, despite the pictures of his sweet self coming out of prison after twenty-seven years, despite, indeed, the current pictures of the man in the world press, I still thought I would see the young lawyer Mandela, hair parted in the middle, slightly puffed cheeks, of long ago, really of his pre-Pimpernel days. I met a lean, dark-suited gentleman, his height dwarfing mine.

    Was he going to talk about his prison days, ask me about Kenya politics, or simply voice his dreams for a South Africa whose leadership he would soon assume? He didn’t. He talked mostly about books, what African writers had meant to him and his fellow political prisoners, how books had played a role in buoying up their spirits. Books, yes, books and more books. I felt as if through me he was talking to all writers of the world and history.

    We sat at eye level, one on one, but I didn’t realize that he grew on me by the second, a towering presence because he did not try to be towering. Before I knew it, an hour and a half had gone; he was ready to receive the next visitor.

    What stayed with me, as I left for KwaZulu Land, was his soft introspective tone. An incident in my first workshop at a library would make me revisit the tone. The itinerary was clear: after the library event a few miles from Durban, we were to drive to the graveyard of Albert Luthuli, the former president of the ANC, to pay respects to his memory. I was in the midst of telling the Kamĩrĩthũ3 story, the community open-air theater that I had been part of, the involvement of workers, small farmers, the landless, the jobless, and the power of an awakened consciousness, when suddenly I saw a commotion in the audience. The ANC chief of security who had accompanied us hurried out of the room, unbuttoning his jacket. They had arrested an Inkatha gunman about to enter the hall. They disarmed him in the nick of time.

    My workshop ended abruptly. Our visit to Luthuli’s grave was canceled. All those present, including an American envoy, drove in a convoy back to Durban. It was then that I realized that my driver was an ANC security officer, and he told me that his own brother had been murdered by thugs, allegedly Buthelezi’s men, the week before.

    After Durban, it was down to Port Elizabeth, in the Eastern Cape. I visited the humble home of one of the ANC cadres. He was a father who seemed to embrace the warmth of his family in gratitude, as if it had been a gift he had not expected. Then later, he took me to the back of the house. He did not show it to me, but he pointed to where his AK-47 was hidden. I think he saw himself as a soldier on leave, or enjoying a temporary cease-fire with the enemy. He could be called to arms at any time, and he could never, of course, be sure of a safe return to his family.

    The two incidents brought home to me the meaning of Mandela’s introspective tone. The country was literally on the verge of a bloodbath, and he knew it. He held the key to its stability; despite his calm demeanor, this must have weighed on him.

    But Mandela held the nation together, the four years that he was president, guided by the realization that there is no room for vengeance in good politics. It was easier to tear down than to build. Even in serving one term, he showed his faith in the ANC and the people.

    I would meet Mandela again after my 2003 Steve Biko Memorial Lecture. The meeting was in Johannesburg again, this time in the offices of his foundation. By then he had left office, the first black president of a Free South Africa, and Thabo Mbeki had taken over as the second. He was different this time, a bit more effusive. He talked about the contribution of Cuba and African states to the struggle. He talked a little about his continuing contact with leaders of the world, Bush and Blair in particular. He reminisced over Biko, paying tribute to the role of the black consciousness movement and indeed that of the other political parties in the liberation, mentioning Robert Sobukwe by name. Again, so generous in his inclusiveness. The question of his giving the Steve Biko lecture came up, and indeed he gave one, the following year.

    As we were leaving, he stood up and placed his hand on my shoulder. Thus we walked to the door, he leaning on my shoulder. I told Xolela Mangcu, my host, how touching that was: he walking us to the door, his hand on my shoulder, a gesture almost reminiscent of the image of his long walk to freedom. Xolela laughed. Sorry, nothing personal; he does that with people. For support. Yes, he was clearly more frail than the first time we met, but his spirits were still up, once again his charisma and his towering presence commanding awe and respect rather than demanding it.

    The third time we met was in 2004, when he, Ali Mazrui, and I were to be accorded honorary doctorates to mark the renaming and relaunching of the former University of Transkei as Walter Sisulu University. Walter Sisulu, an ANC stalwart, was also Mandela’s political and spiritual mentor. My wife, Njeeri, and our two children, Mumbi and Thiong’o, were less excited about my doctorate than the fact that they were going to meet Mandela. It was an emotional moment for me because I was returning to Kenya for the first time after twenty-two years of forced exile.

    Alas, we never met up with him: he was down with something, he could not make it to the ceremony, and he would be given his robes at his home. But a few days later, we had the pleasure of visiting his birthplace, Qunu, where now he will rest forever.

    His passing on, though expected, shocked me: at the back of my mind was always a hope that the man who had cheated death many times would once more rebound. He remains a towering figure in African and world politics.

    When Mandela was released from prison, captured in the iconic picture of his walking hand in hand with Winnie Mandela, I wrote an article in Gĩkũyũ, “Kũngũ Baba Mandela” (Welcome home Father Mandela), because I could not see myself recording this moment in any but an African language. I compared him to mythic figures, Prometheus in particular. For like Prometheus, he had been chained to a rock for bringing to humans the knowledge of fire, really, the secrets to energy and light. He had survived, and now, at ninety-five, he had passed to join other heroes and heroines of history and myth.

    Blessed Peace, Mandela
    translated from the Gĩkũ yũ

    Even those that then called him a terrorist
    Now acclaim him a freedom fighter

    Those that once wanted him gone
    Are now shedding tears that he’s gone

    It is said that truth never dies
    It cannot be buried in a hole

    They tried to kill it with bullets
    They wondered how did it escape?

    They put it in chains
    They sent it to Rob’em Island
    They made it break stones twenty-seven years
    They tortured it to make truth give up hope
    They tried all to make truth surrender to lies

    They did not realize it was the body breaking stones
    That truth cut thru the handcuffs and barbed wires long ago
    That it was truth that guided the armed struggle
    Singing that which had been sung by other seekers of freedom

    You can send us to exile and prisons
    Or confine us to islands
    But we shall never stop struggling for freedom . . .

    Mandela Madiba Rolihlahla of Thembu and African clan
    Your body that has gone to rest under the shades of holy peace

    The truth they tried to shoot down with bullets
    The truth they put in hand and leg chains
    The truth for which they put you in jail and detention
    That truth lives on among the people forever
    In the hearts of all fighters for truth and justice the world over

    ___
    2. Parts of this article have been published in the Standard (Kenya); and the Sunday Independent (South Africa).

    3. For more on Kamĩrĩthũ, see my books, Decolonizing the Mind and Detained: A Writer’s Prison Diary.
    ___

    –Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

  • Mandela's Reflections: Nelson Mandela

    F. W. de Klerk is the first president of South Africa whom I knew from TV and remembered. As it turns out, he became the last in the long list of white presidents of South Africa. It was late 1989; I was ten. Were it not because of the June Fourth tragedy in the PRC that took place some months before de Klerk acceded to the South African state presidency, I might have continued for more days, even years, to mope about unasham- edly, nonchalant of other people’s day-to-day struggle with and in the world. I might have kept on, for some more time, to think of the TV as no more than my daily feeder of Japanese animations. Of course, even though in my teenage years I became more educated and less complacent about my privileged life in one of the world’s richest cities, I paid scant attention to how the Ashanti fought the British, or how the Mau Mau resorted to violence against violence. This in part has to do with the fact that I received no doubt the finest elite education then available in town—for example, I had the good fortune to study “English Literature” as a subject, which only five or six schools in the whole of Hong Kong have the resources to offer.

    It took me a while to emerge from this protected world of myself as a champion of colonial education and to identify the beauty of literature less in a particular national taste or in the workings of one imperial language. The judgment that literature is above all else the living proof of the historical mind’s greatest imaginative achievements came to me through and beyond my colonial education. In terms of time, it took me decades of slow work to finally open my mind and commit it to William Empson’s most humanistic call: to see “moral independence” from “one’s formative society” as “the grandest theme of all literature.” In practice, I spent years learning finally to appreciate that Okonkwo’s pastoral language is by itself beautiful, to understand that the protagonism of Okonkwo lies adequately in the virtue of the black man’s own capacity for innovations, exceptional achievements, and best hopes. Ultimately, I want to point out that I spent as much time in a free land to finish my long walk to freedom as an exceptional man used—indeed, was forced to use—to make his journey under circumstances that were “intended to cripple [a whole race] so that [black men] should never again have the strength and courage to pursue [their] ideals” (Mandela). Even so, the gap in our achievements is a total spectacle.

    Despite all those unreasonable reasons that beefed up and sustained my ignorance, in the decade between 1989 and 1999 I did know President Mandela. Yet, before Nelson Mandela came to me as President Mandela, the antiapartheid icon whom Nadine Gordimer once described as “the personification of [his people’s] future,” he was first and foremost a political prisoner. This is so due to two more unreasonable reasons. First, overwhelmed for some years by the media’s visual representation of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, I gave in to the reeling riotousness of visual culture and abandoned the needed task of understanding the complexity of my neighboring continent. In those years, Africa was for me the prison house of internal conflicts, poverty, and dangerous politics. The second reason has to do with popular culture. In 1990, Beyond, the city’s then most famous rock band, wrote one of its signature songs,《光辉岁月》(The glorious days), to pay homage to Mandela “with best wishes.”1 The hit ballad had, since the 1990s, cemented the image of Mandela as a “battered body,” who “alone is left / to welcome the glorious days, / to hold tight to freedom in the storms.” Beyond shapes and sings the image of Mandela in my and my generation’s mind; we have come to know Mandela as always “a lifetime of faltering struggle.” I believe “The Glorious Days” remains, even today, the only set of Cantonese lyrics and melodies dedicated to the man and memorable to generations of Hong Kongers and Chinese-speaking people. In the light of this single’s singleness, I translate the last part of it here for all its worth, beauty, one-timeness, and inadequacy. Above all else, though, I translate it to disconcert the complacency that is so common in my culture and society:

    Those without colors live colorful lives.
    Can’t we move beyond the color difference?
    Pray that equality arrives for all.
    A riotous array of color sparked beauty
    ’Cause it does not discriminate one from another.

    可否不分肤色的界限
    愿这土地里 不分你我高低
    缤纷色彩闪出的美丽
    是因它没有 分开每种色彩

    ___
    1. Chen Zhifen 陈志芬, “Interview with Wong Ka Keung: Beyond Dedicates ‘The Glorious Days’ to Mandela” (專訪黃家強:Beyond《光輝歲月》獻曼德拉), BBC Chinese Online, December 6, 2013, www.bbc.co.uk/zhongwen/simp/china/2013/12/131206_mandela_pop -song_beyond.shtml. See also Linda Chen, “Weibo Reminisces Mandela’s Glorious Days,” Sino-US.com, December 6, 2013, www.sino-us.com/120/Weibo-reminisces-Mandelas -Glorious-Days.html. These web pages contain the lyrics of the song in full.
    ___

    -Ruth Y. Y. Hung

  • Mandela's Reflections: Mandela, Tunisia, and I

    I have experienced Mandela as a presence, an absence, and a label.

    During the historic first free elections in Tunisia, held on October 23, 2011, I voted early, then set off to tour the polling stations in my hometown of Kasserine, a neglected and rebellious part of the country that brought the Tunisian revolution to sharp pitch early in January of the same year. The mood was buoyant, and long queues of determined men and women had already formed. I took lots of photos to mark the moment but also to tell the story when I got back to Oxford. But when I wanted to express what the elections were like on my Facebook page, my mind went back to one picture I have had in my office in the United States and in the United Kingdom for many years. It was an AP photo of two Zulu women carrying an infirm friend to the voting station in Usuthu, in the Natal Province of South Africa, on April 26, 1994. Their determination and hope was galvanized by Mandela. Those images and the inspired hope that fed them had stayed with me until the day when that “Mandela moment” came to North Africa, fifteen years later.

    The elections were part of a continuing transitional phase in Tunisia. After several traumatic decades, the country sorely needed reconciliation and healing. But for all the good will, active civil society, several conferences, money, and speeches, Tunisia risks either failing its transitional justice, and reproducing structures of authoritarianism, or being torn apart, like Syria, Egypt, and Libya. Throughout this period, three years now, I kept thinking that what we needed was a Nelson Mandela of our own. We missed having a national hero, a father figure, a reassuring face, a man of consensus able to forgive and inspire feelings of genuine leadership in reconciliation and healing. Mandela seems to have set a model for transitional justice that the Arab revolutions need at this moment. For cultures and societies that have been ruled by strong men and have been internalizing models of authoritarian power, a revolution has been a welcome leveling of authority. But at the same time, the atomization of the scene among numerous parties and figures of limited appeal and influence, as well as the return of harmful and fractious identity politics, left people without a moral force that could broker differences and show the way, the Mandela way. But then again, the Arab revolutions may have shown how specific to South Africa Mandela has been and how difficult his example was to transfer or to emulate.

    Mandela had indeed been an inspiration to many Tunisian progressives in the student and labor movements for decades before 2011. But things being what they are in the market machine, Mandela has become an iconic image and therefore consumed and misquoted at will. The wide dissemination of this image made it inevitable that local versions of Mandela would be invented and circulated, regardless of how flimsy resemblances may be. But for me, the peak of this instrumentalization saw a figure of Islamism in Tunisia, someone who did so much to divide the country and erode its modernity and freedoms before and after the revolution, dubbed “the closest thing to an Islamic Nelson Mandela.” Aside from the absurdity of the phrase “Islamic Mandela,” the label was conferred on Rachid Ghannouchi, by an American “expert” and Harvard academic keen on pushing two agendas that could not be furthest from Mandela’s ideals. The first was developed in Iraq and driven by dreams of reconquest and repartition of the Middle East, led by Bush Junior. The second points to the desperate need “experts” and pundits felt to assign leaders to Arab revolutions and anoint political Islam at the helm. Mandela has become, then, a convenient metaphor at the service of grotesque opportunism to usurp the ideals of Arab revolutions.

    -Mohamed-Salah Omri

  • Mandela's Reflections: Malaysian Mandela

    At secondary school in Singapore in the mid-1980s, we read Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country. One word I will always associate with that novel is shantytown. The teacher told the class that shantytowns “were sort of like our kampongs.” But I knew even then that a kampong was not the equivalent of a shantytown. Kampong is the Malay word for “village,” and it evokes the image of traditional wooden houses with atap roofs surrounded by coconut trees, now depicted in watercolor paintings and epochal postcards. The shantytowns of Paton’s novel, on the other hand, were makeshift shacks that black people had put up as a temporary solution to the housing shortage in Johannesburg. They were constructed out of metal sheets, cardboard, sacks, and other discarded materials. And they were disease-infested and crime-ridden.

    With the coming of Chinese and Indian migrant labor to Singapore when it was a British colony, kampongs mushroomed all over the island, each flaunting their own ethnic character. There were Malay, Chinese, and Indian kampongs, but they were not the result of forced racial segregation.

    I think I know what my teacher meant, though. To her, kampongs had that same run-down, squalid look of the shantytowns, not the look of modernity that the Housing Development Board of Singapore, postindependence, wanted to project with brand new high-rise residential flats. But unlike some of the white voices in Paton’s novel calling for South Africa to be divided into white and black areas, the Singapore government wanted to demolish the kampongs and relocate their residents to HDB flats where people of all ethnicities would live together.

    It was also around this time that I began to hear the word apartheid more frequently. Nelson Mandela’s imprisonment for his fight to end apartheid was very much in the news. The newsreels showed scenes of livid Mandela supporters in the streets, pounding the air with their raised, clenched fists demanding his release. Singapore, where the Chinese migrant population had become the majority, had had its fair share of racial riots in the 1950s and ’60s. So to see what would be a repeat of Singapore’s worst nightmare made me sit up and pay attention. Apartheid was a new word for newsreaders, and there was some confusion over the way it was pronounced. Aparthighed, aparthayed, a-par-tide, aparteed, apart-hate. Apa tight. But that did not influence my sense of the uniqueness of the term.

    Years later, Mandela took on a somewhat different significance, this time in neighboring Malaysia, a country where the ethnic mix was just like Singapore’s, except that in Malaysia the Malays were the majority, not the Chinese. Opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim, incarcerated on charges of sodomy and corruption, was being proclaimed the “Malaysian Mandela” after his release from prison in 2004.

    Was Anwar not embarrassed by the comparison? Mandela was in prison for twenty-seven years, Anwar six. Most embarrassing of all, Mandela’s struggle and sacrifice eventually led to the end of apartheid. But did Anwar’s jail term eventually lead to the reformed, corruption-free Malaysia he claimed he so desired, in which there were no longer racial policies designed to benefit his own community, the Malays? Did it lead to an operation similar to mani pulite in Italy, which exposed corruption in connection with the wealth of the ruling class?

    It is understandable why Anwar would be fashioned after Mandela. If a jailed activist can overthrow the government of his country, win the Nobel Peace Prize, and become premier of his nation, so can a Malaysian. Not just any Malaysian, perhaps, but Anwar Ibrahim. Moreover, “Malaysian Mandela” sounds much better and less resonant of a colonial mentality than “Malaysian Jimmy Carter.” Never mind that Mandela himself would have never called himself a “South African Anwar.”

    Once in a while, educated Malaysians of all ethnicities, many of them Anwar supporters, will say that racialism in Malaysia is “apartheid-like,” even though Malaysians, like Singaporeans, have never known what it means to not be able to vote because of their race or to live in segregated areas. They seem to have been unable to come up with a suitable word to describe the political and institutional racism of their country.

    What Nelson Mandela and the Afrikaans word most associated with him—apartheid—mean for Malaysia has, paradoxically, less to do with the nation’s race problem than with its lack of imagination as embodied in the personality cult effect of Anwar Ibrahim.

    Unhappy, the beloved country that steals a hero.

    -Masturah Alatas

  • Mandela's Reflections: Or, The Whale

    11230538153_52fed7ef7d_qNelson Mandela’s incarceration in 1964, under a life sentence threatening two decades of work and his personal well-being as a forty-six-year-old South African political activist, coincided with the escalation of Lyndon Johnson’s genocidal aggression in Vietnam. Johnson’s campaign of implacable violence fomented the end of his catastrophic political career, four decades of the greatest criminal venality in American history. Barely three years out of office, Johnson died in January 1973, a prisoner under constant FBI and CIA scrutiny on his ranch in Texas, a tortured remnant of his formerly dominant persona.

    Against that bitter reckoning, Nelson Mandela’s ninety-five years have just begun their journey toward explication. To a rare degree, given evidence recently within our grasp, his life was astonishingly transparent. It stands now as it conducted itself over seven public decades, in absolute contrast to the obfuscations of power and the exploitation of nameless others that define administrative state energy since the onset of the American Civil War. That difference represents one measure of the ongoing obscenity inflicted upon American citizens under the rubric of “security.” Despite the loss and theft of documents, Nelson Mandela’s life is and was, more rather than less, available to public accounting. In sharp contrast, the American state apparatus has regularly operated as a command center for the creation and elaboration of crises of increasingly contradictory kinds. This insidious (virtually unopposed) gambit reached its pinnacle to date with the construction of 9/11 events that successfully installed a civil, military, interinstitutional, and commercial ethos of essentially impregnable global surveillance. The danger of such self-authenticating corruption is obvious. The American empire is on a perpetual war footing. It strikes without constitutionally mandated authority. Eisenhower’s prophesy has been realized and echoes across the last half century with the ironic jolt of truth-telling farce.

    The degradation of originating constitutional ideals, with legal safeguards for presumed innocence, is now a de facto modus vivendi. The term crisis is inadequate to categorize our massively alienated social condition. The idea of citizenship is under siege in America. Financial establishments are aware of this, cynically wagering on odds that “enlightened” self-interest constructs from the exfoliating demise.

    DF-ST-87-06962Nelson Mandela’s courageous life in South Africa provides a complex narrative that holds too many anomalies to derive direct and immediate circumstantial contrast. One feature of the difference involved, however, goes to the heart of political viability—of sustainable communal and institutional practices. The tattered remainder that divides Mandela’s successful work to dismantle apartheid—mapped out piece by piece with impeccable vigilance in his diary and notebook entries (in prison letters, often sequestered, and notes of conversations during his governing years)—and Lyndon Johnson’s exemplary abuse of institutional rationality, professional courtesy, traditional common sense, and a massively compliant legal system resides in the long enduring loss of America’s shared covenant in which common interests are not subordinated to (or defined as) private controlling and acquisitive interests. That loss can be measured quite literally by the distance between the unwavering humanity of Mandela’s career, despite suffering, crafted day by day (as we now see in recently published texts), which opposed and skillfully mocked habits of paranoid secrecy and vengeful murderousness that, during the decades their lives overlapped, mortally unraveled Lyndon Johnson.

    I view Nelson Mandela’s complex personality, with its spiritual and political rigor, as a concrete embodiment of astute secular understanding that includes a calculus of human disaster. The moment has long been with us when the most economically ascendant and aggressively militarized nation on the planet must look beyond its parochial horizon toward any region or social practice where injustice confronts its own terror. Power terrorizes overtly or by acquiescence with failure to intervene. Inevitably, it petrifies from the audacity of its pride: sclerotic earnestness, self-righteous rhetoric, self-verifying insularity, self-destructive protection.

    These are errors of identity that Nelson Mandela purged from his life’s work. The force of his example cannot be appropriated to distant shores, certainly not to our own. Nonetheless, it carries the splendor of his once-marginalized insight and temporarily thwarted persuasion, compassionate and humble, wary yet suffused with humor, animated by gentle sarcasm and continual self-scrutiny. Critical energy finds a uniquely self-deprecatory élan in Mandela’s life work, suffused with something very much akin to Antonio Gramsci’s devotion to “the long war of position.” In the vacuum of national and global leadership circumscribing our current collective bewilderment, we might seek (as Melville noted) “the one warm spark in the heart of the Arctic crystal.” Without undue idealizing, but with something that approaches amazed and profound respect, I hold Mandela’s legacy of what Nietzsche called intellectual conscience as a spark worth dwelling with. I suspect its warmth derives from the scrupulous meanness of stubborn mental tenacity, partly, no doubt, from a habit of self-calibrating reflective candor and partly from the sheer good luck that ferociously enabled humane karma sometimes earns.

    -Jim Merod

  • Mandela's Reflections: Nelson Mandela on Nightline; or, How Palestine Matters

    Israeli_Apartheid_Week_2009_posterMandela’s funeral was on December 15, the same day that final votes were cast for the American Studies Association resolution answering “the call of Palestinian civil society for a boycott.” That resolution also “supports the protected rights of students and scholars everywhere to engage in research and public speaking about Israel-Palestine and in support of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement.”

    Mandela’s service and burial took place at his home at Qunu, the village where he grew up in the Eastern Cape. In the heavy rain, with an interpreter signing nonsense, the booing of Jacob Zuma, and the stolid parade of dignitaries—except for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who refused to attend—the scene was set for the transformation of flesh into icon. It is not easy to strike at the mask, to dig behind the figure cultivated by political elites who have so much to gain from such mystification.

    • • • •
    After twenty-seven years in prison, Mandela was at last freed after continued black resistance and a successful boycott against apartheid South Africa. Ted Koppel hosted Mandela on June 21, 1990, just four months after his release, at City College of New York in Harlem for a conversation cast as a “Town Meeting with Nelson Mandela.” Broadcast on ABC’s Nightline, it commemorates, if that is the right word, Mandela’s first visit to the United States.

    Whereas politics usually demands a certain amount of playacting, if not outright dissimulation, the appearance of Mandela on this stage destroys any such pretense. His candor, resoluteness, and fierce intelligence are instructive for academics caught up in the morass of invective and abuse that has followed their support of the ASA resolution.

    The controversial sticking point, then as now, is the Palestinian struggle. The interview occurred during the First Intifada, an uprising against the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories: the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. What is most striking in watching the interview now is the calm and restraint, even good humor, that Mandela maintains in what often seems Koppel’s deliberate staging of confrontation, his condescending attempt to question Mandela’s credibility, to trivialize his cause.

    Koppel turns to Mandela’s support for the Palestinians, particularly Arafat’s PLO, and questions what this means for his Jewish supporters. As if proud to pull the proverbial rabbit out of the hat, as if certain that the sounding of the word “Israel” in a town hall meeting will unsettle the gravitas of the man before him, Koppel introduces Ken Adelman. A neoconservative Republican political analyst at the Institute for Contemporary Studies and later a champion of the “war on terror” and the war on Iraq, he is the first to challenge Mandela.

    Adelman wonders how Gaddafi or Castro or Arafat can be Mandela’s “models of leaders of human rights” and admonishes, “You’ve met over the last six months three times with Yasser Arafat.” Mandela explains that political analysts make the mistake of thinking “that their enemies should be our enemies.” Then, without the slightest apprehension, he intones, “Yasser Arafat, Colonel Gaddafi, Fidel Castro support our struggle to the hilt.” His voice rises and deepens on that last word.

    Koppel prepares us for another question with a nod to those he calls “some distinguished guests” who are “very concerned.” Mandela acknowledges Henry Siegman, then executive director of the American Jewish Congress and now an outspoken critic of Israel. After reminding Mandela of the commitment of Jewish organizations to the struggle “against apartheid, against racism, against injustice in South Africa,” Siegman adds that he must “express profound disappointment” with the answer that Mandela gave to the previous question. It suggests, he adds, “a certain degree of amorality.”

    Mandela puts the record straight: “We are a liberation movement which is fully involved in a struggle to emancipate our people from tyranny.” He adds, “We have no time to be looking into the internal affairs of any country.” Later, he will trap Koppel in this expectation of a double standard. Why, he asks, should he be expected to be drawn into the internal affairs of countries such as Libya or Cuba but not in the internal affairs of the United States? With unerring precision, he then confronts the question of Palestine, the reach of Israel, and the meaning of resistance.

    Not interested in labels or easy dichotomies, Mandela has no trouble acknowledging the disproportionate representation of Jews in the South African liberation struggle or his closeness with them. Nor does he question the right of Israel to exist. But he gravely rejects Israel’s “right to take the territories they conquered from the Arab world, like the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, and the West Bank.”

    Finally, Koppel lectures Mandela about political expediency, warning him that he has said some “controversial things, not the kinds of things necessarily that a very political man says.” He suggests that he might have alienated some in this country who have “within their hands, within their power, either to continue sanctions against South Africa or to raise those sanctions, to lift them.” Mandela says he does not understand what he means. In an oblique reference to the Jewish lobby, Koppel hints at the “close alliance between the Jewish population and the black population, in the civil rights struggle. There is likely to be a rather negative reaction to some of the things that you have said.” Mandela comes forward without hesitation in words more analytical than polemical:

    It would be for us a grave mistake to consider our attitude towards Yasser Arafat on the basis of the interests of the Jewish community. We identify with the struggles of the Jewish people and their persecution right down the years. . . . But that does not mean to say that the enemies of Israel are our enemies. We refuse to take that position. You can call it unpolitical, or a moral question, but for anybody who changes his principles depending on whom he is dealing with, that is not a man who can lead a nation.

    For a moment, Mandela’s answer silences Koppel. In a sudden pause that lasts for quite a while, we view Mandela’s attentiveness to Koppel, so motionless, as if he had been turned to stone, and we realize that the game is over. Mandela remarks gently in a kind of serene and twinkling wonder: “I don’t know if I’ve paralyzed you.”

    The more obvious the attack, the more eloquent is Mandela’s response, the vivid display of what it means to think thought through without easy answers. This drama of veiled threat and selective questioning became in the presence of Mandela something utterly absolute in its appeal to all to understand what it might mean to commit to justice and equality—wherever these are found.

    Remember that Mandela remained on a terrorist list in the United States until 2008. It was not simply, as Koppel later reflected, that he had to take his friends where he found them, as if scraping the bottom of some bucket reserved for those who had no power. But rather, for Mandela, the struggle for rights and freedom from stigma and oppression mattered, to stand with, in Steve Biko’s words, “a legitimate place in the world.”

    The day after Mandela’s death, on December 6, in Ramallah, dozens of Palestinians were injured and one detained as Israeli forces used tear gas, stun grenades, and rubber bullets to disperse crowds commemorating Mandela and protesting against the Israeli occupation. Mandela would have been pleased that the two acts, tribute and struggle, joined together in the place he knew so well.

    In these quiet days after the New Year, let us also know again the fact of apartheid and the memory of Mandela, whose portrait adorned posters in Gaza during a candlelight memorial on December 8. The posters read:

    APARTHEID: Wrong in South Africa
    Wrong in Palestine
    Free Palestine
    Boycott Israel

    -Colin Dayan

  • Mandela's Reflections: Mandela, Charisma, and Compromise

    As the cases of Ireland, Algeria, Palestine, and South Africa will suggest, settler colonies vary widely in history and circumstance, but the problems of decolonization in such formations are invariably obdurate. In Ireland, neither the moderate parliamentary Home Rule Party, which led the campaign for devolved independence within the British Empire before World War I, nor the republican separatists, who led the guerrilla war for Irish independence after Easter 1916, had any strategy adequate to deal with the resistance of the Ulster unionists, descendants of the original sixteenth- and seventeenth-century plantation settlers, to a united Ireland. Thus, nationalists would prove more or less helpless to respond when the British government established the partitioned state of Northern Ireland in 1921. The grievances of the Irish nationalist minority within that new polity were thereafter allowed to fester untreated for half a century until, in the late 1960s, “Ulster” erupted in a war that would lacerate it for nearly thirty years.

    In Palestine, the Palestinian national movement, faced by an inflow of Jewish settlers from Europe demanding their own state, was ultimately confounded by this challenge. A US-imposed UN General Assembly Resolution of 1947 set the terms for a grossly unequal partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states; in the war that followed, somewhere between 700,000 and 1 million Palestinians were dispossessed as the new State of Israel was formed. This Palestinian exodus into the Arab states bordering Israel created nearly intractable problems for all the parties involved and has made the consequent Palestinian plight one of the scandals of Israeli history and of the American world order. After the National Liberation Front (FLN), under Ahmed Ben Bella, came to power in Algeria in 1962, it is estimated that over 800,000 settlers of European origin fled Algeria for France, some 200,000 other pieds noirs also leaving over the next decade. Pariahs of a disgraced French imperialism, the plight of the pieds noirs elicited little sympathy anywhere, but their fate served as a warning to any minorities that might resist the creation of an Arabized Algeria.

    Of the situations cited above, only Mandela and the ANC managed to wrest a new state from the clutches of a dying colonialism without either expelling the settler population or conceding to ethno-territorial partitions. The enormity of that achievement, torn from a situation in which the circumstances of much of the black African population were infinitely worse than that of nationalists in Northern Ireland, and at least as bad as those of Palestinians in Gaza, must be wholly acknowledged. Mandela’s charisma and humane vision for a multiracial South Africa may have been significant to this success, but the conditions that enabled that outcome were historical, not personal. Unlike the Northern Irish unionists or the Zionists in Palestine, neither the white South Africans nor the Inkatha movement had any external great imperial power to hand to act as guarantor for any contemplated partitioned state. The implosion of the Soviet Union after 1989 incentivized all parties in South Africa to negotiation and reduced the risk that any secessionist state would find a Cold War–style backer. Likewise, the fact that the ANC was able to achieve its aims by largely nonviolent protest and pressure owes less to Mandela’s restraint than it does to the fact that despite the infamous “colour bars,” black labor had always remained crucial to the South African settler economy. As Mouna Younis has argued in Liberation and Democratization: The South African and Palestinian National Movements (2000), black proletarianization in apartheid South Africa created modes of organization more effective than older “traditional” ethnic formations and allowed black workers some scope for economic leverage and political pressure. The contrast with Palestine, where the Zionist movement’s commitment to a “Jewish labor only” policy succeeded in eliminating Palestinians almost wholly from the developing settler economy, is instructive. The Palestinians who remained within Israel after 1948 were reduced to a minority, while those in the West Bank and Gaza or beyond have always lacked any real capacity to exercise economic leverage on Israel. Thus, the Palestinians were never positioned to look to a democratization-from-below of the oppressor state to solve their problems in the way black South Africans could do, and while some might have proposed a binational state, they were in no position to advance it without an unforthcoming Israeli assent.

    Finally, while Mandela’s and the ANC’s capacity to articulate the vision for an ethnically plural South Africa must be saluted, the bargain necessary to secure the consent of the white settler community clearly had its Faustian dimension. Territorial fissure and civil war were successfully averted, but the social compact that eased the ANC’s transition to hegemony preserved so much of the country’s wealth in the hands of the white elite that the social fissures between rich and poor may well prove a disaster in historical storage. Many Americans now revere Mandela as a kind of sunnier-tempered Abraham Lincoln, a national savior who preserved the South African union as Lincoln did the American. The tragedy of the post-Civil War United States and of South Africa today is that history seemed to decree to statesmen in both cases that any determined attempt to advance equality between the black and white populations and to secure a well-integrated state were incompatible goals. Thus, in the postbellum United States, saving the union dictated that the reconciliation of the Northern and Southern elites took precedence over redress of the plight of the black poor, who had to wait. In South Africa, today, the white and black elites have also agreed to share power, and the black poor are again compelled to wait. As the cases of Northern Ireland, Israel-Palestine, Algeria, and the United States all in their distinct ways demonstrate, the waiting of those excluded from history’s grand bargains may last a long time but rarely lasts forever.

    -Joe Cleary

  • Mandela's Reflections: The Mandela Enigma

    Nelson_Mandela_1998Nelson Mandela has been an enigma to me. I have read his autobiography and many of his speeches, listened to him on tape, and watched him on television, all the time wondering how someone becomes Nelson Mandela. Jean-Paul Sartre explained how Gustave became Flaubert because of his early identification as “the idiot in the family,” but it took him three volumes and thousands of pages, and he still left the job unfinished. Most accounts of the great figures of history focus on their sense of self and their sense of mission. Mahatma Ghandi, who is often invoked in discussions of Mandela, provides the best example of such an account: the epiphany on the train in South Africa, when he understands the nature of racial and political oppression and his growing sense of being endowed with a spiritual mission to carry out political liberation. The lives of these figures seem to fit preexisting narratives and allow us to consider them with equanimity since they comfort our expectations, exceeding them only in magnitude but not in nature or scope.

    This is not the case with Mandela. To be sure, he starts out with a pretty good pedigree as a member of a royal family, but he is the product of a morganatic union and thus cannot inherit any titles, privileges, or honors. There is no evidence that he resented this status, or rather the lack of it, and it would be unwarranted speculation to suggest that he derived a sense of justice or an ambition to affirm his value from it. If anything, the evidence points to the fact that he was comfortable with his standing in the family, retaining his links to it and returning to it even in death.

    So what made him tick? And even more important, what made him the outstanding figure he became? Determinists who assert that the actor matters far less than the agent, and that the latter’s agency derives from a conjunction of forces, would find it difficult to maintain their clever distinction. Their approach is based on the assumption that anyone else thrust in the same situation would do as well differing only in idiosyncratic ways. Even the most stubborn of them would find it impossible to equate Mandela with the featureless “anyone” of their equations.

    This leaves us with the oldest differentiating factor of all in discussions of exceptional figures: character. Character evokes notions of honor, will, integrity, moral rectitude, strength, resolve, steadfastness, courage, fidelity, and so on. It would not be too difficult to sketch a portrait of Mandela by combining these traits and adding a few more personal ones, such as his sense of humor or his patience. Other aspects would be more difficult to include: his undeniable spirituality devoid of any appeal to Providence or any other transcendental.

    The invocation of character may be satisfying, but it may also mask a deeper problem. Mandela at no time displayed two features associated with character: amour propre, self-interest and self-possession. He was not selfless; he was indifferent to the notion of the self. A telling exchange occurred between him and a journalist who charged him with inconsistency when he failed to publicly condemn the Burmese junta whom he had earlier excoriated for its treatment of political prisoners and specifically Aung San Suu Kyi: “That was prisoner Mandela,” he replied. “But this is President Mandela. And President Mandela is a prisoner of the Office of the President.” What is remarkable about this reply is that the author of The Long Walk to Freedom continues to consider himself a prisoner. His actions and statements are constrained now as they were then, in fact perhaps even more now than they were then. Mandela is not engaging in casuistry here; he is telling us about his relationship to history.

    There is no reference to self, or its current political sound-bite version, “core values.” The constant prisoner status is a contingent condition, and the possibilities inherent in it, though limited, are further constrained by other contingencies. Mandela was giving the journalist a lesson in reading: read your circumstances, and if you apply some intelligence to this action, you will be capable of the type of discernment that makes action possible.

    Intelligence, reading, and discernment are, in my view, the keys to Mandela’s enigma, and to his uniqueness.

    -Wlad Godzich

  • Mandela's Reflections: Discomforts

    Mahatma Gandhi on The Salt March, India, 1930Some things rest uneasy on the mind: In a pinch, how prepared would I be, for instance, to live by the protocols of nonviolence? And if you extirpate the pinch, how would a commitment to such principles alter my behavior from what it is right now? At the rebirth of the South African state, Nelson Mandela’s determination to pursue a course of peace rather than vengeance stunned the world as forcefully as the violence that maimed it had kept him imprisoned on Robben Island for over two decades. The new South Africans called apartheid terror’s aftermath “truth and reconciliation,” as had occurred among former Yugoslavic political actors a few short years before. At the death of Nelson Mandela on December 5, 2013, three of the twentieth century’s exemplary figures converged on our collective memorial sense of what remains, apparently, difficult to achieve, and that is to say, the daily mobilization of Gandhian Satyagraha—and at the commencement of our terrible winter this year and always, everywhere, the threat of war, there they were—Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Nelson Mandela, reminding us across cultures of that unease on the mind. No pabulum here; no straight down the middle; no squirreling away from the point.

    To get more firmly to the matter for some future interrogation, we might juxtapose a few impression points:

         1. In Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954–63 (1988), Taylor Branch opens the fifth chapter, “The Montgomery Bus Boycott,” with a story set in Nagpur, India, December 1955: James Lawson, a young black American theologian, is teaching at a Methodist missionary school near the town and had gone to India to study Gandhian nonviolence. The Nagpur Times, soon after the historic meeting at the Holt Street Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, reported that “thousands of Negroes were refusing to ride segregated buses in a small American city” (143). Lawson read the news, rejoiced in it, as Branch tells the story, and would soon meet MLK at Oberlin when he (Lawson) returned to the United States to participate in the fledgling movement and become one of King’s most creative “lieutenants” in the application and adoption of nonviolence to the US scene.

         2. In an early biographical study of Gandhi’s life (The Life of Mahatma Gandhi), Louis Fischer points out that Gandhi, in 1906, amends his cousin’s Sadagraha (“firmness in a good cause” [84]) to Satyagraha in founding a term to name the Indian movement against the South African government’s unfairness to Indian citizens of the Transvaal. Apparently a neologism, Gandhi’s term combines satya, or “truth,” “which equals love,” and agraha, or “firmness or force.” “‘Satyagraha,’ therefore, means truth-force or love-force” (84).

    Nearly a century later and, ironically, in a proximate theater of action, truth and reconciliation appear to make possible the rebirth of a nation-state once devoted to racial and racist hierarchy. Are truth and reconciliation a distant and mimetic response to Satyagraha, and how related are both iterations of praxis to what we know as nonviolent action in the United States? In its robust insistence, this complex of ideas, unlike the usual commemorative gesture, confronts us with the possibility of transformative action—an opening in the chain of necessity?—and to act, according to James Baldwin, is to be in danger. In this case, one might well want a way out.

    -Hortense Spillers