"Death is something inevitable," he said. "When a man has done what he considers to be his duty to his people and his country, he can rest in peace. I believe I have made that effort and that is, therefore, why I will sleep for eternity." Amen to that. But a rider must be entered.
Though Mandela mentioned doing his duty to his people and his country, his service-like that of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr-was to humanity. He conquered hate. He helped to lower the barrier between white and black. He demonstrated that "if you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner".
Mandela, Gandhi and King believed with Henry David Thoreau, the American author of On Civil Disobedience, that just men cannot suffer unjust laws. People could "obey them, amend them...or transgress them", Thoreau said. An 1850 law sanctioning using dogs to track down runaway slaves roused him to transgression. After a night in jail for refusing to pay a poll tax, Thoreau proclaimed that "under a government that imprisons unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison".
Gandhi and King were jailed for much longer terms but neither matched Mandela's record of more than 27 years, including 18 years in the grim Robben Island prison. He was initially sentenced to five years of hard labour for inciting workers to strike and leaving the country without valid travel documents. A life imprisonment sentence followed two years later. Believing that "when a man is denied the right to live the life he believes in, he has no choice but to become an outlaw", the "world's most famous political prisoner" can't have regretted his actions. Like Jawaharlal Nehru, Mandela was born to privilege.
His adopted father, Chief Jongintaba Dalindyebo, acting regent of the Thembu people, wanted him to be either counsellor to another "loyal" chief or an interpreter or clerk-the best a black man could expect in apartheid South Africa. But not for nothing did his first name Rolihlahla (literally "pulling the branch of a tree" in Xhosa) commonly translate as "troublemaker".
The light on the road to Damascus was a speech by another chief at the traditional circumcision ceremony when Mandela was 16 lamenting a bleak future for black youths because whites controlled their land. Mandela later said the speech eventually shaped his resolve for South Africa's independence. Disappointed in a subservient education system and dismayed by the prospect of an arranged marriage to make him conform, Mandela fled to Johannesburg where he did odd jobs, pursuing his degree by correspondence and enrolling at the University of Witwatersrand's law faculty. His law firm Mandela and Tambo, with his fellow student, Oliver Tambo, later African National Congress (ANC) chairman, provided free legal counsel to unrepresented blacks.
Soon, he became actively involved in the anti-apartheid movement, and persuaded the African National Congress to abandon its polite petitions to the racist regime and demand full citizenship, land redistribution, trade union rights, and free and compulsory education for all children. Boycotts, strikes, civil disobedience and non-cooperation were the new instruments that transformed the ANC into a mass movement deriving strength from millions of peasants and workers. Branding them communist terrorists, the government arrested Mandela and 150 others in 1956. The treason charge fell through but caught between obdurate racism and the militant Pan-Africanist Congress which was challenging the ANC, Mandela, who claimed "that a Gandhist philosophy of toleration had shaped the ANC", began to see armed struggle as the only way. In 1961 he co-founded Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nations) dedicated to sabotage and guerrilla war. In the same year he organised a three-day national strike.
A white intelligence agent disclosed in 1981 that British intelligence foiled a South African government plot to arrange Mandela's escape so that he could be "shot while trying to escape", that favourite worldwide police ploy. Mandela had become such a potent symbol of resistance that the US and Britain, fearing civil war would destroy Africa's richest (then also potentially nuclear-armed) nation, supported the international campaign for his release. But Mandela refused to trade armed struggle for his freedom. It wasn't until Frederik Willem de Klerk became president that Mandela was released on February 11, 1990, and apartheid dismantled.
Urging foreign powers to keep up their pressure until blacks were fully enfranchised, Mandela vowed the ANC's armed struggle would continue until this goal was achieved. His diplomatic skills were severely tested when negotiating for the transition from white minority to black majority rule after being elected ANC president in 1991. It was a time when whites seemed more moderate than blacks and South Africa was constantly on the boil. But Mandela steered the ship of state safely through the turmoil and in 1993, the year before the first democratic elections, he and de Klerk were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
At 77, Mandela became the country's first black president with de Klerk his first deputy. That year Mandela published his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. The long walk had not ended, he realised "for with freedom comes responsibilities". He dared not rest. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission tried to heal old wounds. Mandela ingeniously used sports to promote reconciliation, encouraging blacks to support the once-hated national rugby team and in 1995, hosting the Rugby World Cup.
Mandela knew many setbacks and disappointments, not least over his charismatic second wife, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, and the death from AIDS of his son Makgatho. But he seems to have found peace at the end with his Mozambican third wife Graca Machel, and some satisfaction in his birthday being internationally celebrated as Mandela Day to promote global peace.
Ultimately, his greatest achievement must be in the scene of his most arduous labours. It is pointless to pretend South Africa's healing process is over, or that all Mandela's successors recognised with him that "to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others".
Nor do they always pursue with the same dedication the vision that guided his life. But Nelson Mandela would be the last to lose heart. He believed "man's goodness is a flame that can be hidden but never extinguished". The best tribute to his memory would be for South Africa's controversial President Jacob Zuma to try to live up to that faith.
- Sunanda K. Datta-Ray, a former editor of The Statesman, is a writer and columnist.
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