A Giant in South Africa

The story goes that Rolihlahla Dalibhunga Mandela, of the Madiba clan, got the Christian name “Nelson” from his schoolteacher in Mqekezweni when he was seven years old. He was the only boy in the Qunu village who learned to speak English.

When a young man he moved to Johannesburg where he made his name, he saw the suffering and heard the groaning of his people and he promised himself to deliver them from their ‘white’ oppressors. Well, Mandela did not end with a bullet between his eyes and was not beaten up to death behind a lorry, no, he did not. But perhaps more cruel was his fate when he was sentenced in 1964 for sedition and sabotage to life imprisonment to the Robben Island’s penitentiary, notorious for its merciless treatment toward the indigenous prisoners.

We were then in the 1960s. Right on the other side of the planet, the Blacks in the United States of America were marching and standing up to their long standing oppressors and former masters in a titanic confrontation. Their leader Dr Martin Luther King.

Mandela benefitted from his friend Oliver Tambo’s support, who as early as 1980, while in exile, launched an international campaign for his release. Even his then wife Nomzamo ‘Winnie’ Madikizela-Mandela’s hard-hitting militancy against apartheid became a global symbol.

It took many long years, twenty seven exactly when in February 1990 he walked out a free man. The rest is history.

But behind the curtains, he read the script: globalisation, rising violence, appalling poverty, lurking suicidal insurrection; his age, 71; his health; fragile. He did what he could to save his people. And he, in this tamed-acquired nature, could only save the people he loved and his country by advocating forgiveness to the oppressors and ‘race’ reconciliation in the complete knowledge that the ‘white’ ruling class would only make cosmetic concessions. Considering his refusal back then in 1985 to be released if only he would reject violence makes his falling in line a remarkable statement.

Rolihlahla Dalibhunga Mandela died at 95 years old, the first ever Black South African president in his own homeland, having entered the Hall of Fame of the courageous and unflinching who press on with their calling even if it demandes death. A marvel for the 21st century. A legend as we like them.

He was indeed recompensed and honoured with statues everywhere in the country, naming of roads, streets, places and buildings after him and international stardom.

‘Uncle Toms’, that’s what ’White’ people like seeing in the ‘Black’ man. Hence some of the many accolades at Mandela’s death and during the state’s funeral ceremony. They just love it. They know the evils they have been perpetrating against the ‘Black’ people and the retributions they deserve. Surely, the reckoning is at their door.

The journalists have gone, the lights and cameras have been switched off, the guests have departed. Now that this ‘great light’ has gone out in the world, the challenge is for all the South-African leaders to come together to carry on Mandela’s vision to see his country united with opportunities for every South Africans of all colours.

“I dream of an Africa which is at peace with itself.”

Michelle Rondof

Founder of The Adid