Daily Times Editorial Dec 8, 2013

Mandela’s legacy The entire world mourns and pays tribute to Nelson Mandela, the icon of South Africa’s and the world’s struggle for democracy, human rights, dignity, and against racial prejudice and discrimination. It comes to very few men to change history, let alone rewrite it. Mandela’s compelling gifts of head and heart overcame entrenched hatreds and mistaken notions of racial superiority to forge what has been dubbed a ‘rainbow nation’ of all hues in his beloved South Africa. Brave and principled whites, albeit relatively few in number, were always apart of the struggle against apartheid, reinforcing belief in humankind’s innate goodness, rationality and ability to overcome evil, no matter how long it takes. Countries such as the US, France, Britain and even the UN have paid tribute to the great man by flying their flags at half-mast. India has not only followed suit, it has declared five days of official mourning. Pakistan has lagged behind in this regard. The only thing we can boast of is a unanimous resolution adopted on Friday by both houses of parliament to pay respect to Nelson Mandela, but we could easily have done more. Our relatively low-key response to this seminal event reflects the nature of our state and society. Meantime current South African President Jacob Zuma and the African National Congress (ANC) government have announced that an official mourning ceremony will take place on December 10 to supplement the people’s mourning at Mandela’s home. His body will lie in state in the capital Pretoria from December 11 to 13, and he will be buried in his Eastern Cape hometown of Qunu on December 15. While international attention is focused on the great man and his passing, ‘revisionist’ attempts to paint Mandela in ‘saintly’ hues have begun in a mistaken attempt to ‘not speak ill of the dead’. Mandela’s actual record of struggle, including the resort to arms against an unyielding and fascist apartheid regime are being papered over, and his later ‘peaceful revolution’ appears the only game in town. Similarly, ‘embarrassment’ appears to have overtaken even his well wishers regarding his close ties and solidarity with figures like Cuba’s Fidel Castro, Libya’s late Colonel Gaddafi and Palestine’s late Yasser Arafat. On the latter ‘whitewashing’ of Mandela’s image to make it acceptable to today’s political correctness, it needs to be stated that history cannot be ‘revised’ in this way without truth and its lessons becoming a casualty. The 1960s were a period of armed revolutionary and national liberation struggles throughout Asia, Africa and Latin America against colonialism and neo-colonialism, dictatorship and oppression. The regimes responsible for this world order were unbending in their colonial, imperialist and oppressive agendas. The peoples of these oppressed countries had little choice but to take up arms against their tormentors. In South Africa too, the ANC’s ‘Gandhian’ (non-violent) élan gave way to opting for armed struggle when it became obvious that the apartheid regime was uncaring of outside or domestic protest and demands for justice. It answered all such peaceful manifestations with the knout and the mailed fist. The ANC’s armed struggle may not in itself have managed to overthrow the apartheid regime, but it was a factor, along with the former western supporters of South Africa’s racist policies because it suited their material interests turning away under the unrelenting pressure of moral opinion opposed to the affront to human equality and dignity that South Africa represented. Solidarity with successful or struggling movements for revolution and national liberation therefore came naturally to Mandela, and it goes to his credit that to the end of his life, he did not abandon his principles or the friends who had stood by his movement in its difficult years. It would be a mistake to substitute today’s political correctness out of context on a period that considered it legitimate to use force against regimes like the South African apartheid one. And despite today’s received mantra of seeking dialogue and reconciliation as the universal panacea for all conflicts, it is not inconceivable that a similar regime in future may require a dose of the same medicine Mandela tried it, but eventually abandoned it in favour of a much more powerful and ultimately irresistible weapon: moral authority. If his successors in South Africa desire some of Mandela’s shine to rub off on them, they have to seriously restore their now fading moral authority because of the widening poor-rich divide in their country, which still plays out along racial lines, with the non-whites still the have-nots.