mandela has died!

The greatest man of my lifetime without a doubt.

I once had a Lobster and a nice chilled glass of South African white wine whilst looking over at Robben Island from the mainland. Mandela was in residence at the time and we all raised a glass to him, which was a rather silly thing to do at the time with all the thought police that were around!

Mandela was indeed a great man and having lived in the Southern African region for many years  I know that he could have gone the other way and turned the streets of Johannesburg red with the blood of the white man...taken from an earlier quote from Robert Mugabe who said "The streets of Salisbury will run red with the blood of the white man"


As a footnote: Did you know that Mugabe has no todger...I met the surgeon who cut it off while he was in prison many years ago!

 

Absolutely. The ANC were terrorists. As were the French Resistance and the Italian Partisans. If you are on the winning side in the end it makes all the difference!

You are probably taking in far more commentary on this than I, but I don't perceive that anyone is brushing the fact that Mandela fought hard against apartheid under the carpet. I don't get the impression at all that he is being portrayed as a cuddly apolitical granddad.

What you have to remember is that it is not the fact that he fought hard against injustice that marks him out as one of the greatest men in history. Laudable as that may be, millions of men and women have done that.

What takes him above so many others is what has happened since he walked free from prison.

I was utterly convinced that he would be dead within a month of release. Any human being, having endured what he had endured, would have been bitter and resentful. A hint of that could have unleashed a wave of violence that would have resulted in vicious state retribution. On the other hand, a perceived softening of his position could have led to his being targeted by elements opposed to compromise.

Somehow, his intellect, charisma and humanity meant that he was able to keep the respect of all and steer what seemed an impossible path of reconciliation. That's not compromising on the core principle, but refusing the path of revenge which so often replaces one kind of oppression with another.

I never believed that South Africa could free itself from apartheid without an absolute bloodbath. Without Mandela, it could not have done.

That's not to say that South Africa is a fairy-dairy rainbow nation. It isn't. It still has huge social and economic issues to resolve. But it has only got as far as it has because of Mandela, and it only has the hope of resolving those issues by sticking to the spirit of Mandela.

I think it's more of an undercurrent, but it's there - the emphasis on peace and forgiveness above all else is one example, as if he was a Gandhi-esque figure. His forgiveness is admirable but it's not the reason he's a great man

He already represented a huge amount when in jail - he was a symbol of the repression. And people knew why he was locked up. They knew that he had been responsible for setting up a militia. It had been a pragmatic decision - he admitted that during his trial. Apparently at one point on Thursday, Huw Edwards said "his reputation changed" - his reputation only changed amongst one particular group of people: those who wanted him dead to begin with and/or supported the racist Botha regime

For me, Guerilla Mandela is inseparable from Forgiving Mandela. But there is a very subtle message of "he changed" within some of the coverage, which I don't believe is true - turning to violence was just as much of a pragmatic decision as turning the ANC into a more liberal, pro-capitalist organisation. Otherwise, that would imply that he wouldn't have done the same again in later life if the situation was unchanged from the 1960s - I'm sure he would have, given that the reason he refused to accept early release from Botha a few years prior to his eventual release was because he refused to renounce violence

This is the best obituary I've read so far: www.thequietus.com/articles/14064-nelson-mandela-obituary. I also like Mark Steel's: marksteelinfo.com/tributes-have-flooded-in/


As an aside, I've done a fair bit of work on the Civil Rights Movement in the US in the last few years, and the one thing that I've picked up is that for all of the lauding of Martin Luther King, he only took the movement so far. By the time he died, his influence was on the wane, because many black people realised that the policy of peace and tolerance to try and appease white, middle class America was only going to take them so far, and that wasn't going to be far enough. It was the more radical groups like the Black Panthers and the Black Power Movement which eventually forced through the later progress. But they don't teach you that in schools - or at least if they do, it's not emphasised. I feel the same about the Mandela coverage

There were pictures in the Mail recently of people who were lucky enough to have met Mandela. The usual crowd-the awful Blair, Onob and Geldof, and you could tell they were thinking, why aren't all the cameras pointed at me instead of this other chap! When do that lot ever think differently though!