Ubuntu and the emancipation of humans everywhere
Those who branded Mandela as a terrorist are now seeking to program the minds of the youth to see him as some sort of messiah, without links to real struggles for peace. But Mandela was very clear that his life was linked to the collective struggles of humans everywhere
by Horace G. Campbell
On Thursday December 5, 2013 the people of South Africa lost one of the
foremost freedom fighters and revolutionaries who made his mark on
humans everywhere. Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela was born in South Africa in
1918 and matured as Africans in South Africa rose to the challenges
posed by the most brutal social and economic system of that moment, the
system called apartheid. Mandela has now joined the ancestors and he
has left his mark beside those great humans (such as Mahatmas Gandhi,
Martin Luther King Jr, Rosa Parks, Umm Kulthum, Che Guevara and Rosa
Luxemburg) whose greatness emerged from the movements that created them.
The forms of struggle that emerged from South Africa inspired the
refinement of the philosophy of Ubuntu. This is a philosophy that says
one’s humanity is enriched by another’s and that as humans we are linked
to a wider universe and spiritual world. Mandela had said clearly of
Ubuntu, “The spirit of Ubuntu – that profound Africa sense that we are
human beings only through the humanity of other human beings – is not a
parochial phenomenon, but has added globally to our common search for a
better world.”
The philosophy of Ubuntu challenged the ideals of individualism, greed,
unhealthy competition, obscene self-enrichment and those destructive
forms of human association that have brought the planet to the brink of
extinction. When the movement elevated Nelson Mandela to the position as
president of a politically free South Africa in 1994, after 27 years of
incarceration, the political leadership of South Africa sought to give
practical meaning to the philosophy of Ubuntu by establishing a Truth
and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). In all parts of the world, the
international media remember Mandela and his contributions to peace and
reconciliation but the same corporate media seeks to confuse the youth
by marketing Mandela as an unusual individual who performed the
‘miracle’ of ending apartheid. In the process of the wall to wall media
coverage of the celebration of the life of Nelson Mandela, it is
important that the voice of Africa is clear on the meaning of Mandela.
Mandela was against racism and the dehumanizing social system that
created hierarchies.
As peace activists it is vital that we remember Mandela as a defender of
peace and social justice and the fact that he was an extraordinary
human being. What is important to remember is that he was a product of a
social movement; the extraordinary circumstances of the oppression of
apartheid created this Mandela. Mandela joined a social movement, the
anti-apartheid movement and for a moment in history, he became the
symbol of the struggle against war and apartheid. His freedom came from
the sacrifices of millions, especially the youth of Soweto and the
workers from the Mass Democratic Movement who laid down a marker for the
new tactics of revolution. While he was the President of South Africa,
Mandela worked for peace in Burundi and Central Africa and worked hard
to end the western manipulation of who can be branded as a terrorist.
Those who branded Mandela as a terrorist are seeking to program the
minds of the youth to see him as some sort of visionary leader “dropped
from heaven” without links to real struggles for peace. Mandela was very
clear that his life was linked to the collective struggles of humans
everywhere, and when he was released in February 1990 he said, “Amandla,
Amandla ... I greet you all in the name of peace, democracy and freedom
for all. I stand here before you not as a prophet but as a humble
servant of you, the people.”
This media coverage of Nelson Mandela challenges contemporary freedom
fighters to contemplate new tactics, new tools of struggles and new
networks for peace in order to complete the tasks of ending global
apartheid. The African National Congress in government has been trapped
by its inheritance of the social capital of the apartheid state. New
forms of organization and new ideas will be needed as humans gird
themselves to fight against the nefarious forms of racism, exclusion and
oppression that have been refined by global capital as unbridled
capitalism seeks to turn our youths into mindless consumers. It is up to
the youth to gird themselves for the new phase of internationalism and
peace activism so that we can create the conditions for the inspiration
presented by the life of Nelson Mandela to be grasped in all corners of
the globe. Mandela lived a full life and we want to add to the tributes
as we celebrate his life of struggle.
THE SOCIETY THAT CREATED NELSON MANDELA
As soon as it became clear that the most obscene forms of white
supremacy could not survive after the massive resistance of peoples in
all parts of the globe, international news programmers began to present
Nelson Mandela as a visionary leader who single handedly ended
apartheid. Books, films, documentaries, blogs and other mainstream media
seek to present the changes in South Africa without reference to the
reality that Nelson Mandela always represented a liberation movement.
Inevitably, as the movement mobilized around the release of Nelson
Mandela when he was incarcerated for 27 years, Mandela became a symbol
of the anti-apartheid struggle. As the struggle matured in the final
phase after his release from jail on February 11, 1990 the myth-making
was developed as part of an election campaign. It is this myth-making
that ensured the positive and the negative in the representation of
Nelson Mandela to a generation that was not yet born when the liberation
struggles were at the peak.
When Mandela was born in the village of Qunu, in the province that was
called Cape Province, the Union of South Africa had been formed eight
years earlier. The Union government had celebrated the crushing of the
Bambata rebellions and in the face of the failure of open military
rebellions by regional military forces, the African National Congress
had been formed in 1912. Mandela grew up in South Africa in the
turbulent period of the 1930s capitalist depression. It was in the midst
of this depression when the capitalists of South Africa refined the
repression of black mine workers and inculcated in white workers the
idea that they (whites) were not workers but from a superior race. With
the villages of South Africa and the wider region of Southern Africa
providing cheap labour for the mines, mining capital reaped super
profits at a moment when the instability in the international monetary
system required a steady supply of gold from South Africa.
The royal families of the pre –Union society could not escape the
effects of the deformities of segregation and dehumanization.
Missionaries were deployed to teach sons of chiefs and it was from one
of the missionaries that Mandela received the name Nelson because the
missionaries had difficulties saying Rolihlahla. After this missionary
education Mandela was sent to Fort Hare University and it was where the
other famous anti-apartheid and anti-colonial stalwarts were groomed. Z.
K. Matthews, Govan Mbeki, Oliver Tambo, Joshua Nkomo, Walter Sisulu,
Robert Sobukwe, Desmond Tutu and Robert Mugabe were some of the notable
students in the forties at this university. As an activist he was
expelled from Fort Hare and he went on to study law at the University of
Witwatersrand.
Nelson Mandela joined the African National Congress (ANC) in 1942 and in
1944, along with Walter Sisulu, Robert Sobukwe, and Oliver Tambo, they
formed the Youth wing of the ANC. This youth wing joined the hundreds of
anti-colonial movements all over the world and when the repressive
legal structures of apartheid were formalised to support the social
divisions, the peoples responded with a Freedom Charter. The Sharpeville
massacres of March 21, 1960 foreclosed all possibilities of a peaceful
non –violent opposition to apartheid and in 1962 Mandela was dispatched
to the independent states of Africa to gain support for the armed wing
of the ANC, Umkhonto we Sizwe (abbreviated as MK, translated as "Spear
of the Nation). Mandela was one of the co-founders of MK and he received
training in many African countries before he returned to South Africa.
Mandela participated in the debates about unity and struggle that were
at that time raging in the Pan African Freedom Movement for East and
Central Africa (PAFMECA).
SELF ORGANIZATION OF THE YOUTH OF SOWETO
South West Johannesburg (Soweto) was one of those dormitory towns that
were a reservoir of cheap labour for the rich and middle class whites in
the suburbs of Johannesburg. Mandela was arrested in 1962 for planning
“sabotage” of the government and was branded a terrorist by the South
African state. The US military and intelligence agencies worked hand in
glove with the apartheid military to crush opposition from the African
majority. From 1973 the workers of Durban had given notice that there
would be new organizational forms to oppose apartheid and the youth of
Soweto followed with the massive uprisings of 1976. These rebellions are
central to the kind of politics that developed in the period when
Mandela was incarcerated after the Rivonia trials in 1964.
The sacrifices of the youth and their determination had created new
alliances and these alliances matured in the Mass Democratic Movement
and the United Democratic Front (UDF). While Nelson Mandela as a lawyer
had been groomed to focus on the legal questions of the apartheid laws,
the social questions of health, education, housing, police brutality
placed the fight against apartheid on a new terrain as the ANC worked to
remain alive in the heat of the conservative push of Ronald Reagan and
Margaret Thatcher. The formation of the UDF had provided for an
alternative source of political power at the grassroots and strengthened
the capacity of the resistance to transform their conception of the
long term struggles to create an alternative to the social system.
Forward planners for the investors in the Johannesburg Stock Exchange
were sufficiently alarmed when the rebellions of the youth rendered
South Africa ungovernable and apartheid unworkable. After the killing of
Steve Biko, the planners sought out the brightest from among these
rebellious youth to send them to be trained as future leaders in North
American and European universities. Those educated in the schools of the
West became the experts after return to South Africa to be at the
forefront of the negotiations for the form of society to be built after
apartheid. Free Mandela Committees were an integral of the global
antiapartheid struggles. In response to these local, regional and
international alliances to end apartheid the South African Defence
Forces (SADF) spread death and destruction in the townships and across
the region of Southern Africa. The terrorism of apartheid along with the
killing of more than 2 million in the neighboring states did not break
the will of the people. If anything, international solidarity
intensified with the support of the Cubans assisting the Angolans to
fight the apartheid army at Cuito Cuanavale.
THE IMPORTANCE OF CUITO CUANAVALE
One of the many tasks of western propaganda organs has been to downplay
the sacrifices of the peoples of the region of Southern Africa for the
independence of Namibia 1990, the release of Nelson Mandela, and the
negotiations to end apartheid. The epic battles at Cuito Cuanavale
between October 1987 and June 1988 changed the history of Africa. The
SADF had invaded Angola with the plan to impose Jonas Savimbi in Luanda
and to defeat the freedom fighters from Namibia of the South West Africa
People’s Organization (SWAPO). The apartheid army became bogged down at
the crossroads of two rivers in southern Angola. In order to intimidate
the peoples of Africa the SADF had manufactured tactical nuclear
weapons with the assistance of the Israeli state. When the South African
army became bogged down the President of South Africa, P.W.Botha, flew
to the frontlines of the battles in Angola to broker a debate between
the generals on whether South Africa should deploy and use its nuclear
capabilities.
The international isolation of the white racist regime meant that there
was no sympathy for this option, even from the conservative Reagan
administration. The racist army had to fight against a confident Angolan
military with Cuban reinforcements. After nine months fighting the SADF
was roundly defeated with the remnants of the SADF retreating on foot
to northern Namibia. In order to rescue the SADF so that the military
would not be routed as the French army was routed at Dien Bien Phu in
1954, in stepped the US Assistant Secretary of State for African
Affairs, Chester Crocker, to broker the decent withdrawal of the SADF
from Namibia. This battle was episodic and Fidel Castro rightly
asserted that the history of Africa will be written as that of before
Cuito Cuanavale and after Cuito Cuanavale.
NELSON MANDELA AND THE SOUTH AFRICAN STRUGGLES AFTER CUITO CUANAVALE
Nelson Mandela’s walk of Freedom out of incarceration in 1990 had
represented a major step in the peoples of the world for a new system
after apartheid. However, those who owned the banks, the mines, the
insurance companies and the land were planning for a post-apartheid
society where the capital remained in the hands of the white minority
along with new black allies. International capital had grasped the full
implications of black partners in societies such as Kenya, Zimbabwe,
Cameroons, Algeria and Nigeria. Hence even while the negotiations were
on going for the New Society in The Convention for a Democratic South
Africa (CODESA,) the more far sighted elements such as the Oppenheimer
family of Anglo-American Corporation worked to support those within the
movement that believed that the end of Apartheid was for the development
of a class of black entrepreneurs under Black Economic Empowerment
(BEE).
The nature of the inequalities in South Africa today demonstrates the
success of the plan to create black allies. Cyril Ramaphosa is the
poster child of a militant trade union leader of the anti-apartheid era
who became a mining magnate after apartheid, exploiting the very workers
he had vowed to defend. The image of Cyril Ramaphosa who had escorted
Nelson Mandela out of Prison in 1990 operating as a multibillionaire was
one sign of the class formation in South Africa. In 2012, the
political leaders of the ANC oversaw a government that shot 34 Marikana
workers who were striking for better conditions at the Platinum Mines in
South Africa. It was a proper clarification of the politics of
transformation when Ramaphosa, a multibillionaire, emerged as the
spokesperson for the owners of the Platinum Mines in rejecting the
demands of the workers for better working conditions and better wages.
The ANC and its tripartite alliance of the Communist Party, the Congress
of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) had fashioned a theoretical
basis for the enrichment of a few by arguing that before South Africa
could enter the phase of transformation beyond capitalism there had to
be the development of the productive forces. Nelson Mandela was caught
in 1994 in the midst of the alliance and within five years sought to
extricate himself by stepping down as President of South Africa in 1999
after one term.
Ubuntu in practice, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC)
One of the sterling contributions of the South African struggle was to
be able to clarify the differences between restorative justice and
retributive justice, based on Ubuntu. In fact, Mandela not only embraced
Ubuntu, under his political leadership, there was an attempt to bring
the ideas of Ubuntu from its philosophical level to the level of
practical politics in ways that helped avert bloodbath to form a better
society, however imperfect. And this was in part done through the
establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
In the three years after the release of Mandela, the international media
was predicting a bloodbath in South Africa if blacks were to emerge
victorious from the first democratic elections in 1994. Those with
strategic control over the means of violence sought to make this
bloodbath a reality right up to the moment when Mandela was inaugurated
in May 1994 as the first black President of a democratic South Africa.
One year after Mandela became president, the parliament of South Africa
established the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act No.
34 of 1995. This became the legal framework for the establishment of the
Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Mandela threw his international
weight behind the process of reconciliation. While the TRC was holding
sessions under the chairperson Desmond Tutu, Mandela made a number of
public gestures to demonstrate the fact that he supported full
reconciliation between the oppressed blacks and the oppressors. Of the
two most public of these gestures were the visit to have tea with Mrs
Betsie Verwoerd at Oriana in 1995 and donning the jersey of the
segregated South African rugby team in the World Cup in South Africa.
Mrs Verwoerd, the widow of the architect of the most brutal apartheid
structures, had retreated to the town of Orania in the Cape seeking to
establish an all-white town because the whites could not live under a
black political leadership. The extreme Afrikaners around Mrs Verwoerd
had chosen the small community to set up a laager and the whites in the
town did not want any black around, not even black servants. These
whites did not recognize Mandela as the legitimate president of a free
South Africa. Mandela took the bold step of travelling to this all white
town of Orania to demonstrate to Mrs Verwoerd that the new South Africa
was based on forgiveness and willingness to share, core principles of
Ubuntu. This gesture was relayed all over the world by the local and
international media as Mandela sat down to have tea with the people who
were responsible for arresting and incarcerating him. Two months earlier
Mandela had orchestrated another public act by going to the Rugby World
Cup Match and putting on the jersey of the South African team. Sporting
activities had been one of the strongest bases for segregation in the
society and in all areas of sporting activity Mandela inspired South
Africa to rise above the structural violence that had become part and
parcel of South Africa.
At the legal level, South Africa’s post-apartheid constitution is one of
the most progressive in the world, and it draws on Ubuntu to enshrine
equal constitutional rights for all – black, white, colored, women,
youths, elderly people and same-gender-loving persons.
This effort at reconciliation at the legal level and at the public level
went side by side as the TRC started hearings in Cape Town in 1996. The
mandate of the commission had been to bear witness to, record and in
some cases grant amnesty to the perpetrators of crimes relating to human
rights violations, as well as reparation and rehabilitation. Witnesses
who were identified as victims of gross human rights violations were
invited to give statements about their experiences, and some were
selected for public hearings. Perpetrators of violence could also give
testimony and request amnesty from both civil and criminal prosecution.
A new politics was being developed in the context of seeking restorative
justice beyond the Nuremberg model of winners’ court. The healing power
of the process was manifest in the rituals that emanated from victims
and oppressors, creating a space that could be the basis of holding the
society together. This ritual of the TRC with the spiritual
underpinnings of forgiveness and healing was a powerful antidote to the
three hundred years of white racist oppression. Malidoma Some had
written a book on the Healing Wisdom of Africa: Finding Life Purpose
Through Nature, Ritual, and Community. It was in the TRC where one saw
some of the ideas being worked out. During the hearings of the TRC there
were public hearings as the narratives of perpetrators and victims
moved in a constant motion across time (from present to past and
present to future) and space (spiritual, social, physical, emotional) in
a movement that may be called recursive.
Here was a profound moment in the history of South Africa as the African
people offered a crucible for healing the society. Nelson Mandela and
Desmond Tutu will go down in history as individuals who opened up the
possibilities for another form of society. This healing process offered
by the TRC, despite its imperfections, placed Ubuntu on the
philosophical map breaking the ideation baggage of individualism, greed,
competition and revenge.
If the black people and the oppressed majority were willing to turn a
corner, international capital was not. Plans for the reconstruction and
transformation of South Africa were shelved in the face of the timidity
of the political leadership in calling for the cancellation of the
apartheid incurred debt. The repercussions of managing the neo-liberal
programe of international capital cut off the top leadership of the ANC
from the rank and file. Questions of the social reconstruction after
apartheid had to be shelved until new emancipatory formations arise in
South Africa. International capital took the lessons of South Africa to
heart and sought to promote a neo-liberal agenda where a small minority
collaborated with international capital in the new template for the
exploitation of the majority. This form of class rule came to be
understood as the globalization of apartheid without its racial baggage.
MANDELA AND UBUNTU OVERSEAS
Mandela was opposed to the western designation of states as sponsoring
terrorism and openly supported Fidel Castro of Cuba, Yasser Arafat of
the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) the Saharwi Arab Democratic
Republic and the political leadership in Libya. As one who had been
placed on the US list of international terrorist, Mandela in 1992 made a
clear statement about the standoff between Libya and the West over the
downing of the 1988 Pan American Airways Flight 103. This plane had
exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, and the West accused two Libyans of
planting the bomb. This is despite the fact that at the precise moment
of the bomb, western media had blamed Iran for planting the bomb.
In 1998 Mandela travelled to Libya three times within one week to
mediate between the British government and the Libyan authorities. After
travelling back and forth between the western leaders and Muammar
Gaddafi, the head of the Libyan state, Mandela struck a deal where
Gaddafi handed over the two suspects in return for the lifting of
international sanctions against Libya. Gaddafi accepted the offer of
Nelson Mandela and offered to pay US $2.7 billion , approximately $10
million for each of the victim’s families. Gaddafi went further to open
up his economy to western oil companies and in 2004 dumped his plans for
the acquisition of chemical and biological weapons. Despite this
opening and the intense investments of the west, international capital
was not satisfied and in 2011 orchestrated the invasion, bombing and
destruction of Libya under the banner of Responsibility to Protect.
Gaddafi was executed and humiliated as the west sought to roll back all
ideas of African unification and liberation.
Mandela as a Peace maker
After Nelson Mandela was rid of the responsibility of managing the
structures of the apartheid economy, he became even more outspoken
against inequalities. He was assertive on the question of the need for
health for all and the provision of retroviral medicine for those
affected by HIV AIDS even while other leaders of the ANC were equivocal
over the response of the government of South Africa to this pandemic.
Outside of South Africa Mandela shamed the leaders of the Organization
of African Unity (OAU) who had stood by while the fastest genocide
unfolded in Rwanda in 1994. After the passing of Julius Nyerere in 1999,
Nelson Mandela engaged the peace process in Burundi and threw his
considerable international stature behind a tough process of
negotiations to end the decades of warfare in Burundi.
Mandela was opposed to the deployment of US military personnel in Africa
and he spoke out firmly against the Africa Crisis Response Initiative
(ACRI), the forerunner to the current Africa Command. When George W.
Bush started his buildup for the war against the peoples of Iraq Mandela
offered himself up as a peace maker to be a human shield against US
bombs. In an interview with Newsweek magazine in 2002 prior to the
invasion, Mandela called the USA a threat to the peace of the world.
“If you look at those matters, you will come to the conclusion that the
attitude of the United States of America is a threat to world peace.
Because what [America] is saying is that if you are afraid of a veto in
the Security Council, you can go outside and take action and violate the
sovereignty of other countries. That is the message they are sending to
the world. That must be condemned in the strongest terms.”
As a peace activist, Mandela took issues personal with George Bush over
the decision to invade Iraq. Addressing the International Women’s Forum
in Johannesburg in 2003, a visibly furious Mandela stated unequivocally:
“What I am condemning is that one power, with a president [George Bush]
who has no foresight, who cannot think properly, is now wanting to
plunge the world into a holocaust. ... If there is a country that has
committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States
of America. They don't care.”
THE LEGACIES OF NELSON MANDELA
The differing legacies of the political leadership of Nelson Mandela
were on full display at the massive memorial event held in Soweto on
December 10, 2013. There the mass of people expressed themselves in the
admiration and warmth of Nelson Mandela and at the same time expressing
their opposition to the corruption of the top leadership of the ANC. The
people booed the current leader of the ANC, Jacob Zuma, every time his
face appeared on the giant TV screens in the stadium. Mandela had
always remarked that he was a disciplined member of the ANC and his
membership of the organization pointed to the differences between the
promises of the anti-apartheid struggles and the realities of the
enrichment of a new class of African exploiters. It was appropriate that
this celebration of the life of Mandela marked a new stage for the
corrupt leadership of the ANC.
In the period of the anti-apartheid struggles, funeral ceremonies were
occasions for mass mobilization and education. The entire proceedings
played out before over 90 heads of state and government reflected the
new relationship between the ANC and the mass of the poor. Despite the
fact that this occasion represented a huge logistical challenge, one
could negatively compare the planning of the leadership on this occasion
with the World Cup in 2010. Hence, for one of the most important public
events in the history of South Arica, for most of the time the stadium
was half empty. The ANC did not provide transportation to the stadium
as promised. The poor travelled from near and far by train only to find
that there were no buses to take them up to the stadium. Even those who
braved the downpour of rain to make it to the stadium was not allowed
to celebrate the way South Africans are used to celebrate at such
events. Instead they were expected to sit and listen like little
children. At such events people would sing and dance. In fact, before
each speaker someone would raise a song and people would follow and sing
until the speaker was ready to speak. Even Zuma would start a song and
dance before he spoke. Jacob Zuma, the leadership and Cyril Ramaphosa
wanted the people to forget the kind of mass mobilization that was
engineered to end apartheid. They are afraid that this mass mobilization
would sweep the billionaires from power.
The political leadership of Nelson Mandela in the anti-apartheid
struggle had both focused attention on him as an individual and released
the energies of various groups whose task was to clarify the details of
the real meaning of transformation beyond apartheid. In this and in
many other ways, Nelson Mandela symbolized the dialectic of resistance
and transformation. His own life has mirrored the way in which a social
movement shaped individuals. Hence, the youth who are hearing the
tributes to Mandela are faced with the contradiction between focusing on
great leaders and the kind of media coverage that is geared towards the
depoliticizaion of the youth. Richard Falk summed up very lucidly the
place of Mandela for humans everywhere when he wrote,
“It was above all Mandela’s spiritual presence that created such a
strong impression of moral radiance on the part of all of us fortunate
enough to be in the room. I was reinforced in my guiding belief that
political greatness presupposes a spiritual orientation toward the
meaning of life, not necessarily expressed by way of a formal religious
commitment, but always implies living with an unconditional dedication
to values and faith that transcend the practical, the immediate, and the
material.”
In his earthly life, Mandela could not escape this tension between the
spiritual and the material. The spiritual energies of the peoples had
been unleashed to fashion a non-racial democracy. Liberal conception of
democracy could not understand this attempt to transcend the ideas of
the Western Enlightenment, which itself is built on human hierarchies
that carved a supreme space for the enlightened white man. Nelson
Mandela had been reared in these ideas at Fort Hare and as a lawyer but
the struggles elevated him to be a special human being among
revolutionaries. The world salutes Nelson Mandela and we join with those
who are sending tributes to his family.
We will also add that the people should not mourn but organize for the next round of struggle.
* Horace G .Campbell, a veteran peace activist is a Visiting Professor
in the School of International Relations, Tsinghua University, Beijing.
He is a Professor of African American Studies and Political Science at
Syracuse University. He is the author of
Global NATO and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya, Monthly Review Press, 2013.
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