The Last Founding Father of African Decolonization
It is not hard to understand the iconic status of Nelson Mandela and the overflow of emotion his death has provoked in the Pan-African world.
It is not hard to understand the iconic status of Nelson Mandela and the overflow of emotion his death has provoked in the Pan-African world.
For some of us, the official celebrations are missing a crucial element: Celebrating Nelson Mandela as a figure of armed struggle and the liberation movement.
Madiba’s example of forgiveness, reconciliation, and humility are inseparable from his unwavering commitment to combat white supremacy, and promote equality and justice. That commitment, conveyed in his leadership, provided a beacon to the negotiations to replace apartheid with democracy. We saw it flash bright at CODESA after De Klerk used his closing remarks on the opening day of the CODESA negotiations to complain that the ANC had not abandoned its armed struggle, even as the parties were now gathered around the negotiating table. Mandela had already given his closing remarks and De Klerk was to have been the last speaker of the day. But an incensed Mandela insisted on returning to the podium where he castigated De Klerk so vehemently that two decades later De Klerk is still licking his wounds: “Even the head of an illegitimate, discredited, minority regime as his, has certain moral standards to uphold … he has abused his position because he hoped that I would not reply. He was completely mistaken.” Mandela went on to remind the audience that the armed struggle was suspended to give negotiations a chance and that it was one of the agenda points for the negotiations begun that day.
Both Nelson Mandela’s historical role in the South African transition to democracy and his own management of his legacy paved the way for vacuous treatments of his life.
As much as the world wants to deify Mandela, to do so in the abstract with no reference to his actual politics is absurd.
The African Activist Archive Project website contains posters from the African solidarity movement from the 1950s to the 1990s.
At an event meant to celebrate Nelson Mandela's life, Jacob Zuma was not only embarrassed by the crowd (they booed him multiple times), by those on stage.
In the early 1990s I was teaching Economics in a fifth floor classroom at Khanya College in downtown Johannesburg. During one of my early lessons at Khanya I was in the middle of explaining supply curves when a roaring sound from the street below began to disturb my teaching. I tried talking louder but the […]
The Mandela who needs celebrating is the Mandela who, if he was not Lenin, never pretended to be something else.
The one individual the African continent was unanimously proud and infinitely grateful of, was Nelson Mandela.
The author, remembering Mandela, writes how South Africa galvanized progressive energies in the US in the 1980s.
In April 1962, Mandela traveled on an Ethiopian passport in the name of David Motsomayi. He visited Morocco, Algeria, and Mali.
The Nelson Mandela encountered by former antiapartheid activist Tony Karon in American media is so unrecognizable.
The Mandela Capture Memorial in Howick, Kwazulu Natal speaks eloquently to the essential truth: that in South Africa, some families mattered more than other.
The writer, originally from Cape Town, remembers Nelson Mandela's impact on his life.
The Dutch can't hide how racist the "tradition" of the blackface character, Zwarte Piet, is. Here we parody their rationalizations.
Over the last few weeks, the usually unrelenting stream of baby pictures and lose-weight ads in my Facebook feed has increasingly been interrupted by news from the Central African Republic (CAR). “Unspeakable Horrors in a Country on the Verge of Genocide,” blared one particularly oft-shared headline. As someone who has studied the place for a […]
An African refugee in Britain seeks assistance. He is thrown behind bars, often shackled. He fasts in protest. He is shackled and shipped out on the next charter flight.
Racist representations of Africans are common in South Korea. Where does it come from? Why do South Koreans behave this way?
On the rather extraordinary claim that white South Africans have been politically and economically marginalized since the inception of majority rule in 1994.