Understanding Mandela

As I sat down to write this column one question kept running through my mind: How can I express the importance of Mandela? My friends camped outside of Tercentenary Theater last night; they not only wanted to see the man from their seats, they wanted to be close enough to smell him. But when all of us see that dignified Nobel Laureate on stage, dressed in Crimson robes and receiving one of the highest honors Harvard awards, and we cheer, do we know what we are cheering for?

Growing up, I never really understood apartheid. All that I knew was that it was a system that kept white people in power and black people in jail. I knew that it involved disenfranchisement and loss of civil and political rights. I knew that black people were beaten and sometimes killed, but as to any sort of legal or conceptual understanding, I was completely lost.

My grandmother explained it as "what they did to black people in the South in the 1960s, they are doing to black people over there." I was told that in order to support our African brethren, we should boycott companies that invested in South Africa and send letters to the South African Embassy demanding the end of apartheid. I heard unfamiliar words used as rallying cries and the names of F.W. DeKlerk and Nelson Mandela thrown around by politicians and activists like Randall Robinson and C. Payne Lucas of Africare.

Once, in an attempt to educate myself, I sat through Cry Freedom, a Hollywood, overly glamorized, overly processed version of the Stephen Biko story starring Denzel Washington. For two hours I stared at the screen expecting some massive revelation about the South African political, social and economic climate. I was sorely disappointed.

In class I was told that Mandela was some sort of political agitator (the word was used disdainfully by one history teacher) jailed for protests and violence. He was a member of the African National Congress, an underground guerilla organization which actively and viciously opposed the white moderate government.

My mom called Mandela a political prisoner and denounced a government in which the white minority oppressed a black majority. Yet I could never really understand my mother's anger towards the political leadership of South Africa nor her soliloquies on the importance of negritude and the relationships within the African Diaspora. Sure, I was black, but those black people in Africa were different than I was. I could not connect their experience to my own as a black pre-teen who could go anywhere and say anything that I chose. It seemed to me that black people had taken up the South African cause without any real comprehension of the situation.

It is only as I grow older and struggle with my own plans and desires to "save the world" from the evils of racism, sexism, homophobia and capitalism, that I have begun to see this man as a shining example of what can be achieved through passion and perseverance. In 1990, Nelson Mandela was released from prison after 28 years. He was sent there because he chose to fight against repression. He did what so many activists and proto-activists claim, by struggling to bring change to a country which exploited its labor, wrongfully imprisoned its citizens and encouraged full-scale segregation of all public facilities.

There is a real difference between calling oneself an activist and actually being one. So many people are attempting to find their place in a community and comprehend their duty to that community. To me, Mandela is an individual who understands that duality perfectly. His statement of defense during the Rivonia trial reveals this:

"I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if need be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die."

As I start to broaden my perspectives on the world, I wonder if there are any ideals for which I am willing to die. There are many issues to believe in: affirmative action, gay rights, female empowerment, but I would never consider dying for social justice.

A year ago, I might have thought that I could "die for the cause" and would have looked at individuals who could not as weak. Today, I hope to merely support those who can while still working for the cause in my own way. As I gain a sense of my own limitations, I admire Mandela all the more. I can never be another Nelson Mandela, but I can view him as a role model. It is this attitude that I will bring to Mandela's speech this afternoon. I hope to listen and learn, but I will also come to appreciate his sacrifice.

Kamil E. Redmond '00, a Crimson editor, is a Women's Studies and History and Literature joint concentrator living in Pforzheimer House.