ten
Nelson Mandela
1918–2013
1918 (July 18): Born in Mvezo, South Africa.
1927: His father, Gadla, dies; lives with a relative after father’s death.
1934: Begins attending Clarkesbury Boarding Institute.
1939: Begins studying at University College of Fort Hare; meets Oliver Tambo.
1940: Kicked out of Fort Hare College.
1941: Flees to Johannesburg to escape an arranged tribal marriage. Clerks at law firm.
1942: Completes college by correspondence school.
1943: Enrolls in law department of University of the Witwatersrand, as the only black student. Participates in Alexandra bus boycott, his first political experience.
1944: Helps found African National Congress (ANC) Youth League. Marries Evelyn Ntoko Mase.
1945: Son Thembi born.
1947: Completes law clerkship. Daughter Makaziwe dies at nine months.
1948: Apartheid regime begins under Dutch Nationalist Afrikaners.
1948–50: Parliament passes series of strict apartheid laws.
1951: Becomes president of ANC Youth League.
1952 (June): Becomes “volunteer-in-chief” of ANC Defiance Campaign.
1952: Elected as deputy president of ANC. Opens law office with Tambo.
1953: Writes famous “No Easy Walk to Freedom” speech.
1955: Congress of the People drafts Freedom Charter.
1956 (Mar.): Government increases crackdown on ANC.
1956 (Dec. 5): Among 155 arrested and charged with treason. Evelyn soon moves out and takes the children.
1957: Meets 22-year-old Nomzamo Winifred Zanyiwe Madikizela, or “Winnie.”
1958: Divorces Evelyn; marries Winnie.
1959: Winnie arrested for participation in ANC Women’s League demonstration.
1959 (Dec.): ANC calls for massive demonstrations against “pass laws.”
1960 (Mar. 21): Sharpeville Massacre.
1960 (Mar. 30): Government bans ANC, rounds up leaders, and declares martial law; Tambo flees country.
1961: Appointed head of ANC military wing, Spear of the Nation; hides at Liliesleaf Farm.
1961 (Mar. 29): Declared not guilty after five-year Treason Trial.
1961 (Dec. 16): Bombs explode outside government offices and power stations.
1962: Leaves South Africa, travels through Africa and to Europe, and undergoes military training in Ethiopia.
1962 (Aug. 5): Arrested while traveling undercover immediately after return to South Africa.
1962: Sentenced to five years in prison.
1963: Government uncovers Liliesleaf Farm safe house and charges Mandela with treason.
1963 (Oct.)–June 1964: Rivonia Trial.
1964: International protests against Rivonia Trial grow.
1964 (June 12): Found guilty of treason and sentenced to life in prison; arrives at Robben Island, the beginning of 27 years behind bars.
1966: Befriends James Gregory, a white jailer who would guard Mandela until 1990.
1968: Mandela’s mother dies.
1969: Eldest son, Thembi, dies at 29 in car wreck; Mandela could not attend funeral.
1976: Rejects conditional offer of release. Soweto uprising. Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) picks up militant mantle from banned ANC.
1980: Tambo begins “Free Nelson Mandela” campaign.
1982: Moved to mainland Pollsmoor Prison; again rejects conditional freedom offer; begins secret conversations with government.
1986: Violent antiapartheid riots break out across South Africa.
1987: Continues talks with Minister of Justice Coetsee as bridge between government and ANC.
1988: Invited to meeting with President P. W. Botha. Moved to Victor Verster Prison.
1989: F. W. de Klerk becomes president and overturns many apartheid rules.
1989 (Oct.): Walter Sisulu and seven other ANC political prisoners released.
1989 (Dec.): First meeting with de Klerk.
1990 (Feb.): South African government lifts ban on ANC.
1990 (Feb. 11): At 4:15 p.m., released from prison.
1990 (Feb. 28): Visits Zambia for talks with ANC leadership in exile.
1991 (Dec.): Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA) begins talks to discuss nature and framework of future government.
1992: Winnie convicted of participation in 1988 kidnapping of black youths; the two legally separate.
1992 (May): Second round of CODESA talks.
1993: Awarded Nobel Peace Prize, along with de Klerk.
1993 (Apr. 24): Oliver Tambo dies.
1993 (June): CODESA agrees to April 1994 election date.
1994 (Apr. 19): Negotiations gain Inkatha Freedom Party’s participation in election.
1994 (Apr. 27): ANC wins elections with 62% of vote; parliament elects Nelson Mandela president of South Africa.
1994 (May 10): Delivers inaugural speech.
1994 (June): Helps initiate Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
1996: Presides over enactment of new South African constitution. Divorces Winnie.
1997: Hands ANC leadership to Thabo Mbeki.
1998: Marries Grace Machal on his 80th birthday.
1999: Term as president ends.
2002: Awarded United States Presidential Medal of Freedom.
2004: Announces his retirement from public life.
2013 (Dec. 5): Nelson Mandela dies.
When Nelson Mandela died, all South Africa mourned, and the world did too. The one-time militant leader had become the world’s most famous prisoner and then, astonishingly, the father of his nation. He presided over a peaceful transition of power that some thought impossible. Almost all referred to him with a moniker of affectionate respect: Madiba, a term that reflects the deep admiration that Mandela inspired.
We have argued that one way to identify moral leaders is through a sixth sense—a deep-in-your-bones feeling of respect—that someone inspires. Nelson Mandela certainly fits that description. In the early 1990s, as he toured the world after his release from jail, won the Nobel Peace Prize, and negotiated the end of a racist white regime in his native South Africa, people marveled at his dignified bearing and his patient humility. Some of his gifts Nelson Mandela had in the beginning. Others were earned through turmoil, pain, and heartbreak. As he put it, “It is what we make out of what we have, not what we are given, that separates one person from another.”1
Perhaps the most striking note about Nelson Mandela is his personal transformation over the course of his life. Every leader in this book has evolved in some way—it is both a part of life and, when it comes in response to shifting circumstances, a substantial gift. Few of us would have been quick to label Mandela a moral leader if we had encountered him in 1960, and those of us in the West might even have lumped him among dangerous radicals. Mandela’s story is thus about personal growth, like Lincoln’s and Romero’s, but it is also a challenge for us to contemplate people’s contexts and see how they evolve before rushing to judgment.
One aspect of Mandela never changed. He was courageous. Facing a long prison sentence, he turned to the judge and told him that long after his sentence was complete his conscience would continue to drive him to struggle against the injustice of race discrimination. Such courage was necessary to oppose a racist government that was willing to kill to maintain its unjust system—and to remain standing on the world stage long after that government had crumbled.
For centuries, what today we know as South Africa was the territory of a variety of African tribal nations, the most prominent of which include the Zulu, Xhosa, Swazi, and Ndebele. Mandela was the son of a chief of the Thembu tribe and grew up a witness to that proud tradition. The fate of Africa forever changed when the first European conquerors arrived. South Africa sits at the southernmost portion of Africa. Since most early trade routes to Asia had to round the cape of Africa, South Africa quickly became a strategic point with military implications.
South Africa was colonized twice. The Dutch were the first, founding the city known as Cape Town. Thousands of Dutch settlers then marched inland and carved out homesteads on lands long held by local tribes. In the 1860s, the discovery of gold near Johannesburg led to a rush of British settlers seeking their fortune. British imperialism also brought an influx of Indians—including, in 1893, a failed lawyer by the name of Mohandas Gandhi. In the Boer War, between 1899 and 1902, descendants of the original Dutch settlers engaged in guerrilla-style attacks to fight against British control. Half a century later, African liberationists studied these same tactics to use against Dutch whites.
The only constant amid the shifting European powers was suppression of native Africans. By the early twentieth century, Dutch descendants were known as Afrikaners and spoke a language, Afrikaans, descended from Dutch. They made up only 14 percent of the population, while more than 75 percent were made up of blacks, and the rest were mixed-race “coloreds” and Indians. These groups had few political rights. In 1948, the unjust system produced a victory for the Dutch Nationalist Afrikaners, who stood on a virulently racist platform that promised to keep blacks and coloreds in their place.
The 1948 election marked the beginning of a racist regime the world came to know as “apartheid,” literally meaning “apartness.” As Nelson Mandela described it in his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, “The premise of apartheid was that whites were superior to Africans, Coloureds, and Indians, and the function of it was to entrench white supremacy forever. As the Nationalists put it, ‘Dit wit man moet baas wees’ (The white man must always remain boss).”2 The ultimate goal was to separate the races and subjugate nonwhites under white minority control.
Apartheid married the worst of the Jim Crow American South with Nazi-style regulations to restrict contact across races. Calling apartheid “a new term but an old idea,” Mandela described it as a powerful, all-encompassing system that governed every detail of people’s lives, without chance of escape or relief. It took all the old prejudice, social norms, and colonial rules and combined them into an oppressive legal regime.
One of the groups ready to oppose apartheid was the African National Congress, or ANC. The ANC had been founded decades before on a commitment to a multiracial South Africa. By Mandela’s time, it was more social club than activist organization. Membership in the ANC meant access to power. Many old-guard ANC leaders feared that such access would be lost if the organization made a militant turn. But some of the younger members wondered why the organization did not actively advocate for black Africans instead of making concessions to the colonial status quo.
Apartheid also split the church. The racist regime produced a division within the Afrikaner Dutch Reformed Church akin to the one among German churches under the Nazis. Apartheid was “supported by the Dutch Reform by suggesting the Afrikaners were God’s chosen people and that blacks were a subservient species,” Mandela wrote. “In the Afrikaner’s worldview apartheid and the church went hand in hand.”3 Many white Christians supported the regime. Even greater numbers were content to watch without protest. Still, portions of the Dutch Reformed Church found apartheid deplorable. Traditionally black churches and black clergy such as Archbishop Desmond Tutu mobilized peaceful resistance to apartheid.
Later, laws aimed at communism were employed against black political organizing. As in El Salvador, the oppressive South African government’s fierce anti-Communist attitude won the support of the United States and other Western nations. Once more, a Cold War lens distorted the way powerful nations chose allies. There certainly were Communists in South Africa, and some worked with African liberationists in the struggle for a classless, multiracial society. This was all the information Western powers needed to motivate them to support the apartheid regime. Decades later, exposure of the regime’s crimes caused a global shunning of South Africa, and divestment and international pressure forced governments to withdraw their support.
Before that could happen, though, South Africans had to resist the regime themselves—and, by their resolve, show the lengths to which the Dutch nationalists were willing to go. One of those resisters became the face of the global movement against apartheid. His name was Nelson Mandela.
EARLY AND PRIVATE LIFE
Rolihlahla Mandela was born in Mvezo, South Africa, on July 18, 1918. As a young man, a primary school teacher gave him the name Nelson, which he used for the rest of his life. Mandela’s father, Gadla, was a Thembu chief by blood and custom as well as government appointment. His mother, one of his father’s four wives, was illiterate and a devout Christian. Mandela seemed to have modeled himself on the men in his life. The first was his father, who was deposed and forced to move, along with his family, after opposing white rule. Gadla died before Nelson turned ten, and afterward he lived with Chief Jongintaba, the tribal regent for whom Gadla had been a trusted adviser. Jongintaba was a man of natural poise and Christian convictions whom young Nelson greatly admired.
Mandela would later attribute his leadership style to following the example of Chief Jongintaba. In particular, the regent made sure to listen to all sides and voices before announcing his own view. Mandela especially admired the regent’s comparison of leaders to shepherds who guide the flock from behind, leading without some realizing they are being directed at all. Exposure to such leadership imbued him with a deep sense of dignity. Even the most oppressive measures could not shake the childhood lesson that he was somebody. He both demanded respect and offered it freely; “to humiliate another person,” he learned, “is to make him suffer an unnecessarily cruel fate. Even as a boy, I defeated my opponents without dishonoring them.”4 These qualities shaped him as an adult.
Young Mandela drew leadership lessons from his own people but aspired to a British education. Similar to a young Mohandas Gandhi, he believed English government, ideas, society, and education to be the best the world had to offer. Generations of colonial rule flooded the education system with such convictions, and there was no teaching about African culture or respect for African wisdom. Despite it all, though, Mandela would later claim, “Without these schools for Africans, there would have been neither transfer of power nor any black presidency.”5
No surprise, then, that when a teacher in primary school gave him the name Nelson, the young Mandela never changed it. Mandela left home at sixteen to attend Clarkesbury Boarding Institute, a Wesleyan Methodist boarding school and his first Western-style living situation. He moved on to the College of Healdtown and then the University College of Fort Hare. During his years of study, he began identifying more as an African than as a Thembu or Xhosa, and he met Oliver Tambo, a fellow student, who became a lifelong friend and fellow compatriot in the struggle for liberation.
Mandela left Fort Hare rather than defy his conscience and obey the school administration’s order to take up a student council seat he had resigned in protest. He later finished school by correspondence, then started law school at the University of the Witwatersrand. He neither finished nor secured a degree, but he made dozens of contacts in the legal community. After a few years clerking at the firm of a prominent Jewish lawyer, he passed the bar exam and opened his own law firm with Oliver Tambo. He was exceptionally well educated for a black African, but “in those days, a black man with a B.A. was expected to scrape before a white man with a grade-school education,” Mandela remembered. “No matter how high a black man advances, he was still considered inferior to the lowest white man.”6 Individual achievement rarely overpowers legalized prejudice.
Many of the schools he attended were Christian institutions, and Nelson Mandela later declared, “I was a Christian and had always been a Christian.”7 He was baptized as a baby and at Fort Hare became a member of the Student Christian Association. White Christian support for apartheid dismayed him, but he continued to value the church’s work. “The mission schools,” he said, “trained the clerks, the interpreters, and the policemen, who at the time represented the height of African aspirations.”8 Despite his Christian faith, his autobiography touches on the subject only lightly.
Sometimes, though, Mandela turned to Christian resources to encourage black Africans to take responsibility for their own liberation. He recalled with approval a prayer at a meeting in Cape Town in which a minister said, “If the Lord did not show a little more initiative in leading the black man to salvation, the black man would have to take matters into his own hands.”9 At one point, he tried to argue that even Christ, “when he was left with no alternative, used force to expel the moneylenders from the temple. He was not a man of violence but had no choice but to use force against evil.”10 He admitted, with a bit of understated humor, that his audience did not find the argument persuasive.
Athletics, more than faith, defined Mandela. He was a fit and imposing 6 feet 2 inches well into his later years. From running, he learned that discipline could surpass any natural limitations. He would wake each morning as early as 4 a.m. and do strenuous calisthenics. As a young man, he went to a boxing gym a couple nights each week. Even after he was jailed and forced to do hard manual labor, he would still rise early and complete an exhausting workout regimen.
Mandela first fled to Johannesburg, after dropping out of Fort Hare, to avoid an arranged marriage brokered by his adopted father. In 1944, he married Evelyn Ntoko Mase. He and Evelyn had four children together. One, a girl, died of a mysterious illness in 1947 at only nine months. Whether due to the loss of a child, Mandela’s increasingly radical politics, or his overwork, by the early 1950s their relationship was on the rocks. In 1955, Evelyn demanded he choose between his family and politics. After he was arrested in 1956, she moved out and took the children.
The divorce devastated the children despite Mandela’s efforts to stay involved in their lives. In his later years, a more reflective Mandela praised Evelyn and assumed the blame. Mandela called his failure to make room for his family his “greatest regret, and the most painful aspect of the choice I made.”11 Mandela was behind bars when his mother passed away and when his eldest son, Thembi, died in a car wreck at only twenty-nine. At the time of his imprisonment, he had five children between the ages of five and twenty-four. The youngest was thirty-two before Mandela was released.
Mandela and Evelyn had scarcely separated when in 1957 he met Nomzamo Winifred Zanyiwe Madikizela—or “Winnie,” as everyone soon knew her. He was thirty-eight, she was twenty-two, and she enchanted him. Their relationship was passionate, and the two married as soon as his divorce was final. Winnie was herself an energetic activist. She almost miscarried after being arrested for her own political activities with the ANC Women’s League. The couple had two children before Mandela was imprisoned in 1964, and his long imprisonment made it almost impossible to maintain a marriage.
While Nelson’s politics mellowed over the next twenty-seven years, Winnie’s became more radical. In 1986, she endorsed a horrific practice—called “necklacing”—in which those suspected of informing on fellow blacks to the white regime had tires filled with gasoline placed around their necks and ignited. In 1988, she faced charges of involvement in the kidnapping of four youths, one of whom, only fourteen, was murdered. The facts of the situation are murky, but Winnie was eventually convicted and her sentence reduced to a fine. In short, Nelson wanted to talk reconciliation, but Winnie was still ready for battle. Nelson admitted, in a public and difficult divorce case after he became president, that the two never reunited after his release from jail, and there were allegations she had engaged in affairs. They were finally divorced in 1996, two years after he had become president.
In 1998, on his eightieth birthday, Nelson Mandela married Grace Machal and finally enjoyed a marriage without drama. At his daughter Zindzi’s wedding, he acknowledged the toll his life took on his family: “We watched our children growing without our guidance . . . and when we came out [of prison], my children said, ‘We thought we had a father and one day he’d come back. But to our dismay, our father came back, and he left us alone because he has now become the father of the nation.’” In his autobiography, Mandela writes with regret, “To be the father of the nation is a great honor, but to be the father of a family is a greater joy. But it was a joy I had far too little of.”12
Before Nelson Mandela became the reconciling leader of a divided nation, he was a prisoner of conscience, and, before that, he was a freedom fighter. But in 1941, when he arrived in Johannesburg, he was none of those things. His first task was to complete his college degree and then study law. He began his law career clerking for Lazar Sidelsky, the first of several Jews who aided Mandela and stood in deep solidarity with black Africans. After 1952, he owned his own firm with Oliver Tambo. The two specialized in helping fellow blacks navigate the byzantine layers of apartheid regulations affecting every aspect of their lives.
He also became an activist. In 1943, he participated in a bus boycott in response to a price hike in the Alexandra neighborhood of Johannesburg. “This campaign had a great effect on me,” he later recalled. “In a small way, I had departed from my role as an observer and become a participant.”13 In 1944, he helped found the ANC Youth League, which became a center for budding militancy within the African National Congress.
Mandela claims there was no turning point in which he decided on the course of his life. Instead, it was “a steady accumulation of a thousand slights, a thousand indignities, a thousand unremembered moments. . . . There was no particular day on which I said, From henceforth I will devote myself to the liberation of my people; instead, I simply found myself doing so, and could not do otherwise.”14 We can, however, identify some pivotal moments in his long career.
The first was the Defiance Campaign, a months-long campaign of civil disobedience in which black Africans were encouraged to deliberately break apartheid laws. Mandela, by then a rising star in the ANC, became the “volunteer-in-chief” of the campaign. He saw it as a turning point for the entire organization. “Prior to the campaign, the ANC was more talk than action,” he said, but after, it “emerged as a truly mass-based organization with an impressive corps of experienced activists who had braved the police, the courts, and the jails.” Just as important, it removed the stigma of imprisonment. Going to prison became “a badge of honor among Africans.”15 Mandela’s activism provoked a “banning” from the white government. Banned individuals faced restrictions on travel and could not meet with more than a handful of people at a time.
While under ban, Mandela, in 1953, penned his famous “No Easy Walk to Freedom” speech. The irony is that the banning prevented him from delivering this speech in person. Still, it made him a star. Mandela excoriated the system of legalized oppression that existed in South Africa. He placed the campaign for black liberation in South Africa in the context of anticolonial movements around the world—lambasting the imperialist adventures of countries such as Britain and the United States. History has tended to remember the reconciling Mandela and not the fiery freedom fighter of the 1950s and 1960s.
In December 1956, Mandela was arrested along with 155 others and charged with treason. So began the famous Treason Trial. With careful defense work, it dragged on for five long years before Mandela and his associates were acquitted. The acquittal only provoked harsh extralegal crackdowns from regime security forces skeptical of the rule of law. The five years between arrest and acquittal were a time of tremendous change both for Mandela and for the nation.
In 1960, the ANC planned a series of marches. A rival organization, both antiwhite and, unlike the ANC, anti-Communist, tried to steal the ANC’s thunder by marching days earlier. At one of those marches, on March 21, 1960, panicked police fired repeatedly into a crowd of demonstrators. When the gunshots stopped, dozens were dead and thousands wounded. The entire world soon knew of the bloody event, the Sharpeville Massacre. In the wake of Sharpeville, the government banned the ANC outright, declared martial law, and rounded up many of its leaders. Mandela’s friend Oliver Tambo fled the country and would lead the ANC from exile in later years.
For Mandela, the increasingly violent apartheid regime demanded a new strategy. “A freedom fighter learns the hard way that it is the oppressor who defines the nature of the struggle,” he said, “and the oppressed is often left no recourse but to use methods that mirror those of the oppressor.” In addition to massacres such as Sharpeville came beatings, murders, intimidation, and generalized violence aimed at maintaining the status quo. “At a certain point, one can only fight fire with fire,” he remarked.16 “Fire” came in the form of the ANC’s new military wing, uMkhonto we Sizwe, “Spear of the Nation,” or “MK.”
Mandela became head of the MK in 1961. In December of that year, bombs exploded at a handful of government offices and power stations. There is no indication that Mandela ever ordered violence, but his career had clearly taken a radical turn. During a months-long journey to drum up international support for the ANC in 1962, he stopped for military training in Ethiopia. Just days after his return, on August 5, 1962, he was traveling undercover when cars full of police officers cut him off, blockaded his vehicle, and placed him under arrest.
At first, Mandela was sentenced to five years in prison for inciting strikes and traveling without a passport. But after the government discovered an ANC safe house with papers revealing details of Spear of the Nation, suddenly Mandela and compatriots were on trial for treason. This Rivonia Trial was front-page news in South Africa and attracted headlines around the world, not least because Mandela would face the death penalty if found guilty.
Mandela’s lawyers encouraged him to tread lightly in his remarks before the court. Instead, he recalls, “I realized the role I could play in court and the possibilities before me as defendant. I was the symbol of justice in the court of the oppressor.”17 In practice, that meant delivering a riveting, four-hour concluding speech at the close of the trial that traced the course of the ANC, South Africa, apartheid, and his own response. In the last moments—to the horror of his lawyers—Mandela offered what amounted to a confession: “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 achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”18
International pressure had been growing on the South African government during the trial to refrain from putting the defendants to death. His striking speech cast him as a prisoner of conscience and dramatically raised the stakes. Ultimately, the judge did find Mandela and conspirators guilty. Then the white jurist shocked the courtroom by imposing a sentence of life imprisonment instead of death. Mandela had escaped one fate but had been consigned to another.
Mandela would spend the next twenty-seven years behind bars. He compared arriving at the prison at Robben Island to journeying to another country. Jailers greeted Mandela and his fellow prisoners with shouts of “Dis die Eiland! Hier gaan julle vrek!” or “This is the Island! Here you will die!” Mandela responded with stoic courage, determined to prove that those imprisoned for political beliefs were different from common criminals. When a guard threatened to kill prisoners and hide their fate from their families, Mandela simply replied, “You have your duty and we have ours.”19
The early years were the worst. Meals consisted of pap made from ground corn. The prisoners were forced to work hard manual labor. Disobedience could land prisoners in isolation without food or contact for three days. Here his well-honed sense of dignity was tested. “Prison and the authorities conspire to rob each man of his dignity,” he wrote, but “any institution that tries to rob me of my dignity will lose because I will not part with it at any price or under any pressure.”20 At one point, he denounced a particularly brutal warden to a panel of visiting judges in such measured tones—with the warden present and threatening violence in response—that the man was quickly transferred away from Robben Island. Mandela would not be intimidated.
While in prison, Mandela began writing his memoirs, maintained his exercise regimen, and learned Afrikaans. He also befriended his white guards, much to their surprise. He became particularly close with James Gregory, who would guard him for more than twenty years, and the two shared a mournful bond after both lost sons. Mandela also, in his words, “mellowed.” He did not retreat from his convictions but chose to live them out with more patience, dialogue, and openness. He was a mentor to younger men who arrived in prison full of fury. He came to believe that “all men, even the most seemingly cold-blooded, have a core of decency, and that if their heart is touched, they are capable of changing.”21
People expected him to hate whites, but he did not. “In prison, my anger towards whites decreased, but my hatred for the system grew. I wanted South Africa to see that I loved even my enemies while I hated the system that turned us against each other.”22 He had a rare ability to see the way systems erode human decency, refusing to blame the warden for his cruelty but seeing how an inhuman system had produced people who acted in inhumane ways. Change the system, he thought, and you might change the people.
In the 1980s, pressure on the South African government made apartheid increasingly untenable. Oliver Tambo had begun a “Free Nelson Mandela” campaign that made Mandela a household name around the world. South Africa became a pariah nation. In one of the most effective global human rights efforts in history, campaigners from around the world convinced governments to boycott, sanction, and divest from the country. Back in South Africa, uprisings threatened the white minority’s grip on power. The government responded with small steps toward dialogue. Mandela was moved off Robben Island and to a series of progressively more comfortable prisons.
Mandela soon met with the South African minister of justice and, later, the prime minister. Most of the meetings were secret for fear of backlash from whites and black radicals. Many in the ANC disapproved of Mandela’s actions when they found out. Mandela persisted and made it his calling to engage in the dialogue the ANC could not. It was a brave move. The radical who had confronted the state was now risking the ire of his own side in the name of peace.
When F. W. de Klerk took over leadership of the white regime, he shocked the world by quickly moving toward deescalation. The government unbanned the African National Congress and released political prisoners. Mandela and de Klerk met repeatedly, never quite becoming friends but refusing to be enemies. Then on February 11, 1990, the once-unthinkable took place: Mandela walked out of Victor Verster Prison a free man, greeted by an adoring crowd of tens of thousands.
Skeptics predicted that the end of apartheid would result in retaliation against South African whites. It is a credit to Mandela and others, such as Archbishop Desmond Tutu, that it did not. In 1991, representatives of all South African people convened to discuss the shape of a future government. After eighteen months and multiple rounds of talks, the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA) agreed on universal suffrage and set a date for elections. This alone was remarkable enough, considering the amount of blood that had been spilled. The fact that Mandela and others were able to resolve last-minute tensions with the Inkatha Freedom Party, which threatened to boycott the elections, was nothing short of remarkable.
Mandela and de Klerk shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993 in anticipation of the peaceful transfer of power. The hope of the Nobel Committee was not in vain. In April 1994, the ANC won with 62 percent of the vote. The first act of the new parliament was to elect Nelson Mandela president of South Africa. The warring freedom fighter turned prisoner of conscience was suddenly the leader of Africa’s most prosperous nation—but one still riven with racial tensions, resentments, and the memory of violence. He made it his mission immediately after the votes were in to preach reconciliation and a united South Africa, and remind people that they had struggled not against each other or against any one group but against repression.
In his May 10, 1994, inaugural speech, Mandela delivered that message to his people. No one failed to notice that he used the word “we” when referring to South Africa’s ugly past. He would not turn the blame solely on whites nor wipe the slate clean. Mandela cemented the racist regime’s cruelty as part of the history of the nation—a nation that now belonged to everyone. The new South African government put such beliefs into action with the initiation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1994. Offering full amnesty for crimes that were confessed in full, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission pioneered a new way of coping with the aftermath of conflict.
Most of us would have spent those long years in prison nursing grievances. Instead, Mandela emerged a better leader, a better Christian, and a better human being. The Mandela who walked out of prison was no longer the hotheaded young man but one who valued forgiveness, the path of peace, and self-restraint. What never changed was his love for a country that had treated him and his people so cruelly.
In the late 1990s, Mandela—by then into his eighties—handed over power and stepped down from the presidency. Such an act should not be taken for granted. History is littered with the rotten legacies of freedom fighters who refused to relinquish power once they grasped it. In 2004, he retired from public life and lived happily and quietly—seeking time with the family from which he had too long been apart. He lived a long and full life before dying on December 5, 2013.
LEGACY AND CRITICISM
Nelson Mandela was the father of his nation—a nation that had a new birth, in the 1990s, out of the chaos of colonialism and the racist apartheid regime. He deserves to be remembered for his unflagging courage, his willingness to examine his own convictions, his quiet dignity in surviving years of prison, and his openness to dialogue even when it was unpopular with his own people. At the top of the list is surely his remarkable and inspiring evolution from aggressive militant to one who recognized the human dignity even of his oppressors. He offered black South Africans a model to follow: someone who refused to humble himself before an unjust government but instead called on all to overwhelm the regime with a greater humanity and respect for life.
Mandela’s personal leadership was pivotal in a successful, bloodless transition to black majority rule. Few postcolonial transitions were as smooth. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was essential to that transition. Mandela was one of many, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who pushed the commission forward—but he also could have easily squashed the notion had he wished.
Finding a way forward after long, violent conflicts—especially those with atrocities on both sides—can seem impossible. Some abuse the notion of forgiveness by denying justice and insisting that victims must forgive, forget, and move on. Such an approach leaves festering wounds that come back to haunt everyone. In other cases, especially when a long-oppressed group finally has the power to turn suffering back on oppressors, retaliation can take center stage. The focus becomes finding and punishing perpetrators, legally or not—or rewriting history to excoriate some and exculpate others.
Ultimately, the challenge is to balance competing priorities. Do we remember the atrocities that occurred, or do we sweep them under the rug? Is guilt assigned, moved, or confessed? Is the emphasis on punishment or a path forward? When does one form of violence warrant another?
The Truth and Reconciliation approach was embodied in its name. South Africans of all backgrounds were offered the chance to make a full confession of their crimes. The commission’s job was to assess whether the confession was true and complete. In return, those who confessed were offered amnesty for their crimes. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission favored forgiveness and closure for the families of victims—many of whose loved ones had simply disappeared—over retributive justice.
The process was not perfect. Critics still argue that this model fails to deliver recompense to victims, draws false equivalencies between different acts of violence, lets the most evil offenders off the hook, and addresses recent atrocities better than centuries-old wrongdoings. Still, its combination of truthful remembering, honest reflection, and open reconciliation has become an example for others to emulate.
The greatest criticisms levied at Mandela during his life were that he was too radical, too friendly with Communists, and too willing to tolerate violence in pursuit of his social goals. Certainly, the radicalism was tempered by long years in prison. The other critiques warrant more attention. Mandela’s flirtations with communism hurt his reputation at the height of the Cold War. Both Western audiences and anti-Communist African nationalists thought him a pawn in international Communist schemes. Mandela always claimed to be willing to use whatever means he could to advance his cause. “The cynical have always suggested that the Communists were using us,” he later wrote, “but who is to say that we were not using them?”23
Mandela justified his openness to violence on two grounds. First was the practical: “Violence would begin whether we initiated it or not. Would it not be better to guide this violence ourselves, according to principles where we save lives by attacking symbols of oppression, and not people?”24 Most people approve of violence in the name of self-defense. But usually we allow our biased loyalties to decide when we think freedom fighters are truly acting in self-defense.
The pragmatic Mandela was reticent to take violence off the table. “For me, nonviolence was not a moral principle but a strategy,” he wrote. “But if peaceful protest is met with violence, its efficacy is at an end.”25 He believed the threat of violence could drive people to compromise. Mandela made a point that critics of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. claim those two missed: nonviolence requires a government that can be shamed. Gandhi’s encouragement of nonviolent resistance to Nazi crimes, for example, seems frighteningly naive.
Perhaps the most straightforward response to Mandela’s consideration of violence is simply to note that he was impatient in those years, and nonviolent resistance offers little short-term satisfaction. As he later acknowledged, “My thoughts on this matter were not yet formed, and I had spoken too soon.”26
The troubled personal lives of many moral leaders make one wonder whether family commitments and loyalty to a great cause are incompatible. No leader in this volume was as starkly honest about that trade-off as Nelson Mandela. “I did not begin to choose to place my people above my family,” he admitted mournfully. “But in attempting to serve my people, I found I was prevented from fulfilling my obligations as a son, a brother, a father, and a husband.”27 He admitted his faults in this area extended beyond his prison sentence, in another mark of his honesty and humility. Nelson Mandela offers a profound warning of the real costs of a life of leadership.
Today, Mandela’s flirtations with communism bother only the most die-hard cold warriors. His early endorsement of violence still troubles some people, but most judge the entirety of his life. As the twenty-first century continues, Mandela’s legacy will remain tied to the fate of his nation. In 1996, he presided over the enactment of a new constitution for South Africa. It is one of the world’s most democratic and progressive, and enshrines a human-rights vision that goes beyond protecting basic rights to envision a more prosperous future for all.
If the constitution still stands as a beacon, Mandela’s political party, the ANC, has not withstood the test of time. The party—and thus South Africa—has struggled to find leaders of Mandela’s quality and incorruptibility. Mandela and his peers also appear to have bought political peace at the price of leaving economic apartheid unchallenged. Despite black majority rule, the nation remains profoundly unequal. Its great wealth has stayed disproportionately in the hands of whites. Not confronting economic inequality when the nation was willing to examine its conscience appears to have been a missed opportunity.
In 1961, Mandela insisted, “I will not leave South Africa, nor will I surrender. Only through hardship, sacrifice, and militant action can freedom be won. The struggle is my life. I will continue fighting for freedom until the end of my days.”28 He kept his word. It came at a great personal cost, but that suffering also produced great wisdom. In the process, he changed the course of his beloved country and became a moral leader to millions around the world.
LEADERSHIP LESSONS
Nelson Mandela’s life and work offer a number of important lessons about moral leadership:
- Forgive failures, but do not forget them. Mandela asked his nation to forgive the crimes committed by the apartheid regime and those who rebelled against it—but to do so without forgetting them and failing to learn from them. He did the same thing in his personal life by making an honest confession of his failures as a parent.
- Avoid talking down to people. Mandela liked to say that a morally superior tone never helped produce fruitful discussions. Moral leadership is not gained by insisting that everyone else is immoral.
- Make the most of setbacks. Mandela’s twenty-seven years in prison did not fuel hatred but moved him to spiritual maturity, heroism, and vision. We all face obstacles in life, but we have a choice whether those obstacles leave us bitter or transformed.
- Be willing to see the humanity in people. One of Mandela’s breakthroughs was his ability to see the difference between unjust systems that teach people to be evil, and people themselves. Be willing to see the goodness and dignity in others, even opponents.
- Be disciplined. As Mandela’s self-discipline grew from inspiring his calisthenic regimen to encompassing his entire life, he gained the patience and humility that come with self-control. Being disciplined helps you make the most of your gifts.
“People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.”29 Such insights did not come to Nelson Mandela through study but through a courageous life. He committed his life to a cause. He did not pursue it without error. It came with a great personal cost—both to him personally and to his family. Reflecting on his life, though, he decided that what counts is “not the mere fact that we have lived. It is what difference we have made to the lives of others that will determine the significance of the life we lead.”30 The difference one makes to the lives of others: somewhere in that statement is the seed of moral leadership.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
- If Mandela had moved into guerrilla warfare, would we be studying him as a moral leader?
- Do his failed marriages and struggles as a parent matter to our evaluation of him?
- Does Mandela bear responsibility for the corruption of the ANC and the lack of serious economic progress for black South Africans?
- Reflect on how twenty-seven years in prison made Mandela a better person.
- Did Mandela work effectively in a team? How did he balance individual leadership with collective action?
FOR FURTHER READING
Aikman, David. Great Souls: Six Who Changed the Century. Dallas: Word, 1998.
Cooper, Floyd. Mandela: From the Life of the South African Statesman. New York: Puffin Books, 2000.
Mandela, Nelson. In the Words of Nelson Mandela. Edited by Jennifer Crwys-Williams. London: Walker Books, 2011.
———. Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela. New York: Little, Brown, 2008.
Meredith, Martin. Mandela: A Biography. New York: Public Affairs/Hachette, 2010.
Sampson, Anthony. Mandela: The Authorized Biography. New York: Vintage, 2012.
1. Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela (New York: Little, Brown, 2008), 66.
2. Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 111.
3. Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 111.
4. Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 10.
5. Anders Hallengren, “Nelson Mandela and the Rainbow of Culture,” NobelPrize.org, https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1993/mandela-article.html.
6. Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 34.
7. Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 521.
8. Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 19.
9. Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 265.
10. Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 521.
11. Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 600.
12. Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 600–601.
13. Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 87.
14. Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 95.
15. Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 138–39.
16. Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 166.
17. Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 317.
18. David Aikman, Great Souls: Six Who Changed the Century (Dallas: Word, 1998), 103–4.
19. Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 341.
20. Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 391.
21. Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 462.
22. Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 568.
23. Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 121.
24. Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 272.
25. Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 158.
26. Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 158.
27. Nelson Mandela, In the Words of Nelson Mandela, ed. Jennifer Crwys-Williams (London: Walker Books, 2011), 40.
28. Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 276.
29. Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 622.
30. Nelson Mandela, “Address by Nelson Mandela during the 90th Birthday Celebration of Mr Walter Sisulu,” Mandela.gov, May 18, 2002, http://www.mandela.gov.za/mandela_speeches/2002/020518_sisulu.htm.