LEADER PROFILE SIX
NELSON MANDELA
On the list of the most important human rights victories of our times, the end of apartheid in South Africa has to be near the top. And as often happens with successful movements, a charismatic leader inspired the masses and grew to be a symbol of that victory. The American Revolution had George Washington, the Solidarity movement had Lech Walesa, but there is probably no greater testament to the power of great leadership than the story of Nelson Mandela, a revolutionary who toppled a government from behind bars.
Mandela was raised in the countryside and taught from an early age to have great pride in his people, the Thembu. When he ran away from home as a young man, to escape an arranged marriage, Mandela landed in Johannesburg where he quickly became outraged at the treatment of his fellow blacks under the white minority government.
He first became involved in political organizing against apartheid as a college student, but it was after he set up his own law firm that he became truly dedicated to the cause. Mandela and his law partner Oliver Tambo saw people jailed simply for being unemployed, for living in the wrong area, and other so-called offenses. As Tambo described it, “South African apartheid laws turn innumerable innocent people into ‘criminals.’ Apartheid stirs hatred and frustration among people. Young people, who should be in school or learning a trade, roam the streets, join gangs, and wreak their revenge on the society that confronts them with only the dead-end alley of crime or poverty.”
Changing these conditions became Mandela’s mission. But it wasn’t long before Mandela and his involvement with the African National Congress—the political party bent on overthrowing apartheid—began to attract the attention of the white South African government, who knew a threat to their stability when they saw one.
First, the authorities demanded that Mandela and Tambo move their practice from the city to the “back of beyond,” as Mandela later put it in his autobiography Long Walk to Freedom, “miles away from where clients could reach us during working hours. This was tantamount to asking us to abandon our legal practice, to give up the legal service of our people. . ..No attorney worth his salt would easily agree to do that.”
Mandela and Tambo were determined to defy the order.
Whenever an obstacle was thrown in Mandela’s way, he immediately set upon finding a way around it. Time and time again, Mandela was to be thwarted in his struggle. But instead of throwing up his hands, he would roll up his sleeves and figure out how he could succeed within the conditions at hand—no matter how brutal or unfair they might have been.
In 1952 the heat was on, so Mandela recognized he had to spread his anti-apartheid message—and fast. The authorities were closing in and preventing every standard means of organizing a political movement—using ever crueler variations on the system they had used to oppress the country’s black majority for decades.
So Mandela came up with what became known as the M-Plan, named for its creator. Tambo described it as “a simple commonsense plan for organization on a street basis, so that Congress volunteers would be in daily touch with the people, alert to their needs and able to mobilize them. [Mandela could] no longer appear on the public platform and few platforms were allowed us as the years went by, but he was ever among the people, guiding his lieutenants to organize them.”
Mandela was putting to work leadership principals he had learned as a boy being raised by his uncle, the powerful acting regent of the Thembu people.
In his autobiography, Mandela recalled attending meetings over which his uncle presided:
“As a leader, I have always followed the principles I first saw demonstrated by the regent at the Great Place. I have always endeavored to listen to what each and every person in a discussion had to say before venturing my own opinion. Oftentimes, my own opinion will simply represent a consensus of what I heard in the discussion.
“I always remember the regent’s axiom: ‘A leader,’ he said, ‘is like a shepherd. He stays behind the flock, letting the most nimble go out ahead, whereupon the others follow, not realizing that all along they are being directed from behind.’”
It wasn’t long before Mandela was jailed and truly had to completely rely on the more nimble members of his flock. And as always, Mandela adapted and the movement thrived. He was in and out of jail throughout the late fifties and early sixties, sometimes simultaneously representing his clients while conducting his own defense in another courtroom. As the price on his head grew higher, he donned disguises to move throughout the country, earning him the nickname, the Black Pimpernel. He also utilized a complex underground network of people willing to smuggle him out of the country to attend diplomatic meetings where he exhorted other countries to join his fight.
Finally, the South African government caught up with Mandela and handed him a life sentence in 1962. His statement at the trial became a rallying point for the movement during the twenty-seven years he was imprisoned:
“During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to the struggle of the African people. 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 needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”
And he stuck to his word. Twice the government offered Mandela freedom if he would renounce his ideals. Both times, he firmly refused and his legend grew. “Prisoners cannot enter into contracts,” he said. “Only free men can negotiate.”
Though Mandela was denied access to the freedom movement he helped ignite, behind the prison walls he once again displayed his irrepressible knack for organizing to better his community and making the best of a very bad situation.
Mandela started a school at the harsh penal island where he served the first part of his sentence. As the prisoners did their grueling manual labor, they quizzed one another on the week’s lessons. They even put on plays.
“Any man or institution that tries to rob me of my dignity will lose,” Mandela later wrote in a note smuggled out by friends.
In 1990, the white minority government did just that. Bowing to international pressure, President F. W. deKlerk summoned Mandela to the presidential palace to negotiate his own release—and an end to apartheid.
Mandela became president of South Africa in 1991 in the country’s first democratic election. On a continent rife with warring factions and political turmoil, Mandela steered his nation through a remarkably peaceful transition to democracy. He simply used the same integrity, openness, and ingenuity that allowed him to prevail over the oppression and imprisonment he encountered on the way to freeing his people. Mandela humbly explains away his remarkable impact on his nation and the world: “I was not a messiah but an ordinary man who had become a leader because of extraordinary circumstances.”