During his June 1990 tour of the United States, Nelson Mandela flew to Miami to speak to a union convention. It was a tense moment because anti-Castro Cubans protested, denouncing him as a Communist and a terrorist. SWAT squads were out in force wearing body armor and displaying automatic weapons while a small plane circled overhead towing a sign denouncing the ANC.
When interviewed, Mandela said he thought it was totally unreasonable for critics to bash him for his friendship with Cuba. “Fidel Castro supported us while we couldn’t even get close to the American government,” he explained. “Why should we criticize Cuba?”
Inside the convention, I spoke to a few black female delegates who started jumping up and down when he entered the hall.
“We love him,” they screamed. “He’s a stand-up leader when so many of our leaders sell us out.”
In South Africa, the term “stalwart” might be interchangeable with “stand-up.” Both refer to the idea of consistent leadership that endures for years, earning respect and admiration.
On his ninety-fourth birthday on July 18, 2012, the National Education, Health and Allied Workers Union used the term to call on its members to support what Mandela stood for: “This stalwart of our liberation never betrayed the struggle for freedom and did not waver in the face of danger. He sacrificed his life and livelihood in search of justice for the oppressed and vulnerable. . . . The challenge for our leaders is to ensure that they learn from him and they prioritize service delivery above their personal interests and those of their families. The fight against corruption should be intensified in order to protect the legacy of stalwarts like Mandela and others who gave their all on behalf of the oppressed without expecting anything in return.”
He won accolades like this because Mandela always called attention to his organization, not himself. As Parliament Speaker Max Sisulu noted in a Nelson Mandela lecture he gave in India: “[He] never sought to place himself above others. He is a product of our organization, his views were honed within the organization and the dreams and aspirations he articulated were those shared with his comrades in arms: Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki, Ahmed Kathrada, Yusuf Dadoo, and many others. When he spoke, he spoke for them all.”
Some of the best insights into Mandela’s character have come from people like Ahmed Kathrada, who worked alongside him in the movement, then in prison.
Kathy told me, “I first met him in 1945 or ’46. I would say that prison brings out the best and the worst in people. It’s a real test. There are, what do you call it, things that happen in prison, temptations in prison that one can take advantage of.
“First of all, when we came to prison, to Robben Island, he said, ‘Chaps, we are no longer leaders. We don’t make policy, we don’t give instructions. Our leaders are outside the country.’ In the first years it was Chief Luthuli. After he died, it was Thabo Mbeki and others. ‘Those are our leaders,’ he said. ‘Here we are ordinary prisoners. No preferential treatment.’ I mean, he didn’t have to tell us but he did, and he practiced that in prison.
“There was also apartheid between Indians and coloreds on the one side and Africans on the other, and the most glaring example was that for ten years the Africans did not have bread. We had bread. I mean clothing, too. They were given short trousers; we were given long trousers. He was offered equal treatment with us. He refused.
“And when I talk about our leadership as a whole, we did pick and shovel work. It was very hard. We got used to it after a while. He was exempted. He refused such special treatment. In 1977, after being in prison for thirteen years, he was offered release, provided he would go to the Transkei. He refused. In 1985, all of us were offered release on certain conditions. Now by that time we were at Pollsmoor, five of us. It didn’t take us any debate: we told Madiba to write a letter and tell them we are not accepting this release.”
Kathy is impatient with the idea that anyone would ever suggest Mandela was anything other than a stand-up, stalwart leader. “They don’t know. You see, unfortunately, there’s an increase today, particularly among ignorant people, who think the revolution was just around the corner and everything was going to be all right without negotiations. What they forget is that the South African Army was the strongest in the whole of Africa. They could literally walk through Africa without resistance because the [liberated] African countries were few, so there was no army in Africa that was as strong as this one.
“Madiba’s timing was just perfect, otherwise there would have been so much more bloodshed. But people don’t know those things. People don’t know what the White Right Wing—not the lunatic fringe like Terre’Blanche of the neo-Nazi AWB, but the generals leading the South African Army—what they were planning. Now they would never have defeated us. I mean, we were going to win. Everything was turning in our favor. The people in South Africa were becoming more and more politicized. The international community was isolating apartheid, so everything was in our favor, but always with the idea that we would force the enemy to the negotiating table. That was the ANC policy.”
The debate over Mandela’s effectiveness as a negotiator and president will continue. But his willingness to stand up courageously when he believes it is the right thing to do is undeniable. For example, it took great courage for him to personally embrace AIDS activism even when his successor and former deputy president Mbeki became a symbol for those who didn’t believe fighting AIDS should be a priority, stressing instead “diseases of poverty.” Mandela helped reintroduce AIDS as a major human rights issue at speeches in South Africa and at international conferences, saying, “The more we lack the courage and the will to act, the more we condemn to death our brothers and sisters, our children and our grandchildren. When the history of our times is written, will we be remembered as the generation that turned our backs in a moment of a global crisis, or will it be recorded that we did the right thing?”
Elaine McKay, HIV/AIDS program manager at the foundation, said Mandela was gutsy enough to say he had made a mistake on the issue earlier:
“Mr. Mandela is the first leader I know who, as former president, was quite happy to get up and say, ‘I’m sorry.’ He said after his presidential years that he was so concerned with nation-building that he didn’t pay sufficient attention to HIV and AIDS. When the Nelson Mandela Foundation was then set up, he was clear that he wanted it to be a clear priority for the foundation to correct what he could have done during the presidential years. HIV was going to be one of his top priorities.”
The foundation would soon be criticized for spending too much time on AIDS, for turning Mandela into an AIDS activist.
McKay explained: “It affected him personally. He lost a child. So for him it wasn’t about politics. It was about doing the right thing. And that’s what inspired me when I worked with Nelson Mandela. He came up and he said, ‘My son died, and he died of AIDS.’ He didn’t hide it.
“He said, ‘For all of you who think that this disease is a three-letter sickness, you’ve created terms that take away from the seriousness of the disease. I’ve lost a child. Don’t allow the silence around the disease to kill our people.’ He broke the silence. What better leader to be associated with: one that makes it personal and makes it real. That level of integrity is unprecedented today.”
When AIDS activist Zackie Achmat of the Treatment Action Campaign in South Africa announced he would stop taking his medicine because they were unaffordable for poor South Africans, Mandela called and appealed to him to take his medicine. Achmat said no, but they later met and Mandela threw his considerable weight and visibility behind him and his campaign. The controversial activist and the respected leader became friends. Mandela later called him a “national hero.” On one occasion, when former president Thabo Mbeki refused to take Achmat’s calls, Mandela broke all protocol and went personally to his home to try to persuade him on the issue.
Mandela later asked Bill Clinton to intervene with pharmaceutical companies, with the result that lower-cost AIDS drugs were made more widely available. Elaine MacKay admired Mandela’s persistence on an issue he was not obligated to act on. “We were ridiculed [in some quarters]. Someone said to me, ‘You took Mr. Mandela’s number, prisoner number 46664, instead of prisoner to president, you made him prisoner to AIDS activist. We did get that criticism. But we had his mandate, and he was prepared to buffer the criticism that we encountered. So he honestly took a principled stand, and backed us up every step of the way, even when we were faced with political problems.”
I asked Elaine to tell me what it was like for her to comfort Mandela when he was grieving privately for his dead child.
“I went to his home to sympathize with him, along with a colleague from the Mandela Foundation. We sat around his dining room table, and I couldn’t find the words to say, ‘I’m sorry,’ you know? As parents we don’t want to bury our children?
“He spoke of how he wasn’t able to attend one of his kid’s burials when he was imprisoned on Robben Island because they wouldn’t give him a pass to leave. So it was in this context that he asked, ‘Why didn’t I know sooner? Is there something that I can do? Is there something our country can do better? What are all the other challenges other people are facing when you can’t afford access to treatment?’ For him, no one needed to die of AIDS. The fact that it was his son made it even more real for him. It was so painful to watch, but all he wanted to know was, ‘What are we going to do about it? How can we prevent this happening to somebody else?’
“It was so touching to watch. Because all you know is the Nelson Mandela that makes the hair on your arms stand up. The kind of man who can inspire fear by virtue of his size, and how he uses his voice. But he also has such a soft and gentle side that I’ve seen. That is also his legacy.”