![]() The following year he was appointed chair of the Southern African Development Community (SADC), a regional economic bloc, and that brought him to confront an even more onerous problem: Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) was fast sliding into chaos under its long-term kleptocrat, Mobutu Sese Seko. The government of Abacha, secure in oil wealth and facing a fractured opposition whose leadership preferred comfortable exile to the necessary task of national leadership, was the first setback to Mandela’s vision in 1995. His harsh journey from prison to the presidency enabled him to pursue his vision, which afterward needed to be broadly applied across Africa. He was not and never wanted to be seen as a pacifist: for him freedom and justice were worth fighting and dying for. “I have done whatever I did, both as an individual and as a leader of my people,” Mandela told the judges at his trial at Rivonia on 20 April 1964, “because of my experience in South Africa and my own proudly felt African background, and not because of what any outsider might have said.” It was this vision that saw him in 1961 travel to almost all of independent Africa, drumming up support for his fledging armed struggle it was out of this experience that he settled on his great legacy for the world: reconciliation and redistributive, rather than retributive, justice after the experience of tyranny and war-what has now (somewhat uneasily) become the sprawling and protean field of transitional justice. What tends to be missing from most of the encomiums, perhaps because he has now been so warmly embraced by the world, is what Mandela himself always made sure to emphasise at every opportunity: that he was first and foremost an African nationalist with a vision-shaped by his experience of raw racism and oppression perpetrated by a minority fascist regime-of commitment to the continent and all its people. Mandela had to back down from his hard-line stance against Abacha amidst pressure from the “realists” in his government who were concerned that a newly liberated South Africa was on a collision course with some of those who had been among the staunchest backers of his African National Congress (ANC) during the terrible years of apartheid.Īppraisals and reminiscences of Mandela since he died on 5 December have justly stressed his great commitment to social justice, his largeness of spirit and towering humanism, his lack of saintly affectation (in sharp contrast to Mahatma Gandhi, with whom some have compared him) and his courage, dignity and political astuteness. By doing so, Abacha had drawn the battle line, stoking the fiery passion for justice still burning in the breast of the aged champion of freedom: to his end Mandela lived by the dictum, which he articulated with great eloquence at his trial at Rivonia in 1964, that though he abhorred violence, he was willing to employ it to fight “tyranny, exploitation, and oppression.” ![]() ![]() Mandela was angry Abacha had rebuffed Mandela’s studiously private and civilised appeal for the release of Saro-Wiwa and his fellow activists. ![]() The nine had been condemned by a military tribunal. Sani Abacha, an obdurate and corrupt dictator in Nigeria who, in addition to still holding the winner of his country’s presidential election in solitary confinement, had just executed the writer and environmentalist Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other activists from oil-blighted Ogoniland. He was 77, and had already been president of South Africa for a year. And I am going to explode it underneath him.” It belonged to Nelson Mandela. On 27 November 1995, a calm voice issued this jarring statement on the BBC: “Abacha is sitting on a volcano.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |