John Humphrys considers Nelson Mandela's life
“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.” So spoke Nelson Mandela in 1964, on trial for his life.
Few politicians face so daunting a challenge as Mandela confronted as a young black leader in apartheid South Africa. Even fewer live to become the internationally revered statesman able to say at the end of a long, tempestuous life that he has achieved his goals. Long before his death on Thursday, Mandela had made real the ideal he so simply and eloquently articulated from the dock during his trial. Is he the outstanding political figure of our times?
His political career lasted nearly seventy years but its purpose followed a simple straight line. Born in 1918 into the Thembu tribe in the eastern Cape, he trained as a lawyer, joined the African National Congress in 1943 and founded its youth wing. In the early 1950s, along with his ANC comrade, Oliver Tambo, he set up the first black legal practice in a country increasingly in the grip of an apartheid ideology that treated the black majority as an inferior race. In 1960 the ANC was banned and at Sharpeville sixty nine black people were gunned by the police.
Mandela’s political activity had to go underground. He fought the apartheid regime by attacking its economic base and was put on trial for sabotage. He was sentenced to life in prison and after 1964 spent twenty-seven years incarcerated, eighteen of them on Robben Island off the coast at Cape Town.
Resistance to apartheid governments organised by an exiled ANC leadership and political and economic pressure from an increasingly hostile international community led the apartheid government of President F W de Klerk to think again. In 1990 the ANC ban was lifted and Mandela was released. The stage was set for majority rule to come at last to South Africa. In 1993 Mandela and de Klerk jointly won the Nobel Peace Prize and the following year Mandela was elected the first black president of the country, serving until 1999 when he retired at the age of eighty-one.
What makes Mandela stand out as such an extraordinary figure, though, is less the fact that he was able to achieve his seemingly impossible goals than his personal qualities and the example that he set. The nobility of his vision, the courage and dogged determination with which he pursued it and his refusal to allow nearly thirty years in prison to quench his spirit are all exceptional. But perhaps even more than these remarkable qualities it is his magnanimity that is the most striking characteristic of this extraordinary man.
His refusal to seek retribution against those who had treated him and his cause so outrageously – indeed his palpable wish to be generous towards them – was motivated by more than astute political calculation. It seemed to come from something much deeper within him, something that struck many people as being an almost Christ-like belief in forgiveness and turning the other cheek. It was manifest in his smile, his humour and his self-deprecation. Like Abraham Lincoln he had the greatness of spirit to be able to imagine what it would be like to be the people against whom he was fighting and to treat them generously when they had been overcome.
Of course Mandela did not defeat apartheid single-handedly. Many others did indeed have to lose their lives in order to bring the new South Africa about. Nor was Mandela such a paragon of a political figure to be without legitimate critics. The ANC government over which he presided failed to tackle many of the problems it inherited and the party itself has become mired in incompetence and corruption. Mandela, it is said, could have done more to ward off these tendencies given his supreme moral and political authority.
Nonetheless his achievement seems incomparable. And his legacy will only in part be expressed through what happens to the free South Africa he, more than anyone else, helped to create. The more substantial part of that legacy will be symbolic. He remains behind as an icon, an image of what a human being as clear-sighted, courageous, determined, resourceful and above all generous can achieve in political life.
Is he the political figure of our times?
