25 - 31 January 2001
Issue No.518
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 25 - 31 January 2001 Issue No.518 |
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Plain Talk
Biographies and autobiographies are often more thrilling than works of the imagination. I have just finished reading Nelson Mandela's recently published autobiography Long Walk to Freedom which has all the elements of a modern thriller: action, violence, detection, imprisonment, intrigues and what have you. After finishing this book which is an enlargement of his earlier work No Easy Walk to Freedom, I found myself going back to the first 'instalment' of that great freedom fighters.
Mandela's first book tells us half the story. It stops short with his life in the infamous Robben Island prison. The book ends with no glimmer of hope for a changed South Africa. The introduction is by Ruth First, a white anti-apartheid writer whom I had the pleasure of meeting when she visited Cairo in the 1960's. In keeping with the savagery of the racist government of South Africa, First was killed by a letter bomb that exploded in her face.
In her introduction she says that the Rivonia trial sending Mandela and his colleagues to imprisonment "marked the abandonment by the African Struggle of any illusions, constitutional and otherwise about the nature of the combat. The non-violent phase of the liberation movement was over," the armed resistance movement began and the freedom fighters were hunted, put on trial, thrown into jail or killed. Leaders were legally murdered under the semblance of law and order.
Ruth First continues in her introduction to describe the enemy the freedom fighters are against. The enemy is not a single outpost "but an imposing phalanx of white settler states which together constitute almost a fifth of Black Africa. The strategic core of this vast white power stronghold is, of course South Africa, with four million whites, a prosperous economy heavily financed by British, US. and European interests, and with a massive mobile military capacity."
Mandela was a born leader. After his legal education he opened law practice in partnership with Oliver Tambo in Johannesburg. While Mandela chose to stay and fight inside South Africa, Oliver Tambo became the roving ambassador, and the official spokesman of the African National Congress abroad. For some years he headed the ANC office in Cairo, situated with other freedom fighters offices in Ahmed Heshmat Street in Zamalek.
Oliver Tambo describes Mandela as "passionate emotional, sensitive... He has a natural air of authority. He cannot help magnetising a crowd ... dedicated and fearless, he is born mass leader... He is the symbol of self-sacrificing leadership needed by a people living and dying under the most brutal system of race rule in the world."
Mandela starts his The Long Walk to Freedom with the birth of a resistance movement, with how, from 1912 onwards, the African people "raised their voices to condemn the grinding poverty, the low wages, the acute shortage of land, the inhuman exploitation and the whole policy of white domination."
Those conditions created rage among the people. But rage alone is ineffective. "Long speeches, the shaking of fists, the banging of tables and strongly worded resolutions out of touch with conditions," Mandela cautions, "do not bring about mass action and can do a great deal of harm." Rage, in Mandela's opinion had to be checked, channelled and used, turned into cold anger and stored like harnessed power. "We had to analyse the dangers that face us", says Mandela, "formulate plans to overcome them and evolve new plans of political struggle," without becoming racist in turn. "We are convinced," Mandela writes "that there are thousands of white population who are prepared to take up a firm and courageous stand for unconditional equality and the complete renunciation of white supremacy."
There certainly were whites like Ruth First, Nadine Gordimer, Breyton Breytenback, Christopher Hope and others, who took the side of the rightful people of South Africa. Through their writings they were able to win sympathy and support for the African people of South Africa.
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