Mandela: A Long Walk To The Emancipation Of Man

By Osuolale Alalade

The transition of the Madiba on 5 December, 2013 into an icon of the ages ushered in one of the most significant watersheds in the broad sweep of world history. His passage closed a major chapter of this history as it has given birth to a post-Mandela world. From now on, the evolution of the character of the world and attempts at resolving its unending multifarious struggles would be measured against a certain Mandela barometer.

In this, he joins a pantheon of rare giant spirit beings whose respective journeys through here was to point humanity in a certain direction. Mandela’s life struggle was to vacuum out of existence a fossilised horrendous expression of man’s inhumanity to man that was founded on ancient scriptural distortions, the Bible and the Koran, posted by the so-called major religions of the world. He laid bare the emptiness of the pretenses of the superiority of the material over the spiritual. And this spirituality was not defined by the Church and the Mosque that indeed sanctioned slavery and persisted in its iniquitous degradation of black humanity. Indeed, some historians have advanced that exactly at the point of encounter and engagement with others, the black man was forced to dispose of his gods for the gods of Others – Jehovah, Allah and Yahweh – and suffered under those foreign deities.

Thus Mandela’s titanic struggle against Apartheid, the last bastion of the expressions of the senselessness of these major hegemonic faiths, was also a process that was intricately entangled in the larger ideological, spiritual and material struggles that defined the sordid existential realities of inimical global race relations. Black humanity was the last on this totem pole. In fact, he was not part of the pole as he stood outside of it as a derelict reject of a race in a callous global dispensation. Mandela’s challenge was a universal human problematique.

The resolution of the ideological and material dimensions of the historic lunacy of the 20th century culminated in the fall of the Berlin Wall. In this, black humanity was a convenient pawn in the hands of the principal antagonists. Local African hero collaborators, and there are many dead accursed and as there are still many inglorious of them with us, with feet of clay emerged in their subservient dalliance with the enemy. They were touted as the true representatives of black humanity. Apartheid was validated by the warped logic of a broken world as “the natural order and right of things”. But the problem of black humanity preceded the formal institution of racial segregation as Apartheid.

Before Mandela the revolt of the most oppressed strand of humanity had been tepid, timid and piecemeal. Before now, Absalom Jones and Richard Allen in 1787 had rebelled against the Church teachings of the inferiority of black humanity and its degradation even in death. As descendants of Ham’s children, the black soul was unworthy to be interred in the church cemeteries with whites. Jones and Allen established the Free African Society that was a precursor to the formation of the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas. Underpinning this revolt was the evolved expansive world view and an African consciousness in the belief that African peoples, both on the mother continent and in the Diaspora, shared not just a common ancestry and history, but also a common destiny.

Still haunted in 1822, the first boatload of unwanted blacks from the United States arrived on Providence Island in present day Monrovia, Liberia. In 1824, 6,000 blacks left the United States for Haiti. Yet, while the returns of the forced Diaspora progressed, by the early years of the 20th century, African peoples were acutely confronted even on the continent with the unfathomable devastation associated with the problem of European settler and imperial hegemony.

Parts of the southern tip of Africa were acquired by the British during the Napoleonic Wars. There also existed the independent republics of Dutch–Afrikaner settlers, known as Boers. To avoid British rule, many Boers under British rule resettled north and east from the Cape that eventually became the Boer republics of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal. In 1880-1881 the first Boer war was launched and won by the Afrikaners to pre-empt British intentions to bring the Boers under its rule. The British re-launched the war in 1899. This lasted until 1902 with the defeat of the Boer republics but with the promise of self-government. The colonies of the two independent Boer republics, the Orange Free State and the Transvaal Republic, became part of what today would be described as terroristic state of the Union of South Africa.

Meanwhile, racial segregation in South Africa had begun in colonial times under Dutch rule. Following the general elections in this terroristic state in 1948, Apartheid was declared as an official policy. Before then, the first internal passports in South Africa were introduced on 27 June 1797 in an attempt to exclude all indigenous South Africans from the Cape Colony. The Natives (Urban Areas) Act of 1923 defined urban areas in South Africa as only for “white” and all black African men in cities and towns had to carry around permits, called “passes”, at all times to be in those cities. Protesting the pass laws of 21 March, 1960, 69 unarmed Africans were shot dead by the Boer state.

Thus, by the turn of the last century, in South Africa the Afrikaners had taken over and were terrorising the land. Ultimately, indigenous Africans were herded into poor Bantustans. While these unfolded, in nearby South West Africa (Namibia), the Germans, who had earlier congratulated the Boers during the first Boer war, were busy experimenting with racial extermination in the genocide of the African population. In 1902, following the revolt of the Herero, German General Trotha stated his proposed final solution to the resistance of the Herero people in a letter, before the Battle of Waterberg:

“I believe that the nation (HERERO NATION) as such should be annihilated, or, if this was not possible by tactical measures, have to be expelled from the country…”

The science of extermination for which Auschwitz then became infamous was developed in Namibia. They killed off unarmed Africans and forced their women to boil the severed heads, pick off the remaining loose flesh from the skulls that were then polished and mounted as souvenirs that were sent home to their wives and loved ones in Germany.

Also, in the Congo, by the time Belgian King Leopold was done with decimating the population, he had killed a third of the population. A third of the remaining Congolese had their limbs amputated. There was no hiding place or a sanctuary for the black Being. It may then be surmised that the historical span of black life has been fettered by the yoke of a conspiracy of horror; including denunciation of his humanity, Christianity, Islam, slavery, and colonialism. In the subjective and convenient thought pattern that emerged from this universe, race separation and Apartheid were seen as the natural order of social evolution. Race was the primary and central medium of human interactivity and the black being was constructed in this medium as sub human. Today, the end result is the prevailing mass self-repudiation of African peoples, often explicit but sometimes disguised. That was and in many respects still is the prevailing contextual horror of the Mandela struggle. It has indeed been a long walk.

In this consuming journey, Mandela transcended the horrible context of the ideological and the material contentions of his time even though they shaped his struggle. His historic task was to confront the pervasive existential problematique of humanity itself. Accordingly, the true appreciation of him lies in careful exfoliations and explorations in the realm of a transcendental moral plane. It was on this plane that he clearly defiantly defined in bold strokes the global grund-norm to validate all revolutionary struggles of the oppressed. In this pursuit, he gracefully and graciously ultimately offered the oppressor the gift of his (the oppressor’s) own redemption.

Mandela liberated both, irrespective of the colour of the victim and of the vile perpetrator. As a result of the passing away of he whose middle name some have interpreted as “troublemaker” or “shaker of trees”, the conjuncture of the grave historic forces that came to define the last decade of the 20th century has been finally brought to closure in the early years of the 21st century and the very beginnings of third millennium. Mandela made nonsense of the philosophy of those who glorified dominant nonsense in the West about black humanity that denied Africa as not being a historical part of the world but as only Unhistorical, Undeveloped spirit still trapped in the condition of mere nature. Only recently, the thesis was reaffirmed in Dakar, yes, Dakar, by French President Nicholas Sakorzy

A Xhosa and member of the Thembu royal family, Mandela’s long walk to freedom had to begin with living dangerously through a passionate engagement with anti-colonial politics by joining the African National Congress. As a founding member of the ANC Youth League, he was marked out early for his determined commitment to the cause for which he was prepared to die. Consumed by the struggle, he traded his lawyer’s wig for the camouflages of a revolutionary fighter. In this he was remarkable by his indifference to whether he led the movement or was led as long as the struggle for justice remained the central objectives of his revolutionary associates.

Invariably, the formal leadership posts that he held were literally imposed on him. Undoubtedly committed to Gandhian principles of non-violent protest, he was however to co-found the militant Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) in 1961, the armed wing of the ANC, in association with the South African Communist Party, to which it is now confirmed he was a member. In 1962, he was arrested, convicted of conspiracy to overthrow the government, and sentenced to life imprisonment in the infamous Rivonia Trial. In prison, Mandela was the true leader who would decline privileges denied his co-conspirators such as non-participation in back breaking hard work of breaking rocks. This ruined his health. But that did not stop him from catering to the welfare of his comrades that often entailed sustaining their morale. As a leader he was not above carrying and emptying the waste (faeces) buckets of weary and sick colleagues in prison.

In all this, it is the joke of the gods that Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, born 18 July 1918 was black. We however lose the universality and the timelessness of the essence of Mandela’s long walk to the emancipation of mankind, if he is diminished by an undue focus on the immediacy and specificity of his struggle as an anti-apartheid warrior in white-dominated South Africa. To achieve his goal, he rejected the absolute notion of violence as a redemptive act, notwithstanding his recognition of the magnitude of the physical and psychological violence inflicted not only by Apartheid but by human history against black humanity. He emerged above all as a humanist, unfazed by the hypocrisy and the convenience of the adulations of the very forces that denounced him as a terrorist. He set those that would tie him to the stake or tighten the noose around his neck free by his unconditional love for them. Indeed, it would appear this was the profound import of his life. This was to thrash the trash of humanity; to sanitise the world at great personal cost. He was the quintessential African.

Nkosi Sikeleli Afrika!