Let Freedom Reign E-Book

Henry Russell

• Herausgeber: IMM Lifestyle Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Seitenzahl: 153

Beschreibung

On 10 May 1994, Nelson Mandela became South Africa's first black president, uttering the words 'let freedom reign' as part of his famous inaugural address. More than 100,000 people turned up to hear him speak. Mandela's great skill as an orator has enabled him to use the power of words as an important weapon in his fight against discrimination and injustice in the world. This collection, which marks the 20th anniversary of Mandela's release from prison in February 1990, explores how his electrifying speeches and impressive rhetoric helped bring about social and political change in South Africa, through, among other things, the dismantling of the apartheid system. Throughout his lifetime, Mandela has spoken about and written on such issues as global warming, HIV/AIDS, human rights, racism and discrimination and women's rights, and some of these are showcased in "Let Freedom Reign". In this book, author Henry Russell analyses the linguistic features, content and context of Mandela's speeches, revealing the oratory skill behind this great man's most inspiring words.

Leseprobe

For Sara, Meredith, Fabia and Esther.

First published in 2010 by New Holland Publishers (UK) LtdLondon • Cape Town • Sydney • Aucklandwww.newhollandpublishers.com

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Garfield House, 86–88 Edgware Road, London W2 2EA, UK80 McKenzie Street, Cape Town 8001, South AfricaUnit 1, 66 Gibbes Street, Chatswood, NSW 2067, Australia218 Lake Road, Northcote, Auckland, New Zealand

Copyright © 2010 introductory text: Henry Russell

Copyright © 2010 speeches: see page 136

Copyright © 2010 foreword: André Brink

Copyright © 2010 photographs: see page 136

Copyright © 2010 New Holland Publishers (UK) Ltd

Henry Russell has asserted his moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers and copyright holders.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

eISBN: 978 1 60765 221 2

Publishing Director: Rosemary Wilkinson

Publisher: Aruna Vasudevan

Project Editor: Julia Shone

Editor: Sally MacEachern

Cover design: David Etherington

Inside design: Sarah Williams

Production: Melanie Dowland

Reproduction by Pica Digital Pte. Ltd., SingaporePrinted and bound in India by Replika Press

The paper used to produce this book is sourced from sustainable forests.

Contents

Foreword by André BrinkNelson Mandela: Myth • Man • Magician

Introduction

1. Political Awakening (1948–61)

2. In Captivity (1962–89)

3. Release and Triumph (1990–94)

4. President of South Africa (1994–99)

5. In Retirement (1999–)

Acknowledgements

Nelson MandelaMyth • Man • Magician

Years ago, among the green mountains of the Languedoc region in France, on my way to Carcassonne, I turned off the main route to follow a thin little side-road which brought me to a tiny village with only one paved street. The others were mere paths that branched off randomly, left and right, some of them no more than flights of steps hewn from the solid rock. Here and there villagers were going about their immemorial business: a cobbler in his workshop, a spinning woman, a baker stacking fragrant baguettes on a shelf, a sprinkling of children playing on what passed for a village square. The little place seemed lost in time and space. It might have been a hundred years ago, an unimaginable distance from the nearest town.

In one of the tortuous little side streets, along a steep incline, I noticed in a small square window on my right, set in a stone wall that might have dated from the Middle Ages, the bright colours of a sticker not much bigger than a postcard. It said, as I approached to take a closer look: LIBÉREZ MANDELA.

It seemed so out of place, so utterly pointless. And yet, as I felt my throat contract, this was wholly necessary and inevitable and necessary: for there was, literally, no corner or nook in the wide world where Mandela was not relevant and present. Only a few years later he was indeed set free, and what an unforgettable moment that was, when he strode from Pollsmoor Prison outside the town of Paarl, hand in hand with his then wife Winnie, towards the frenzied crowds massed along the road through the vineyards, towards Cape Town, towards the waiting world. A world that could never be quite the same.

A moment of exultation. But also a moment fraught with dire possibilities. For when in 1964 Mandela had gone from the Rivonia trial to the prison on Robben Island – truly a place where a man had to abandon all hope of ever returning to the outside world – the legacy he had left behind was encapsulated in one of the truly unforgettable speeches of our modern era culminating in those ringing words: It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if it needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die. During the 27 years of his captivity these words had continued to reverberate around the world: on the campuses of the USA and Western Europe, behind the Iron Curtain, in small clandestine gatherings and large auditoriums; they had acquired breadth and depth and the quality of prophecy and vision: such stuff as dreams and myth are made on. Now, emerging from prison, there was a real danger that the man could no longer match the myth. How could anyone live up to the expectations the world had dreamt about him: the hopes of the oppressed, the groans of the suffering, the imaginings of politicians, of the poor and the deprived all around the world, the unexpressed and inexpressible yearnings of the millions of women and men who believe that life could and should be different and more meaningful than the existence they had been relegated to?

Mandela himself tried to make it clear that he was merely human: I stand here before you, he said in Cape Town on 11 February 1990, in his very first speech after his release from prison, not as a prophet but as a humble servant of you, the people. But that was easier said than done. The miracle was that this was exactly what he achieved. He never betrayed the myth: in almost every imaginable respect he lived to the expectations of the world. But he never sacrificed his humanity – warts and all he showed humanity what a human being could do, and be. The story was told about his final journey through Europe, at the end of the first term of his presidency, when he voluntarily laid down the burden of office and went to take his leave from all the heads of state who had offered him and his people their support during his term of office; and how at the end of every exhausting day, he would summon all his secretaries (four of them, I was told, as he had too much energy for one or two), and invited them to sit on his bed before he went to sleep. ‘Now tell me,’ he would ask of them, ‘what have I done wrong today?’

Can anybody, by any stretch of his or her moral or mental resources, imagine any other leader acting in this manner? To Mandela it came naturally; it was not an act (even though he could be a consummate actor when occasion demanded). Because, when all was said and done, he was a man among women and men and most particularly children.

It is because of the very humanness of his humanity – for better or for worse – that the way in which Mandela assumed the burden of being a man among people transformed the very ordinariness of his being into something magical. The famed Madiba Magic has endowed him with the almost uncanny ability to transcend the ordinary. At the time of our first free elections, Mandela made me believe: We have achieved the extraordinary. Now we can tackle the ordinary. Because in this country we have a human being in charge. No more. And certainly no less.

Part of his humanity resided in his resolve never to accept that the struggle to which he had dedicated his life, his long walk to freedom, could ever be over. Much of his energy went into the realization of his dream for a commission in charge of truth and reconciliation. Long after many of his colleagues – including the unreliable and often unpredictable F. W. de Klerk, Mandela’s second deputy president with whom Madiba had to share his Nobel Prize and to whom he had addressed some of his harshest (but eminently well-deserved) words at the end of the first day of the CODESA negotiations – had faltered in their support of this remarkable enterprise (flawed as it may have been), Mandela remained as steadfast as Table Mountain.

However reasonable and understanding and forgiving he could be in his dealings with others, there were some things he ferociously condemned whenever and wherever he encountered them: deviousness, a self-serving mentality, narrow-minded politics, a tendency not to see the wood for the trees. Mandela’s burning honesty, the clarity and depth of his vision, could tolerate no mendacity or egotistic and nepotistic pettiness. In the end, when his successor, Thabo Mbeki, shamefully turned away from the war against AIDS and condoned Mugabe’s excesses in Zimbabwe, Mandela did not hesitate to lambaste the man who had been his understudy. And yet there has always been in him a profound awareness of human fallibility. As a statesman he never expected perfection of others (even if he mostly demanded it of himself); he could always reason, and offer help, and forgiveness. What guided his brand of humanity has been the conviction that, In a cynical world we have become an inspiration to many. We signal that good can be achieved amongst human beings who are prepared to trust, prepared to believe in the goodness of people, as he said in his review of the country’s first ‘Democratic Decade’ in 2004.

I often feel, in a time when so much of Mandela’s legacy is placed in jeopardy by misguided or small-minded followers who all too often taint and distort his great vision with personal agendas and private ambitions, that if some good is ultimately to come from the South African experience, it would be because, when everything is put to the test and everything is at stake, an abiding sense of loyalty to the myth, the man and the magician may yet prevail against all the odds.

– André Brink

Introduction

Nelson Mandela, the first democratically elected black president of South Africa is celebrated for his heroic life and for his oratory. The son of Chief Henry Mandela, a minor member of the Thembu royal line, Rolihlahla Mandela was born on 18 July 1918 in Mvezo, a village in the district of Umtata, Transkei. After Mandela’s father was deposed as Mvezo Chief, the family took refuge in Qunu, just south of Umtata. He was the first member of his family to receive a Western-style education. In the schools of the time, African pupils were customarily given an English name on their first day. Mandela got ‘Nelson’ and, although he never knew why his teacher called him that – it was possibly after Admiral Horatio Lord Nelson (1758–1805), the hero of the Battle of Trafalgar (21 October 1805) – henceforth, he always retained it in front of his original forename, which means ‘he who pulls up the branch of a tree’ – figuratively, ‘troublemaker’.

Henry Mandela died of tuberculosis in 1927. While waiting to attain his majority at the age of 16, Nelson attended meetings held by Chief Jongintaba Dalindyebo, the acting regent, at Mqhekezweni, the provisional capital of Thembuland. There, he learned some of his earliest lessons in oratory and in achieving consensus through discussion. He later recalled the meetings as ‘democracy in its purest form’, where all comers were at liberty to talk without interruption about whatever was on their minds. Mandela also learned a technique for which he would become renowned: that of listening to what everyone had to say before venturing his own opinion or making a judgement. He later recalled the Chief’s axiom that a leader is like a shepherd who always stays behind the flock, letting the most nimble go on ahead; the other sheep follow without realizing that they are being directed from behind.

Mandela attended the University College of Fort Hare at Alice in the Eastern Cape Province and there heard an address by Jan Smuts (1870–1950; prime minister of South Africa 1919–24 and 1939–48). Mandela was impressed by the old statesman’s authoritative presence and gained strength from his evident difficulties in speaking English (Smuts’s first language was Afrikaans; Mandela’s was Xhosa).

Mandela then took a law degree at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, graduating in 1939. Four years later, he joined the African National Congress (ANC), and in 1944 became a founder member of its Youth League. His politics were further radicalized in 1948, when the Afrikaner-dominated National Party won the whites-only general election and instituted apartheid, a strictly codified policy of racial segregation which gave the minority white population far greater rights and privileges than the black majority.

Having renounced his claim to the chieftainship of the Tembu, Mandela opened a law firm with his lifelong friend and fellow ANC member Oliver Tambo (1917–93) in 1952. In that same year, Mandela took a leading role in the ANC’s Defiance Campaign, in which thousands of South Africans peacefully refused to obey apartheid laws. The campaign, which carried on into 1953, led to the imprisonment of more than 8,000 protesters. In 1955, Mandela was one of the authors of the Freedom Charter, which called for equal rights for all South Africans. In 1956, he was arrested and charged with trying to overthrow the South African state by violent means. The ensuing treason trial, which lasted until 1961, ended in the acquittal of all the accused.

During the protracted court proceedings, throughout which the defendants were bailed, Mandela divorced Evelyn Ntoko Mase (1922–2004), his wife since 1944, and married Nomzamo Winifred (Winnie) Madikizela (b. 1936); they were to divorce in 1996.

In 1960, the Sharpeville massacre, in which 69 unarmed black demonstrators were killed by South African police, and the subsequent outlawing of the ANC, convinced Mandela that a fair and free society could not be achieved by peaceful protest alone. Shortly after the trial, Mandela became leader of Umkhonto we Sizwe (‘Spear of the Nation’, see page 31), the new military wing of the ANC, which was formed to carry out acts of sabotage against the state.

After 17 months in hiding, Mandela was captured in 1962 and sentenced to 5 years’ imprisonment. While he was in jail, the authorities found new evidence to link him and others to Umkhonto we Sizwe. The subsequent legal proceedings became known as the Rivonia Trial, after the suburb of Johannesburg in which police had raided a safe house. They ended in 1964 with Mandela’s conviction on all charges. At the age of 46, he was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole. Mandela spent the next 18 years in Robben Island Prison, off Cape Town. In 1982, he was transferred to the maximum security Pollsmoor Prison, where he remained until 1988, when he was taken to hospital for what turned out to be tuberculosis (TB). In December 1988, Mandela was moved to Victor Verster Prison in Paarl.

Throughout his imprisonment, Mandela retained wide support among South Africa’s black population, and his case became a worldwide cause célèbre. As the apartheid regime was gradually weakened by international pressure, the government of F.W. de Klerk softened its attitude towards segregation. On 11 February 1990 Mandela was released after 27 years behind bars. On 2 March he was appointed deputy president of the ANC, becoming its president in July 1991. Mandela and de Klerk worked to end apartheid and bring about a peaceful transition to non-racial democracy in South Africa. In 1993 they were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

In April 1994 South Africa held its first free, one-adult one-vote election, which was won by Mandela and the ANC. As president, Mandela introduced a new democratic constitution together with numerous measures to improve the lives of the country’s black population. The greatest landmark of his term of office is generally agreed to have been the establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (1995–98), which investigated human rights violations under apartheid. When his term of office ended in 1999, Mandela, aged 81, retired from active politics.

There is no doubt that his deeds alone should guarantee Nelson Mandela a place in the pantheon of great political figures. But his stature is further increased by his writings, especially the autobiography Long Walk to Freedom (1994), and above all by his speeches, some of which are featured in this book.

The basis of great oratory is neither fluency nor stridency – these are the attributes of the demagogue. The true foundation, as Cicero (106–43 BC) noted in De oratore, is knowledge, and all Mandela’s speeches – from the greatest landmarks to the most informal scripted remarks – reveal in-depth research, together with a lawyer’s mastery of his brief.

Most public speakers, like artists, are part of a tradition. Some imitate the style of those who have influenced them; others invoke the names of their masters or make unmistakable allusions to them. In addition to Chief Jongintaba Dalindyebothe and Smuts, Mandela was impressed by the broadcasts of Winston Churchill (1874–1965; British prime minister 1940–5 and 1951–5). He was also influenced by the life and speeches of Mohandas ‘Mahatma’ Karamchand Gandhi (1869–1948), the leader of the Indian nationalist movement against British rule and the model for all who seek to achieve political and social progress through non-violent protest and passive resistance.

Then, from 1962 to 1990, almost the only political voice that Mandela heard – apart from odd conversations with prisoners and warders – was his own. Mandela’s largely self-taught oratory style is perhaps the finest illustration of the dictum of Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon (1707–88): ‘Le style est l’homme même’ – Style is the man himself.

– Henry Russell,London, 2009

Chapter 1

Political Awakening(1948–61)

In 1948, the National Party won the Europeans-only general election and immediately introduced a massive legislative programme that consolidated white supremacy through apartheid (Afrikaans: ‘apartness’). Racial segregation was already well-established in South Africa, but the National Party now codified and enshrined it with draconian laws. The Population Registration Act of 1950 classified all South Africans as Bantu (all black Africans), Coloured (those of mixed race), or White. A fourth category – Asian (Indian and Pakistani) – was later added.

The Group Areas Act in the same year established residential and business sections in urban areas for each race, and members of other races were barred from living, operating businesses, or owning land in them. Thus, 80 percent of the land was given over to the whites, who comprised only 20 percent of the population. Mixed marriages were forbidden, along with any sexual relations