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Joel Carpenter


Mandela's Miracle

Special Section: White/Other

Every time I start up our Encarta CD encyclopedia, I see a video clip of Nelson Mandela at his 1994 presidential inauguration. "Let there be justice for all," he says, in that princely African voice. "Let there be peace for all." This founding father of the new South Africa has become an icon of democratic idealism worldwide; indeed, the death of white rule in South Africa and that nation's rebirth as a multiracial democracy is one of the greatest stories of the century just passed.

Mandela's own perseverance and triumph over oppression prepared him for effective work at peacemaking, democratic reform, racial justice and national reconciliation. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993, along with his fellow negotiator and frequent antagonist, F. W. de Klerk. Mandela, a man of irresistible charm and political prowess, made perhaps his most lasting accomplishment as president with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Rather than letting South Africa succumb to a spasm of post-revolutionary retribution, Mandela established a tribunal that would help the nation forgive without forgetting. As both a liberator and a healer, Nelson Mandela has be come a legendary figure, a secular saint.

It is hard to imagine a tougher writing assignment than examining a life of such mythic proportions. Yet Anthony Sampson has the right credentials, a rich fund of information and perspectives, and a deft touch. Unlike many other white observers of South Africa, Sampson is intimately acquainted with the postwar generation of black activists who led the struggle. He has known Mandela since 1951. He also has access to influential people through out the nation: Anglo business executives, Afrikaner jurists and former government officials, Asian and Jewish lawyers and civic activists, and foreign diplomats. For this biography, Sampson and his research assistant pumped information and opinions from some 250 people, nearly everyone who had significant contact with Mandela, friendly or otherwise. They also dug into the formerly secret diplomatic papers in the United States, Great Britain, and South Africa. Mandela's personal papers, including his prison correspondence and the long-hidden manuscript of his prison memoir, enhance the story further.

Sampson is deeply sympathetic to Mandela the person, but this book is not a hagiography. "I am no saint," Mandela protests throughout, and Sampson faithfully shows Mandela the human being, with all of his peculiar traits, blind spots, and inheritances. There are important areas in his life that Mandela's co-authored memoir, The Long Walk to Freedom, treats with restraint and discretion, such as the infidelities and lawlessness of his second wife, Winnie Mandela, and the internal power struggles of the African National Congress (ANC). Sampson, by contrast, calmly lays them open in all of their painful detail.

His aim, throughout the book, is to provide a finely grained character study of the man behind the Mandela icon, and to place him properly within the great sweep of history that carried both him and his beloved nation to their common fate. Sampson thus has written a classic biography, both de tailed and probing yet organically related to the great events of the times.

Mandela's early life provides the basis for some important traits to which Sampson will return often. The future president enjoyed a Xhosa country boyhood in the Transkei, and then moved at age nine to learn the ways of the court from the Tembu regent, who was a relative and family friend. These experiences, Sampson explains, shaped Mandela's lifelong sense that he is both a "country boy" with traditional rural values, but also a chief, who assumes and easily wears personal authority.

Among the values of the traditional chief was the foundational concept, ubuntu, embracing at once the ideas of fellowship, loyalty, solidarity, and of drawing one's humanity from membership in the community. One cannot understand Mandela's power as a national reconciler, Sampson insists, without seeing it as an expression of ubuntu.

Mandela was educated at strict and rigorous Methodist mission schools and enrolled in 1939 at Fort Hare, which was the only black university in South Africa. He took up the self-discipline of Methodism, if not a great measure of its piety. Mandela also acquired a lifelong ambivalence toward the British imperial legacy. The British had subjugated his people, yet they also schooled his generation in liberal political ideals that the Africans would ride to freedom.

A political education awaited Mandela in Johannesburg, which was his home from 1941 until his arrest and imprisonment in 1962. He learned to fend for himself and rely on personal networks from home and school in an exciting but daunting urban setting, where both opportunities and indignities came his way. Working mostly in law offices, he was introduced to undercurrents of radical thought circulating among Jewish, Indian and African professionals. Mandela pondered the Christian multiracial democratic views of the ANC, the class-based analysis of the communists, and a rising ideology of African independence as well. He stayed with the ANC, resisted the more racially exclusive brands of African nationalism, and borrowed some Marxist critiques of economic imperialism from the communists.

While the Afrikaners' Nationalist Party was making its move to power, warning about the "black peril" and the "red menace" and promoting its doctrine of apartheid in the late 1940s, a cadre of young activists, led by Mandela and his schoolmates Walter Sisulu and Oliver Tambo, was developing a militant opposing agenda for the ANC. Mandela and his colleagues discovered that they were in for a much longer and fiercer struggle than the independence movements elsewhere in Africa. After police massacred scores of protesters in the Transvaal town of Sharpeville in 1960, Mandela received ANC permission to form a military unit, Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation). He be came a fugitive, moving under disguise from one safe house to another and plotting the bombing of utilities and government facilities.

In 1962, after a lengthy tour of England and a number of independent African nations, Mandela was arrested, tried, and sentenced to five years in prison. The following year he was charged with sabotage, a capital crime. The trial became a platform for the ANC to defend its beliefs, this time to a worldwide audience. Mandela, Sisulu, and all but one of their co-defendants were convicted in 1964 and handed life sentences.

Fully a third of the book addresses Mandela's prison years. Earlier biographies have lacked the sources to devote much attention to those years, but with full access to Mandela's papers and a number of memoirs written by inmates and jailers alike, Sampson has been able to give the prison experience the attention it deserves.

The Nelson Mandela who left prison was a very different man than the one who went in. In the close quarters of prison, he set aside some of his aloofness and became a master encourager, mediator, and relationship builder. He made a point of getting to know his Afrikaner warders, and he studied their language, history, and way of life.

Mandela became a model to the others of self-mastery, self-discipline, and self-confidence. He followed a strict personal regimen, kept a tight rein on his temper, and urged his colleagues on, looking to the day when the nation would need the Robben Islanders again. His personal motto, through all of the hardship, loneliness, in dignities, and temptations to despair, was the Victorian poem "Invictus," by W.E. Henley, which he learned as a schoolboy:

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate;
I am the captain of my soul.

As his captors often noted, Mandela steadfastly refused to be "rehabilitated" away from the basic principles of the ANC. Yet he did give up on the idea of accomplishing the revolution by force. The great struggle was to be won by negotiation, Mandela was convinced, and the nation would be transformed by a common hope for a better future. Mandela emerged from prison with his showmanship and leaderly ability in tact, but he was no longer the rash and self-important radical. In prison he had nothing to rely on but his personal dignity and his ability to build relationships, which he honed and polished to a fine edge. He came out of captivity having acquired the calm and sure demeanor of a statesman. Mandela the revolutionary had been transformed into a moral leader and a reconciler.

Sampson is careful to intersperse his accounts of the prisoners' experience with a running narrative of the ongoing struggle against apartheid, be ginning with the Soweto Uprising of 1976. He gives a clear and compelling narrative of the sequences of events that led President P.W. Botha and his cabinet members to begin secret talks with Mandela and exiled ANC leaders in 1987. He is somewhat less clear in explaining what lay behind President F.W. de Klerk's astonishing speech in February of 1990, in which he reversed three decades of Nationalist policy by legalizing the banned political organizations, opening up negotiations with the ANC, and freeing political prisoners, not ably Nelson Mandela.

Nevertheless, Sampson gives a careful and convincing "grand explanation" for the demise of apartheid. He cites the following factors: (1) the growing "ungovernability" of the nation, beginning with the Soweto Uprising in 1976; (2) the ANC 's success in keeping alive the dream of an alternative future for the nation; (3) the end of the Cold War and the cessation of the American and British governments' support for the Nationalists as anticommunist allies; (4) the economic sanctions imposed on South Africa in the latter 1980s; (5) a growing weariness among the Afrikaners with their status as the world's pariahs and their acknowledgement that their system could not (or should not) last; (6) the Nationalists' impression, as they be came acquainted with the ANC 's leaders, that these adversaries were capable of sharing in the government; and (7) the fact that the ANC leaders were indeed more knowledgeable and capable than they had been be fore their banishment.

The most daunting test of character for Mandela, Sampson implies, was his role as party leader from 1990 until the great election in 1994. After 27 years in prison, he had to unify his fractious and dispersed comrades, moderate their views (when many still hoped to win power by force of arms), and deal with an adversary now suddenly more dangerous than the government, Zulu chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi.

The chief, who had broken with the ANC in 1979, had just formed the Inkatha Freedom Party with covert government support and the encouragement of right-wing groups overseas. For the next four years Inkatha partisans fomented political violence that claimed over 100 lives per month. Mandela felt betrayed when he found that the attacks were instigated by a shadowy "third force" with ties to government security. From then on he deeply distrusted de Klerk, but the talks finally bore fruit in 1993 with an agreement for an election the following year and an interim constitution that incorporated a bill of rights and the separation of powers.

At age 75, Mandela ran for president, and proved to be a masterful fundraiser and campaigner. With Inkatha and the Afrikaner Volksfront boycotting the election, the foreign press continued to warn darkly of impending civil war. At the last moment Buthelezi and at least some of the Afrikaner right-wingers joined the election, and South Africa entered a new dispensation. Mandela had his day of triumph in the Pretorian sunshine.

Mandela the president proved to be more a head of state than the chief executive of the government. He relished the role of chief diplomat and he achieved some diplomatic successes in Africa, notably persuading Mobutu to step down in Zaire and getting Libya's Qadaffi to agree to the extradition of suspects in the Lockerbie, Scotland airliner bombing. Yet he failed to curb the human rights depredations of General Sani Abacha in Nigeria.

His greatest achievement as president, however, was as the national reconciler. Mandela drew upon his African roots, and held up the vision of ubuntu, of a multiracial nation, embracing all colors. He worked especially hard at reconciling the Afrikaners, making peace with the Dutch Reformed churches that had lately repented of their theological support for apartheid. Mandela understood, Sampson insists, the moral power of forgiveness, the courage and strength that it reflected, not weakness. In Mandela's hands, it became yet another pillar supporting the new nation.

The most remarkable instrument in Mandela's campaign for forgiveness was the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which held hearings from 1996 to 1998. Its head was the Nobel laureate and national conscience, Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The TRC had a distinctly religious basis, and Tutu gave the proceedings a deeply pastoral touch. The tribunal offered amnesty to anyone who would give the full truth about his or her involvement in political violence.

The stories that emerged were more terrifying than anyone had imagined. The former government was clearly implicated in the work of clandestine death squads in the 1980s and the so-called "black-on-black" violence of the early 1990s. The ANC's own dark history of political crimes, including those of the president's ex-wife, Winnie Mandela, came to light as well, much to the embarrassment of the new government. Through it all, President Mandela maintained that the nation's future depended on facing up to the truth and extending forgiveness to all who asked for it.

As a final grace note, Mandela did last year what many other African heads of state have failed to do. He freely bade farewell to his office and enjoyed the democratic election of a successor. He rejoiced in the achievement of his generation's dream of multiracial democracy, and he was grateful that his beloved nation was spared a major conflagration. Mandela lives in his country house in Qunu, near his birthplace, where he enjoys the company of his new wife, Graca Machel (the widow of the former president of Mozambique), and his grandchildren, and savors long walks in the fresh country air. So this grand, Ulysses-like saga of a re turning hero ends not with a blast of vengeance, but with forgiveness, hope, and a gentle twilight.

It is difficult for this Christian reviewer, in this Christian review magazine, to stay away from themes of grace and providence in this story. Christians involved in the struggle saw saintliness in Mandela, and ascribed his capacity to forgive to Christian faith. Mandela's biographer, however, is very reluctant to include theological or providential dimensions in this story.

Sampson admits that Mandela's basic beliefs—that people could be transformed, that only forgiveness could bring national reconciliation, and that there was hope for seeing justice prevail—were essentially religious. He shows Mandela leading an abstemious life even as a young man, and in prison meditating daily, attending religious services of all faiths, and deeply appreciating the role of South African religious leaders in the struggle against apartheid. Yet he insists that, as one of Mandela's fellow inmates put it, "character, not religion, was [Mandela's] strength." And it is true that, whatever particular religious convictions Mandela harbors be hind his broad humanitarian principles, he has long observed silence concerning them. Apparently his biographer chose to have the story reflect Mandela's own reticence.

Nevertheless, even the obvious religious dimensions of the South African revolution are downplayed at Sampson's hand. South Africa, after all, is a religion-saturated land whose national airline carries Gideon Bibles. Apartheid had a Calvinist theological support-system behind it, via the Afrikaners' Dutch Reformed denominations. Perhaps be cause of this legacy, some of apartheid's opponents may be eager to play down the religious dimensions of the struggle. Yet the role of God-fearers in challenging the system has been immense.

The human rights lawyers who stood by the opposition since the early years were very often Jews and Muslims. The democratic political beliefs of South Africa's black leaders owe much to Christianity, as the Voices of Liberation anthologies published by the South African Human Sciences Research Council make clear. Sampson alludes at points to the two main ideological wells from which Man- de la's generation drank: Christianity and Marxism, and he suggests that the Christian theme was the stronger. Yet he only lightly touches upon the enormous role that church leaders played, in the absence of the banned and exiled ANC in the 1970s and 1980s, and in the presence of the horrific daily violence of the 1990s. They gave a public voice, moral leadership and some community-based restraint to the forces that were unleashed in those years. It was not for naught that Desmond Tutu was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984, yet this fact does not even appear in Sampson's account.

And one must not forget the courageous work of some "subversives" within the Dutch Reformed theological establishment: Beyers Naude, Nico Smith, and David Bosch, who witnessed against their churches' heretical support for apartheid. In sum, the South African struggle was saturated with religion. Religion was a powerful prop for racial oppression, and it has taken countervailing forces with deep religious power to shake that foundation.

Sampson's task, of course, was to help us understand Nelson Mandela, and his role in the death and rebirth of South Africa. That he has done very well, and we cannot fault him too much if there are some other important themes that need to be highlighted. Yet given this story's many surprises, it is hard to keep from speculating about a fate that went beyond even the mastery of Nelson Mandela. Perhaps it had something to do with the hymn young Nelson sang in the Methodist mission school every Sunday—a hymn that became the anthem of the struggle, and is now the national anthem: "Nkosi Sikelel' Afrika." "Lord, bless Africa" has been the nation's prayer, and with the eyes of faith, we can see that God has answered it, repeatedly. Not the least of those blessings has been the fate of Nelson Mandela.

Joel Carpenter is provost of Calvin College and author most recently of Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism (Oxford Univ. Press).

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