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The legacy that is Mandela
18/07/2003 16:05 - (SA)
Johannesburg - Nelson Mandela, who celebrated his 85th birthday on Friday, will be remembered as the man who led South Africa from white minority rule to democracy without the predicted bloodbath on a continent driven by civil wars.
"We enter into a covenant that we shall build a society in which all South Africans, both black and white, will be able to walk tall, without any fear in their hearts, assured of their inalienable right to human dignity - a rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world," he declared when he became president in 1994.
Many achievements
The Nobel Institute honoured him and outgoing white president Frederik de Klerk with its peace prize in 1993.
Since his retirement in 1999, Mandela devoted his considerable energy - despite increasing physical frailty - to mediating conflicts, especially the civil war in Burundi, where a transitional government is now in place but heavy fighting is continuing.
He negotiated the deal under which Libyan leader Moamer Kadhafi sent the Lockerbie bombing suspects to stand trial in the Hague, and even came up with a plan - rejected by the warring parties - for peace in the Middle East.
Love for children
His other main interest is children, after being deprived of seeing his own children and their friends grow up during his 27 years in jail, and drumming up money from businesses to build schools in remote areas.
Mandela charms audiences with his self-deprecatory wit, his smile and humanity, but does not hesitate to speak out at what he perceives as injustice or bullying by powerful nations.
"I want to be a friend of the United States of America but I'm not going to allow what they've done for me to shut my mouth," he said in criticising Washington's decision to attack Iraq without a UN mandate.
Speaking his mind
He went on to declare that George W Bush was "a president who can't think properly" and described British Prime Minister Tony Blair as Bush's "foreign minister".
Bush, unsurprisingly, failed to request a meeting with Mandela on his recent tour of Africa.
Then US president Bill Clinton revealed in 2000 that Mandela had comforted him in the aftermath of the Monica Lewinsky affair, saying in an interview with The Times of London: "Mandela helped me to deal with this... how to think about it... that really helped me."
Hillary Clinton, in her memoir "Living History", likened her ability to forgive her husband to Mandela's ability to forgive his jailers.
Making a difference
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, in a tribute published in the South African press on Friday, said he gave Mandela as an example when people asked him what difference one person could make "in the face of injustice, conflict, human rights violations, mass poverty and disease".
Said Anglican archbishop emeritus Desmond Tutu of Mandela's experience in prison: "He came out a far greater person than the man who went in... a person who had compassion, a deep compassion even for his perpetrators. He had learned to understand the foibles and weaknesses of human beings and to be more generous in his judgment of others."
How it began
An activist since his student days at Fort Hare University College in the southeast, Mandela opened the first black law firm in Johannesburg in 1952, along with fellow activist Oliver Tambo, and was imprisoned several times before beginning his 27-year term for treason and sabotage in 1964.
He became commander in chief of Umkhonto weSizwe (Spear of the Nation), the armed wing of the African National Congress, in 1961, and the following year underwent military training in Algeria and Ethiopia, but he was in prison for most of the fighting between black guerrillas and the apartheid regime's security forces.
In 1998, on his 80th birthday, Mandela, after having divorced Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, married Graca Machel, the widow of Mozambican president Samora Machel and a campaigner against landmines and child abuse.
"First time I met him, he was just my hero," she said before the marriage.
But she also told a Johannesburg newspaper: "He is a symbol... but he is not a saint. He has weaknesses."
Said Mandela: "Late in life, I am blooming like a flower because of the love and support she has given me."
He continues to travel extensively, despite increasing frailty and is working on the second volume of his memoirs.
- AFX
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