How will you remember Mandela?

Remember Mandella

A friend of mine, Karel Solomon, posted the following about Nelson Mandela on Facebook during the week, and I found it very moving.

Karel’s an anti-Apartheid and human rights activist – formally in South Africa and now in Australia. Karel’s a very inspiring guy:

As Nelson Mandela lay critically ill in a South African hospital – many people have asked me how I will remember him. This is what I say:

Mandela, along with his friend Walter Sisulu, formed the Congress Youth League, a branch of the ANC in the early 1940s. In 1956 the ANC adopted the ‘Freedom Charter.’ In a June 1956 article Mandela defended economic positions of the Freedom Charter. He declared that the “nationalization of the banks, the gold mines and the land” would strike a “fatal blow” at the “financial and gold-mining monopolies and farming interests that have for centuries plundered the country and condemned its people to servitude.

Mandela maintained his anti-capitalist economic positions two weeks before his release from prison, “The nationalization of the mines, banks, and monopoly industries is the policy of the ANC, and the change or modification of our views in this regard is inconceivable.”

Two weeks later, Mandela would be released from prison by F. W. de Klerk. The South African government unbanned political organizations such as the ANC and Communist Party.

Mandela had an astounding change of heart upon being released from prison. After Mandela began holding regular meetings with former Anglo American and De Beers chairman Harry Oppenheimer, they reversed the ANC’s economic position. In his first post-election interview as president Mandela stated: “In our economic policies . . . there is not a single reference to things like nationalization, and this is not accidental . . .” Following the 1994 election in which Mandela was elected president, the ANC submitted its economic program to Oppenheimer “for approval.”

Ironically, between 1997 and 2004 eighteen state-owned firms were sold by the South African government, raising $4 billion. Even stranger, the Minister of Finance elected during the 1994 elections was none other than Gill Marcus. In fact, it was under this new leadership that the central South African Reserve Bank was privatized. Marcus became Deputy Governor of the Reserve Bank in 1999, and its Governor in 2009.

Was Mandela’s release dependent on his economic change of heart? Was the offer of the Presidency too huge to refuse? 27 years is a long time to remain in jail – the carrot of Presidency must have been huge.

Some – even in the ANC now question the legacy of the Mandela and the ANC’s economic change of heart. “What is the vote worth – if I have no bread on my table?” some ask.

What I do know is that from 1990, the year of Mandela’s release to 1994, the year of his election 24,000 (Twenty Four thousand !) people were killed in what the world called Black-on-Black violence – or what many South Africans saw as the Mandela’s ANC entrenching a no-opposition policy.

Mandela – Madiba to some – just a man to others.


Posted

in

by

Tags:

Comments

One response to “How will you remember Mandela?”

  1. A1 Avatar
    A1

    http://johnpilger.com/articles/mandela-is-gone-but-apartheid-is-alive-and-well-in-australia

    Mandela is gone, but apartheid is alive and well in Australia
    19 December 2013

    In the late 1960s, I was given an usual assignment by the London Daily Mirror’s editor in chief, Hugh Cudlipp. I was to return to my homeland, Australia, and “discover what lies behind the sunny face”. The Mirror had been an indefatigable campaigner against apartheid in South Africa, where I had reported from behind the “sunny face”. As an Australian, I had been welcomed into this bastion of white supremacy. “We admire you Aussies,” people would say. “You know how to deal with your blacks.”

    I was offended, of course, but I also knew that only the Indian Ocean separated the racial attitudes of the two colonial nations. What I was not aware of was how the similarity caused such suffering among the original people of my own country. Growing up, my school books had made clear, to quote one historian: “We are civilised, and they are not”. I remember how a few talented Aboriginal Rugby League players were allowed their glory as long as they never mentioned their people. Eddie Gilbert, the great Aboriginal cricketer, the man who bowled Don Bradman for a duck, was to be prevented from playing again. That was not untypical.

    In 1969, I flew to Alice Springs in the red heart of Australia and met Charlie Perkins. At a time when Aboriginal people were not even counted in the census – unlike the sheep – Charlie was only the second Aborigine to get a university degree. He had made good use of this distinction by leading “freedom rides” into racially segregated towns in the outback of New South Wales. He got the idea from the freedom riders who went into the Deep South of the United States.

    We hired an old Ford, picked up Charlie’s mother Hetti, an elder of the Aranda people, and headed for what Charlie described as “hell”. This was Jay Creek, a “native reserve”, where hundreds of Aboriginal people were corralled in conditions I had seen in Africa and India. One outside tap trickled brown; there was no sanitation; the food, or “rations”, was starch and sugar. The children had stick-thin legs and the distended bellies of malnutrition.

    What struck me was the number of grieving mothers and grandmothers – bereft at the theft of children by the police and “welfare” authorities who, for years, had taken away those infants with lighter skin. The policy was “assimilation”. Today, this has changed only in name and rationale.

    The boys would end up working on white-run farms, the girls as servants in middle-class homes. This was undeclared slave labour. They were known as the Stolen Generation. Hetti Perkins told me that when Charlie was an infant she had kept him tied to her back, and would hide whenever she heard the hoofs of the police horses. “They didn’t get him,” she said, with pride.

    In 2008, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologised for this crime against humanity. Older Aboriginal people were grateful; they believed that Australia’s first people – the most enduring human presence on earth – might finally receive the justice and recognition they had been denied for 220 years.

    What few of them heard was the postscript to Rudd’s apology. “I want to be blunt about this,” he said. “There will be no compensation.” That 100,000 people deeply wronged and scarred by vicious racism – the product of a form of the eugenics movement with its links to fascism – would be given no opportunity to materially restore their lives was shocking, though not surprising. Most governments in Canberra, conservative or Labor, have insinuated that the First Australians are to blame for their suffering and poverty.

    When the Labor government in the 1980s promised “full restitution” and land rights, the powerful mining lobby went on the attack, spending millions campaigning on the theme that “the blacks” would “take over your beaches and barbies”. The government capitulated, even though the lie was farcical; Aboriginal people comprise barely three per cent of the Australian population.

    Today, Aboriginal children are again being stolen from their families. The bureaucratic words are “removed” for “child protection”. By July 2012, there were 13,299 Aboriginal children in institutions or handed over to white families. Today, the theft of these children is now higher than at any time during the last century. I have interviewed numerous specialists in child care who regard this as a second stolen generation. “Many of the kids never see their mothers and communities again,” Olga Havnen, the author of a report for the Northern Territory government, told me. “In the Northern Territory, $80 million was spent on surveillance and removing kids, and less than $500,000 on supporting these impoverished families. Families are often given no warning and have no idea where their children are being taken. The reason given is neglect – which means poverty. This is destroying Aboriginal culture and is racist. If apartheid South Africa had done this, there would have been an uproar.”

    In the town of Wilcannia, New South Wales, the life expectancy of Aborigines is 37 – lower than the Central African Republic, perhaps the poorest country on earth, currently racked by civil war. Wilcannia’s other distinction is that the Cuban government runs a literacy programme there, teaching young Aboriginal children to read and write. This is what the Cubans are famous for – in the world’s poorest countries. Australia is one of the world’s richest countries.

    I filmed similar conditions 28 years ago when I made my first film about indigenous Australia, The Secret Country. Vince Forrester, an Aboriginal elder I interviewed then, appears in my new film, Utopia. He guided me through a house in Mutitjulu where 32 people lived, mostly children, many of them suffering from otitis media, an infectious, entirely preventable disease that impairs hearing and speech. “Seventy per cent of the children in this house are partially deaf,” he said. Turning straight to my camera, he said, “Australians, this is what we call an abuse of human rights.”

    The majority of Australians are rarely confronted with their nation’s dirtiest secret. In 2009, the respected United Nations Special Rapporteur, Professor James Anaya, witnessed similar conditions and described government “intervention” policies as racist. The then Minister for Indigenous Health, Tony Abbott, told him to “get a life” and stop listening to “the victim brigade”. Abbott is now the prime minister of Australia.

    In Western Australia, minerals are being dug up from Aboriginal land and shipped to China for a profit of a billion dollars a week. In this, the richest, “booming” state, the prisons bulge with stricken Aboriginal people, including juveniles whose mothers stand at the prison gates, pleading for their release. The incarceration of black Australians here is eight times that of black South Africans during the last decade of apartheid.

    When Nelson Mandela was buried this week, his struggle against apartheid was duly celebrated in Australia, though the irony was missing. Apartheid was defeated largely by a global campaign from which the South African regime never recovered. Similar opprobrium has seldom found its mark in Australia, principally because the Aboriginal population is so small and Australian governments have been successful in dividing and co-opting a disparate leadership with gestures and vacuous promises. That may well be changing. A resistance is growing, yet again, in the Aboriginal heartland, especially among the young. Unlike the US, Canada and New Zealand, which have made treaties with their first people, Australia has offered gestures often wrapped in the law. However, in the 21st century the outside world is starting to pay attention. The specter of Mandela’s South Africa is a warning.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *