Instructions… Bottom of FormGoing to See Nelson MandelaBy. Bill Fletcher Jr.NNPA Columnist
I recently went to an event at the Brookings Institute in Washington, D.C. to see and hear former South African President Nelson Mandela. The event was over in about 20 minutes. President Mandela was introduced and then delivered prepared remarks, comments that were carefully worded and very diplomatic. Upon completion, he was applauded and then left the building. There were no questions and no discussion.There were a number of things that struck me about the event, but I must tell you what was most prominent for me was who was in the room and who was not. When I sat down and scanned the room I saw a great many White faces and a sea of business suits. The first thought that came to my mind was this: How many of the people in this room and their organizations had demonized President Mandela prior to his 1990 release from captivity? How many had viewed him, as Vice President Cheney did during that time, as a terrorist? How ironic, I further thought, that Mandela is now an icon.There are three basic points that I believe to be worth considering in light of the Mandela trip. The first is the question of what is a terrorist. To borrow some words from Malcolm X, the word “terrorist” is being used loosely. During World War II, the Nazis used the term terrorist to describe the armed resistance to their occupation in countries such as Greece, the Soviet Union, France and Norway. In the U.S.A., we described the resistance as patriotic. In the 1940s the Zionists military units that fought to proclaim the state of Israel were called “terrorists” by the British who were then occupying Palestine. Later, these same military units/terrorists became leaders of Israel and were welcomed into various halls of government. On the other hand, the Palestinians who have fought the growing occupation of their land are condemned as terrorists whether they use military or non-military tactics. The Irish Republican Army has been declared to be terrorists and then non-terrorist military and then again terrorists so many times that my head keeps spinning!So, in looking at the face of President Mandela, I found myself wondering about the definition of a terrorist. If a terrorist is someone who uses military means against civilians in order to accomplish political objectives, then I am fairly clear who is a terrorist and who is not. In other words, the term is not as relative as it may seem but is used sometimes to accurately describe criminals and in other cases inaccurately to describe resisters to oppression. The U.S.A., for some reason, has a habit of doing a lot of the latter even when at the same time it uses terrorist methods to accomplish its objectives, with a case in point being the contra war in the 1980s against the Sandinista government of Nicaragua.The second point that the Mandela visit surfaces is that the opposite of demonization (e.g., pre-1990 Mandela, at least as far as many US political leaders were concerned) is deification. Both are dangerous. It is dangerous to try to turn someone-alive or dead-into a god because humans cannot be gods. Humans have failings and deifying or canonizing someone runs the risk of our falling into disappointment or despair when we discover some of those failings. This has happened for many when it finally dawned on them that Martin Luther King, as great a human being as he was, was in fact a human being with some failings.The other problem with deification, however, is that the rich and powerful often enjoy deifying the people’s real leaders as a way of transforming those same leaders-alive or dead-into acceptable and safe creatures. So, for instance, President Mandela is now supposedly acceptable to everyone. We have gone from the U.S. ruling circles ignoring or castigating Mandela to treating him as if he has finally ‘arrived.’ Yet, President Mandela is, for them, inconveniently still alive. So try as they may, he remains unpredictable, as President Bush discovered in the lead up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq when President Mandela was an outspoken opponent of the war.The rich and powerful wish to make of President Mandela a symbol that they can use to further their own objectives. They want to claim him as their own, which takes me to my final point. It is precisely for that reason that the room in which I sat had the types of people that were there. I did not see the activists who had put themselves on the line to fight the apartheid regime and their collaborators here in the U.S.A. I did not see those who had sat-in at the South African embassy, or those who had been involved in the boycotts to pressure for an end to White minority rule.The image of President Mandela that the rich and powerful wish to project runs into the problem of both the real Mandela and the real people who gave so much of themselves in South Africa, here in the U.S.A., and around the world in order to fight oppression. It is almost like George Orwell’s 1984: history is rewritten to serve those in power, and if many of us had not actually lived the anti-apartheid movement, we might think that it had all been a dream.Bill Fletcher Jr. is president of TransAfrica Forum, a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit educational and organizing center formed to raise awareness in the United States about issues facing the nations and peoples of Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America. He also is co-chair of the anti-war coalition, United for Peace and Justice (www.unitedforpeace.org). He can be reached at bfletcher@transafricaforum.org.###.
