The Power of Mandela

 illustration from After Gandhi: One Hundred Years of Nonviolent Resistance  

by Anne Sibley O'Brien and Perry Edmond O"Brien

"1962. Cape Town, South Africa
    Robben Island, a wild, rocky outpost seven miles off the coast, was a place of banishment. Nelson Mandela arrived there in the dark belly of a boat, chained to three other men.
    'This is the island! Here you will die!' white prison guards yelled at the four men as they stepped off the boat. They commanded them to jog between lines of armed guards to the prison gatehouse. Mandela knew this moment was crucial. The job of the guards was to break their spirit. As the jailers screamed at them, he and the others kept their pace slow.
     The guards were astonished. They threatened to kill the men if they did not move faster. Mandela replied, 'You have your duty, and we have ours,' and walked with measured dignity to the gates.
     He spent the next 27 years in prison." 

In 1998 I traveled to South Africa, Swaziland and Zimbabwe with my friend Meikie, who was raised in Soweto and fled apartheid as a teenager. Our first stop was Capetown, where we boarded a boat for a tour of the Robben Island prison where Mandela spent 18 of his 27 years of incarceration. Many of the tour guides for the prison are former prisoners. We heard accounts of the struggles of the inmates to overcome the tribal divisions between Xhosa and Zulu, and of their efforts to create a "university" by each man sharing the knowledge he carried.

    

    "At the prison, the leaders of the anti-apartheid movement - black, Indian and 'coloured,' or mixed race - were housed together in one section. At first they spent their days breaking rocks into gravel. Then for thirteen years they mined limestone from a quarry with picks and shovels. They were fed cold corn porridge. They slept in individual cells, on mats on cement floors, surrounded by thick stone walls. Many of the prisoners had life sentences.

     "But Mandela believed he would be freed one day. He knew that his challenge was to survive in both body and spirit, to emerge from prison whole. He and the other leaders began a campaign to improve their conditions. They decided that the most effective way to resist was to adopt completely nonviolent strategies. They organized strikes, refusing to eat or slowing down their work. They treated their guards with respect and when possible befriended them, but they refused to be bullied. At first they demanded long pants instead of the shorts they were given, which only boys wore. Over many years they won better food, more blankets, the chance to have more visitors, to write letters, to study, to receive books. 
     "Meanwhile, they transformed the prison into a place of learning. Stolen newspapers, read in secret by one person, were copied on tiny scraps of paper and passed around. As one man pushed a rock-filled wheelbarrow in the quarry, another walked beside him, telling him what he knew of science or mathematics or philosophy. When books and studies were finally allowed, everything learned was shared with others. Group debates might go on for 30 or 40 days, working out differences among the men and visions of how the country should be run.
      "...The ideas that had been chipped out of the hard prison years became the basis for the government of the new South Africa."

text from After Gandhi: One Hundred Years of Nonviolent Resistance by Anne Sibley O'Brien and Perry Edmond O'Brien

The first president of the new democracy didn't create the miracle of a peaceful transition by himself. He worked with and was supported by a broad group of leaders who had endured the same terrible hardships and who together had practiced the skills that would be needed to build a new country. In Mandela's own words, "The restoration of the nation was being planned by the same men, women and children whose bodies and spirits were being broken daily."

 

Mandela's accomplishments and his status as one of history's greatest leaders can sometimes make him seem like a saint. It's important to remember that his wisdom, his vision, and his commitment to freedom, forgiveness and reconciliation did not come to him easily as the qualities of someone superhuman, but grew as his chosen response to the dehumanization to which he was subjected. 

Mandela offers a model of endurance, personal integrity, dignity and grace, teaching that no matter what comes at us, we are always free to choose our response. On Robben Island, he used the poem "Invictus" to inspire himself and his fellow prisoners to rise above their circumstances.

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.

from "Invictus" by William Ernest Henley

  illustration from Talking Walls by Margy Burns Knight

The Color of Their Skin

When our son Perry was young, South African apartheid was regularly in the news. One day in March 1986, the month he turned four, he saw me crying in response to a report of a brutal attack by white police officers on unarmed black school children. When I explained why I was so sad, he responded, "Is it the color of their skin that makes them do that?"

At just four years old, not only was our white son aware of skin color, but he was grappling with questions about racial dominance and injustice. Whether or not he saw himself as "white," it seems he had begun to absorb, and to puzzle over, a sense of white people being on the wrong side of history.

(As children often do, he also voiced so simply a profound question that can be unpacked on so many levels: Is our racial identity our destiny? Are we the unconscious victims of our socialization? Is whiteness like a toxin, instilling a tendency toward inhumane actions?)

All of our children deserve information on how racism works. It's essential knowledge for navigating our 21st-century world, for building relationships with all kinds of people, for becoming culturally competent, and for building a future with more freedom and justice for all. Children need basic guidance in separating the falsehoods of racism - in attitudes and words, actions and policies - from the truth about the common humanity and mutual dependence of all people.

But how do we impart this information without instilling guilt, anger or hopelessness? Crucially, we must not burden children with responsibilities that belong to adults. I never want to imply, "Something terrible is happening in the world, there's nothing I can do to stop it, and whether you like it or not, you'll get caught up in it."

Instead, children need positive messages of passion and power: "We want all people to be treated fairly. Sometimes people are mistreated because of their skin color. I'm working with other grownups to change that." Young people need to see that there are solutions and that adults are engaged in tackling the issue, within themselves and in the wider world.

Children also need affirmation that their actions matter. When we listen to them and support their impulses to act, they gain a sense of their own power to change things for good.

Perry's question was so striking that it's all I remember of the conversation that day. I don't recall how I responded. Today, I imagine I'd say something like: "No, our skin color doesn't make us do things. It's the way we think about skin color. Some people are very confused. They think that people with different skin colors aren't as good as they are. Really, they are scared of people who are different from them. That's why they act that way. But when we remember that people of all skin colors are one family, we can make a different choice. We can treat everybody well. We can stand up for each other."

I do remember what Perry did soon after. He announced that he wanted to write a letter to South African Prime Minister Botha. "Let black children and white children play together," he dictated solemnly. "And hire more black policemen. They will understand." We put the letter in an envelope and mailed it.

There's no evidence that Botha ever received the letter, much less that he was touched by it. But what matters is that this four-year-old acted positively, with passion and power.