Mandela’s name cannot be spoken of by television and radio journalists other than with tone of utmost reverence. I recall when he was released from jail and women radio hosts were imparting the news while hardly holding back cries of joy. He has long been treated as godlike. As I am writing this, I am listening to television news stating that he is in deteriorating condition, and making the invariable references to having brought “freedom to the rainbow nation.” I see his visage portrayed on the colored glass of a church in South Africa while a black congregation sings his praises.
How many times has hell on Earth has been created in the name of “democracy” and “human rights”? “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” brought the “Reign of Terror” to France and the genocide of the Vendée peasantry. The People’s Republic of China brought deaths to some 80,000,000. More millions died in the name of the “people’s democracy” in Bolshevik Russia and Cambodia. Every state claims to be a “democracy.” The word, with associated clichés such as “human rights” and “freedom,” means little or nothing in substance. The South Africa that was delivered up to Mandela has set about its onslaught of Whites, especially farmers, and over 3000 have been murdered since 1990, while the murder rate generally is one of the highest in the world.[1]
For South Africa, “the long road to freedom” has meant hell’s pandemonium. So long as the Black can be said to have the vote, all else is permitted. Most South African Blacks seem incapable of laying blame for their plight where it belongs, ultimately on Mandela for bringing them to the cursed state of the rest of sub-Saharan Africa: the return to savagery and dysfunction wherever white rule was scuttled.
What has the post-apartheid regime ushered by Mandela offered the Blacks? Not only has life not improved, it has become much worse, and public services and utilities are barely functional. Crime is rampant, slums persist. Such is the existence of South Africa after the abdication of the Afrikaner that John Minto, perennial protestor and a leader in the anti-apartheid protests in New Zealand during the 1980s, declined to accept the Steve Biko Award for his services in helping to wreck South Africa because even he could not see any sign of the new Black utopia eventuating. In January 2008 Minto wrote to Mbeki: “Receiving an award would inevitably associate myself and the movement here with ANC government policies. At one time this may have been a source of pride but it would now be a source of personal embarrassment which I am not prepared to endure.”[2] How or why Minto believed that post-apartheid South Africa would be any better than any other Black state is unknown to this writer.
Like the image of Martin Luther King, who talked peace but practiced a strategy of tension, and lamented the leniency by which Black protesters were treated by police in the Southern States,[3] Mandela’s image is humbug. Mandela was committed to violence. It is assumed that Mandela was unjustly convicted and imprisoned, merely for standing up for “freedom,” as a “prisoner of conscience.” He was convicted for his involvement in a planned terror campaign. Hanging would have been appropriate.
A plan to unleash a terrorist campaign on South Africa had been hatched on the “Rivonia” farm near Johannesburg. The South African authorities had received information that leaders of the militant wing of the African National Congress, Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), were ensconced at the farm, which was owned by Arthur Goldreich. On July 11, 1963, police raided the farm where they discovered another decidedly non-African “Black” leader, Denis Goldberg, and outside in a thatched roofed building “two whites and one Bantu.” Eight suspects were caught during the raid: Goldberg, Rusty Bernstein, Raymond Mhlaba, Bob Hepple, Govan Mbeki, Arthur Goldreich, Ahmed Kathrada, and ANC leader Walter Sisulu.[4]
The raid discovered a plan for the terrorist campaign known as “Operation Mayibuye,” drafted by the National High Command. The defendants contended that Operation Mayibuye had not been formally adopted by the High Command and was only under consideration. That apparently is meant to be a cause for commendation and gratitude. Mandela, who was already in jail, insisted that it was a “draft document” which he did not consider realistic. However, Mandela always also insisted on not being a communist, a lie that has only recently been exposed by documents proving that Mandela was indeed a senior member of the Communist Party. The plan was designed to cause such chaos as to motivate military intervention from the United Nations, through South West Africa.[5]
Mandela had been jailed in 1962 for inciting a general strike in 1960, which had met with less support than expected, the failure of which prompted him to state that “the days of non-violent struggle were over.” Mandela was among first to urge the ANC to take a violent course. It was Mandela’s prompting that eventually persuaded the ANC to establish a separate guerrilla organisation, Umkhonto we Sizwe. Douglas Linder states of this:
In June 1961, Mandela sent to South African newspapers a letter warning that a new campaign would be launched unless the government agreed to call for a national constitutional convention. Knowing that no such call would be forthcoming, Mandela retreated to the Rivonia hideout to began planning, with other supporters, a sabotage campaign. The campaign began on December 16, 1961 when Umkhonto we Sizwe saboteurs lit explosives at an electricity sub-station. Dozens of other acts of sabotage followed over the next eighteen months. (Indeed, the government would allege the defendants committed 235 separate acts of sabotage.) The sabotage included attacks on government posts, machines, and power facilities, as well as deliberate crop burning.[6]
It is no use debating here the legitimacy of Mandela’ call for violent struggle. What we are concerned with is his portrayal as some Christ-like figure of “peace and goodwill to all men.”
In February 1962, Mandela left South Africa to gather support from states and to receive six months training in Ethiopia. He was arrested shortly after his return to South Africa.
In July 1963, Mandela was called into a Pretoria prison office where he met ten others. He and these others became known as the “Rivonia 11.” They included seven captured at Rivonia, two who were previously detained (Andrew Mlangeni and Elias Motsoaledi), and James Kantor, an attorney.[7] ANC lawyer Harold Wolpe and Arthur Goldreich had both evaded arrest.
Mandela’s own statement from the dock is a declaration of violent intent:
At the beginning of June 1961, after a long and anxious assessment of the South African situation, I, and some colleagues, came to the conclusion that as violence in this country was inevitable, it would be unrealistic and wrong for African leaders to continue preaching peace and non-violence at a time when the Government met our peaceful demands with force. This conclusion was not easily arrived at. It was only when all else had failed, when all channels of peaceful protest had been barred to us, that the decision was made to embark on violent forms of political struggle, and to form Umkhonto we Sizwe.[8]
ANC chief Sisulu testified that Operation Mayibuye was formulated by Arthur Goldreich, a member of the High Command and a former member of the Zionist underground in Palestine. Sisulu stated that sabotage would be needed but that there was no intention to kill anybody. The judge pointed out that a passer-by had been killed by an explosion at a post office, but Sisulu was content to say what amounts to “shit happens.”
Justice de Wet concluded that “beyond doubt Nelson Mandela had been the leading spirit behind the creation of Umkhonto we Sizwe” and that “Operation Mayibuye comprised a detailed plan for waging guerrilla war intended to culminate in full scale revolt against the Government of South Africa.”[9] It was because of international pressure that the defendants were sentenced to life imprisonment rather than hanged, Justice de Wet stating that he “decided not to impose the supreme penalty,” although it was “the proper penalty for the crime. . . . The sentence in the case of all of the accused will be one of life imprisonment.”[10] Of course such leniency did not do South Africa a jot of good, and one has heard nothing other than how Mandela was wronged because he was jailed for plotting violence. All the defendants broke into smiles, and Mandela gave the thumbs up to his supporters.[11] As the police wagon drove off, Mandela gave a clenched fist salute to his chanting supporters. In 1985, having already released Denis Goldberg, Prime Minister Botha offered Mandela his release if he renounced violence. He refused. The same year the Government entered into secret negotiations with Mandela to scuttle their own existence. By 1990, with negotiations ongoing, Mandela was living in a bungalow at Victor Verster prison, and was released that year and elected president in 1994.
The myth of Mandela has grown with time, as do many myths about figures acclaimed as Gods. Mandela the liar is not so well known. He always denied being a member of the Communist Party. While this writer does not care whether he was a party member, it is part of the myth that Mandela was not a Communist but just a sincere democrat who believed in justice for everyone. His denial also means that he was a liar, and if he lied about that, should his protestations about anything else, including those during the Rivoniam trial, where he insisted he was not a Party member, be trusted? The defendants in the Rivonia trial were very cagey in regard to their association with the Communist Party. In was only in 2012 that the minutes to a 1982 meeting of the Communist Party were found in private archives of a party official deposited at the University of Cape Town. These papers discuss Mandela’s party membership. Membership was kept secret so as not to jeopardise the ANC’s relationship with the West.
Umkhonto we Sizwe was established in 1961 after ANC leaders had gone to China and the USSR and obtained support for a guerrilla war. The first attacks were launched on December 16, 1961. “Its campaign of ‘sabotage’ and bombings over the subsequent three decades claimed the lives of dozens of civilians, and led to the organisation being classed as a terrorist group by the US.” Professor Stephen Ellis, a former researcher for Amnesty International, who is now at the Free University of Amsterdam, having discovered the archives revealing Mandela’s senior position in the party, wrote a book last year in which he also describes “how the ANC’s military wing had bomb-making lessons from the IRA, and intelligence training from the East German Stasi, which it used to carry out brutal interrogations of suspected ‘spies’ at secret prison camps.” Ellis writes that: “I think most people who supported the anti-apartheid movement just didn’t want to know that much about his background. Apartheid was seen as a moral issue and that was that. But if real proof had been produced at the time, some might have thought differently.”[12]
The ANC’s “campaign of ‘sabotage’ and bombings over the subsequent three decades claimed the lives of dozens of civilians, and led to the organisation being classed as a terrorist group by the US,”[13] states The Telegraph report on Ellis’ book. However, as should be known by now by observers of history and politics who are more astute than the average newspaper reader, such a designation by the US State Department means little or nothing, and such an organisation might nonetheless receive backing from the USA. Certainly, corporate interests both within South Africa and outside were eager to see the elimination of Apartheid in favour of an integrated workforce, and an additional legacy of Mandela has been to inaugurate the globalisation and privatisation of South Africa’s economy in a manner reminiscent of Kosovo, where the KLA had also once been listed by the USA as a “terrorist organization.”
Angola was also the base for “Quatro,” a notorious ANC detention centre, where dozens of the movement’s own supporters were tortured and sometimes killed as suspected spies by agents from their internal security service, some of whom were “barely teenagers.” East German trainers taught the internal security agents that anyone who challenged official ANC dogma should be viewed as a potential spy or traitor.[14]
If anyone would be startled and perplexed that the ANC could do such things, it is only because generations have been reared on the fantasy that real angels have sooty faces—the sootiest of all being Nelson Mandela[15]—and the color of the Devil is white.
The Nelson Mandela Foundation went into denial mode when confronted with the evidence:
On Friday night, a spokesman for the Nelson Mandela Foundation said: “We do not believe that there is proof that Madiba (Mandela’s clan name) was a Party member. . . . The evidence that has been identified is comparatively weak in relation to the evidence against, not least Madiba’s consistent denial of the fact over nearly 50 years. It is conceivable that Madiba might indulge in legalistic casuistry, but not that he would make an entirely false statement.[16]
Whether Mandela was a Communist is largely an irrelevant point, however, in comparison to Mandela’s legacy of helping to bring ruin to the Afrikaners, who have spent most of their four centuries of existence fighting persecution, while South Africa was pushed onto the path to globalisation.
Notes
1. Erin Conway-Smith, “South African framers fearing for their lives,” The Telegraph, December 1, 2012, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/southafrica/9716539/South-African-farmers-fearing-for-their-lives.html
2. “John Minto to Visit Abahlali baseMjondolo on Saturday, 17 April 2009,” Anti-Eviction Campaign, http://antieviction.org.za/2009/04/18/
3. See King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” 1963.
4. Douglas O. Linder, “The Nelson Mandeal (Rivonia) Trial: An Account,” http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/mandela/mandelaaccount.html
5. Operation Mayibuye, http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/mandela/mandelaoperationm.html
6. Linder, op. it.
7. Linder, op. cit.
8. Quoted by Linder, ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Colin Freeman and Jane Flanagan, “Nelson Mandela ‘proven’ to be a member of the Communist Party after decades of denial,” The Telegraph, December 8, 2012, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/nelson-mandela/9731522/Nelson-Mandela-proven-to-be-a-member-of-the-Communist-Party-after-decades-of-denial.html
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. Only in a metaphorical sense, as Mandela is “high yellow” with a mongoloid eyefold indicating Hottentot descent.
16. Colin Freeman and Jane Flanagan, op. cit.
No comments:
Post a Comment