Nelson Mandela

Peace Through Reconciliation

Neera Chandhoke

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000393033
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Peace & Global Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book reflects on the life and politics of Nelson Mandela (1918–2013) and his efforts to broker peace and reconciliation in a deeply divided country. Through examples from apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa, it explores conflict and methods for realising peace, social justice, and democracy.

The book looks at the festering of animosity and racial bitterness between the white Afrikaner community and the black community during years of racial violence, injustices, and authoritarianism in South Africa. In the most violent phase of the country's history, Mandela offered to both communities peaceful means to ensure equality, justice, and inclusivity. The author highlights the extraordinary challenges which Mandela faced in mobilising consent and persuading both the black and the Afrikaner community to acquiesce to a peaceful transfer of power. The volume further details the socio-political contexts and negotiations which resulted in the swift transfer of power, Mandela's insistence on crafting inclusive systems of nationhood, his multi-cultural cabinet, and the institutionalisation of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to address challenges facing the two communities in the post-conflict period.

An accessible introduction to one of the greatest leaders in contemporary history, this book will be essential reading for scholars and researchers of peace and conflict studies, social exclusion and discrimination, critical race theory, human rights, politics, decolonisation and post-colonial studies, sociology, and history.

Part I

Violence and peace

When you go chosen soldier in the crusade of dreams

Our tears shall not cloud your journey home.

When you go Mandiba your nobility shall be our lasting inheritance.

Jekwu Ikeme

One of the major questions that confronts a complex and plural society is the following: how do and how can various communities of language, religion, caste, race, and ethnicity live together peaceably in a democratic political community? Every society is composed of a number of communities, each of which subscribes to a distinct system of meanings or a language. This is a not a problem. The problem arises when we begin to trace relationships between these communities and find that not all these relationships are comforting. One group may be indifferent to another group and see the latter as the unknown and perhaps the unknowable. We, members of X group, can believe our own reasons for doing things we want to, and members of group Y have their own reasons for doing things that they wish to do. These reasons have to do with the internal understandings, shared languages, traditions, and memories of our group. These understandings, hold members of group X, can hardly be comprehended or appreciated by people who have not been born into our systems of meaning, who do not speak our language, who do not appreciate the value of this language, and who consequently cannot understand narratives of belonging.

On the other hand, relationships between two communities may be based on antagonism rooted in memories of the distant or recent past, a clash of mythologies, the stories parents tell their children and children tell each other. For these reasons, the relationship between groups may be conflictual. Members may not dine with each other, interact, or inter-marry. Yet this is also not a serious problem. The conflict can be kept in check. The production and reproduction of diversity and difference is natural to every society. Groups always define themselves in relation to others.

But differences can be negotiated by other social processes. Solidarities develop in the overlap between meaning systems, languages, music, folk traditions, historical remembrances, and rituals. Camaraderie ripens in the workplace, in and through social associations in civil society, political allegiances, and mobilisation, and through networks of trade and commerce that demand a high degree of trust.

The problem arises when social divisions are politicised and political leaders harness identities to their own interests and agendas. Consider the case of apartheid South Africa. From 1948 to 1990, a racist group—the Afrikaners—monopolised the institutions of state power, commanded the symbolic resources of society, controlled economic resources, practised linguistic domination, and suspended every right and freedom of the majority community. The dominant group expelled the majority—black and coloured Africans—from every sphere of collective life. The state was supported by an alliance between white groups.

Consider the implications. All societies are politically organised into the state. Each state is distinctive, but all states have one feature in common. They are central to individual and collective lives. The state establishes the network of rules that frame various transactions of society. Through these rules—some written, some unwritten, some said and others left unsaid—the state as the repository of power, the condensate of power, and the source of power ultimately controls the way people live and the way they relate to each other and to the world. In these days of intrusive technology, the state also controls the way we think.

The primary safeguards against the abuse of power by the state is the practice of representation and participation. In a democratic society, policies and rules enacted by the state are contested by various political agents. Through practices of representation and participation, democratic states are transformed into terrains of contestation between different perspectives and ideas. Final decisions are, therefore, almost always the outcome of compromises. The party which is victorious in the election rules but does not always have its way. Sometimes it dominates by accommodating other perspectives, sometimes by compromising, and sometimes by the imposition of brute force. But rule-making and implementation without democratic representation and participation, and without contestation, is the specific hallmark of authoritarian states.

The costs of authoritarianism are unbearably high. In apartheid South Africa, the majority was completely excluded from democratic processes of representation, participation, negotiation, contestation, and compromise. It had absolutely no part to play in the making of rules, no role in shaping the framework within which its members had to live out their lives. They were denied the basic rights that accrue to human beings. At this stage of our collective life, we do not need to figure out why people have rights; they have rights simply because they are human. But in South Africa, the life of the majority was governed, was ruled, and was dominated by a community that had garnered power on the basis of the morally dubious factor of race. The Afrikaners had no special ability or capacity to govern a large, multi-cultural society. Their sole qualification for power was that they were white. The laws they enacted were not the product of contestation and compromises. They were diktats issued by a privileged group.

Authoritarianism breeds injustice that unfolds into the lives of people in different ways. Each one of these ways is toxic. Each one of these ways is unjust. Injustice maims minds and bruises bodies. The concept of justice holds that all people who live in a territorially delineated political community should share equally in the benefits and the burdens of society. This is a default principle, and any deviation from the norm should be justifiable. No one should be barred from the circle of justice for reasons that are morally arbitrary and politically discriminatory, such as race. No one can be discriminated against or unduly privileged for reasons over which we have no control—birth into a group that had been typed as inferior. This very axiom was disregarded by the apartheid state.

It follows that a state that represents the interest of and promotes only one religious group, one ethnic group, or one racial group—as in the case of apartheid South Africa—is tyrannical, repressive, and above all, unjust. Such a system can only breed anger, resentment, struggle, and resistance. It can hardly promote peace even in the minimal sense as the containment of conflict. But peace is an essential precondition for living a fulfilling life along with fellow citizens. Such societies are rocked by discontent and torn apart by violence, for violence begets little but violence. Peace recedes further into the distance.

Mandela: an answer to violence

Famously, the leader who showed humanity the route from violence born out of institutionalised racism and discrimination to peace through reconciliation, who disdained the concept of “victor’s justice”, and who promised and delivered on inclusive democracy was Nelson Mandela of South Africa. He privileged negotiation over retaliatory and retributive violence, reconciliation over vengeance, and compassion over victor’s justice. Given the charged political context in the country after Mandela was released from prison in 1990, the fight was bound to be long and bitter.

The stakes were extremely high for each community in this fight. The white community was determined to retain absolute and complete power that it had grabbed, consolidated, and augmented over the years. For the blacks and for the coloured people of South Africa, the stake was nothing less than absolute freedom and the right to be equal citizens in their own land. The whites were determined not to share power, while the majority expected a complete transfer of power.

Across the world, political observers of developments in South Africa feared a bloodbath; they predicted civil war. Mandela defied these predictions and, despite all odds, piloted a peaceful transfer of power in the country. He established a model of conflict resolution anchored in the worthy principles of political life: compassion, empathy, acceptance, forgiveness, and the grant of equal rights to all citizens. That was the genius of the man who had struggled against rank discrimination and racial violence and who had spent 27 years in prison, most of it in the dreaded Robben Island jail, Pollsmoor, and finally Victor Verster.

Mandela was tried and sent to prison in 1961 for treason, tried again for leaving the country in 1962, and then jailed in 1964 along with his colleagues in the famous Rivonia Trials. After that, Mandela was rendered anonymous by the regime; the holders of power sought to make him disappear. Younger people did not even know what he looked like because it was a crime to circulate his photographs in South Africa. During the period of imprisonment, Mandela became one of the world’s most quoted public figures, but in apartheid South Africa, his words and teachings, like those of other activists of the African National Congress (ANC), were banned. Carrying his photograph or uttering his name could lead to torture and a prison sentence.¹ For all intents and purposes, he was labelled a terrorist. His image and his name had to be wiped out from public memory. Ironically, the more the apartheid regime tried to banish Mandela from the memory of the public, the more he was revered across the world.

The brutality of the apartheid regime, particularly the way they treated the leaders of the ANC, was, in time, to lead to international outrage. A massive movement to free Mandela and other leaders erupted in various countries. World figures like Bertrand Russel, Simone de Beauvoir, and Ilya Ehrenburg put their signatures onto numerous petitions to the campaign.² Concerts were held under banners of “Free Mandela” and lead singers like Bruce Springsteen and Miles Davis sang for him. Lovers of the music of freedom attended these concerts in thousands. A global movement had taken up the task of freeing Mandela and other leaders.

International support for the liberation struggle in South Africa was significant and heartening, but it was not enough. The struggle for freedom had come up against an iron wall, that of a racist regime determined to retain power. Within a few years, the gates in the iron wall were wrenched open and new forms of politics, fresh approaches to inter-racial relations, and times of democracy were ushered in. The journey was not easy.

Mandela had warned his people in 1953 that the struggle would be difficult. His presidential address to the African National Congress (Transvaal) on 21 September 1953 was titled “No Easy Walk to Freedom”. “You can see that there is no easy walk to freedom anywhere, and many of us will have to pass through the valley of the shadow of death again and again before we reach the mountaintop of our desire”.³ Along with other leaders, Mandela enabled his people to walk through the valley of shadow and emerge into the sunlight of democracy and toleration, reconciliation, and peace. That is why he was one of the most celebrated leaders of the freedom struggle in the post-colonial world. He was certainly the best known, because he had vision, he had courage, he had generosity, and he had imagination.

Before he could fulfil his dream, he had to tread a long and tortuous path to his destination. There were times he had to walk alone, there were times he was accused of selling out to the white settler class, there were times he was slammed for going soft on the white oppressor, and there were times he had to confront accusations that he had let down his own people. He had to persuade his own party men who had different notions of how a state should be organised in the aftermath of apartheid, different ideas of how the former ruling class should be dealt with, and different ideas to deal with leaders who believed that violence is the only answer to historical injustice.

Gumede tells us that in the Robben Island prison, an epic leadership battle for supremacy between nationalists took place in the ANC. On the one side was nationalist Mandela, and on the other side was the leader of the African Communists and a member of the ANC, Govan Mbeki, father of the future president of South Africa Thabo Mbeki. Mbeki’s group argued that the ANC should seek power through military means, nationalise all industries, pursue Nuremburg-like trials to prosecute apartheid leaders for crimes against humanity, and set up a communist state with the Communist party at its head. Mandela and his group argued that the ANC was a broad church of all colours, ideologies, and classes who were united in their fight against apartheid and racial prejudice. He argued for a negotiated settlement and the setting up of a constitutional non-racial state.⁴

Mandela understood that he had to deal with the trauma of a people who lived in a tortured land, and he had to convince them to try out his point of view and to share his vision. Despite opposition and allegations, he persevered, confident in the belief that the path he had chosen would lead his people in the right direction. He was equally determined that justice in the post-apartheid era could not be based on retribution as in the Nuremburg model. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth is a pointless principle of justice in human affairs. It produces and reproduces nothing else than damaged and bitter individuals and communities. It does not allow people to accept the past. It pushes back the hope that they will be able to live in peace; it might even banish the possibility of peace to eternity.

After he was released from prison following the unbanning of the ANC in 1990, Mandela’s ideas and political commitments caught the attention of a world that was exhausted by cynical and power-grabbing modes of politics. His re-entry into his own world was not stress-free. His memories of South Africa were those of racism and struggle. That was a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series editor’s preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Violence and peace
• Part II Historical injustice and resistance
• Part III Towards an inclusive democracy
• Part IV Peace through reconciliation
• Conclusion: Nelson Mandela’s contribution to peace
• References
• Index