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It is an ideal for which I am prepared to die, said the prisoner in the black shorts

Monday July 23 2018
By JENERALI ULIMWENGU

"It is an ideal for which I have lived; it is an ideal which I hope to live and see realised. But if it needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”
These immortal words formed the conclusion of the statement by Nelson Mandela at the end of the so-called Rivonia Trials in June 1964.

The reference to death was no idle talk, for the prosecution had asked for the death sentence. Mandela and his co-accused expected to be hanged, and as one of the accused who still lives, Andrew Mhlangeni, said this week, the life sentence was something they celebrated.

It is the measure of the man whose 100th birthday was being honoured this week by his country and a good part of the world community that his statement, which was hardly a defence, was fearless, almost resigned to his fate. Indeed, the then prime minister of the apartheid government, Hendrik Verwoerd, later said that if the judge had passed the death sentence he would have let it be carried out.

The state authorities seemed to have prepared Mandela for a grim fate by bringing him into the courtroom dressed in black prison garb, including short trousers and simple sandals for a man known for his elegance and sharp dressing, while his comrades were allowed in to come in their everyday clothes.

Historians have tried to work out why the judge, one Quartus de Wet, did not sentence the revolutionaries to hang. Some credit his “lenient” sentence to the fact that he was not a bloodthirsty apartheid ideologue, though, obviously, he supported the government, and some point to the world public interest that had been whipped up since the beginning of the trial a year earlier.

The hanging of the man who had come to be known as the Black Pimpernel would have been too much for the world.

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For 27 years he lived behind bars, keeping himself alive and sane, serving as the premier symbol of the liberation struggle that the people of South Africa and other countries were waging against the last bastions of colonialism and racism.

It took courage and self-abnegation for a relatively young and well-to-do lawyer with a beautiful young wife to throw all that out the window in pursuit of ideals whose realisation was not in any way assured.

It is only fitting that his 100 years have been marked, and it was proper that the highlights of the celebrations were crowned with a rousing speech by one of the world’s best speechmakers, Barack Obama.

The former president of the United States qualified current times as “strange and uncertain,” perhaps an oblique reference to his bumbling successor but also good enough for a number of countries around Africa and across the world.

“These days we see much of the world threatening to return to a more dangerous, more brutal way of doing business,” he said, and “Each day’s news cycle is bringing more head-spinning and disturbing headlines.”

By urging those who listened to him to learn from Mandela’s life of self-sacrifice, Obama was invoking values being fast erased by mechanical nationalisms and murderous xenophobia.

The world has indeed changed for the worse with more and more countries governed by demagogues, populists and bookkeepers.

Mandela’s life reminds us that it is noble to fight for others, even when the odds stacked against you and seemingly insurmountable, that those who strive and persevere will ultimately triumph.

When he founded the Umkhonto We Sizwe guerrilla army, no one thought they were going to overrun South Africa the way, say, Fidel Castro’s barbudos overran Batista’s Cuba. It was a strategy of attrition, aiming to force the enemy to the negotiating table. And it worked, in the fullness of time.

The exemplary spirit of Madiba, Govan Mbeki, Walter Sisulu, Ahmed Kathrada, Andrew Mlangeni and others teaches us to be humble as we serve our people; to sacrifice our lives for the betterment of the lives of others. These are authentic giants who have nothing to do with the Lilliputians we have put at the head of our countries.

Jenerali Ulimwengu is chairman of the board of the Raia Mwema newspaper and an advocate of the High Court in Dar es Salaam. E-mail: [email protected]

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