Mostafa Kamal Majumder
The demise of South Africa’s fatherly figure Nelson Mandela (95) on Friday has cast a pall of gloom not merely in the African republic that he has built from the ruins of apartheid to a nation of mutual trust and confidence among its once staunchly racially demarcated communities but also the rest of the globe.As a journalist I had an opportunity to have a first hand knowledge of what Nelson Mandela did for his country after he became president and remained in the top political position for only one term before retiring to assume the fatherly figure of the whole nation. The Juhannesburg summit on sustainable development took me to South Africa where I stayed for little over a week in 2002, five years after Mandela ended his political career after serving as president from 1994 to 1999.
Mandela served 27 years in prison. An international campaign lobbied for his release, which was granted in 1990 amid escalating civil strife. Mandela published his autobiography and opened negotiations with President F.W. de Klerk to abolish apartheid and establish multiracial elections in 1994, in which he led the ANC to victory. As South Africa’s first black president Mandela formed a Government of National Unity in an attempt to defuse racial tension. He also promulgated a new constitution and created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate past human rights abuses. Continuing the former government’s liberal economic policy, his administration introduced measures to encourage land reform, combat poverty, and expand healthcare services. He declined to run for a second term, and was succeeded by his deputy, Thabo Mbeki. Mandela subsequently became an elder statesman, focusing on charitable work in combating poverty and HIV/AIDS through the Nelson Mandela Foundation.
The whites who captured and ruled the country for centuries, did not turn into a hated and oppressed lot after the blacks, representing 75 percent of the population, assumed power under the leadership of Mandela.
Wikipedia notes, “In 1652, a century and a half after the discovery of the Cape Sea Route, Jan van Riebeeck established a refreshment station at the Cape of Good Hope, at what would become Cape Town, on behalf of the Dutch East India Company. The Dutch transported slaves from Indonesia, Madagascar, and India as labour for the colonists in Cape Town. As they expanded east, the Dutch settlers met the southwesterly migrating Xhosa people in the region of the Fish River. A series of wars, called the Cape Frontier Wars, were fought over conflicting land and livestock interests.
The discovery of diamonds, and later gold, was one of the catalysts that triggered the 19th-century conflict known as the Anglo-Boer War, as the Boers (original Dutch, Flemish, German, and French settlers) and the British fought for the control of the South African mineral wealth. Cape Town became a British colony in 1806. European settlement expanded during the 1820s as the Boers and the British 1820 Settlers claimed land in the north and east of the country. Conflicts arose among the Xhosa, Zulu, and Afrikaner groups who competed for territory.
Great Britain took over the Cape of Good Hope area in 1795, to prevent it from falling under control of the French First Republic, which had invaded the Dutch Republic. Given its standing interests in Australia and India, Great Britain wanted to use Cape Town as an interim port for its merchants’ long voyages. The British returned Cape Town to the Dutch Batavian Republic in 1803, the Dutch East India Company having effectively gone bankrupt by 1795.
The British finally annexed the Cape Colony in 1806 and continued the frontier wars against the Xhosa; the British pushed the eastern frontier through a line of forts established along the Fish River. They consolidated the territory by encouraging British settlement.”
When Mandela retired the whites were still controlling 75 percent of the nation’s wealth – industry, business, commerce as well as landed property – while the blacks owned only 25 percent.
In his policy of reconciliation Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela did not allow anybody to touch the properties legally owned by the Whites. He ensured redistribution of only those properties that were taken over illegally by force, and such claims were supported by valid documents.
In the administration Mandela ensured distribution of jobs in keeping with the population strength in different communities. Thus he won over both the whites and the blacks. Despite the big transition to black rule from longtime apartheid, the economy remained unaffected. And the whites in time realised, Nelson Mandela was fatherly figure not merely to the blacks but also to them. This explains why the whites probably more than the blacks in South Africa mourn the great leader who has by his policy of toleration and accommodation won them all.
During my stay in South Africa with a team of journalists brought together by the Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment, I found time to talk to people to have a first hand knowledge of life in the republic – designated as the cradle of civilisation. We used to stay in a hill-top house forty miles into the countryside as Johannesburg hotels and even private homes were overbooked by government and non-governmental delegates attending the summit and the people’s forums being held simultaneously.
South Arfica’s traffic system still reflected the one introduced by the apartheid regime. There was no public bus service from the countryside to Johannesburg, Cape Town or Pretoria which used to be the exclusives domains of the whites. The transport system comprised limited train services which could be availed by blacks to an extent. The roads were used primarily by the whites who moved in cars.
After the end of apartheid bus transport system by then was yet to develop. The gap was being met by privately organised micro-bus services that South Africans call ‘kumbis’. South Africans – black or white – were well groomed in schools and Egnlish was the common spoken language, though the people had a rich diversity of indigenous culture and local dialects.
It was because of a leader like Mandela who created and led the African National Congress, grooming political workers that South Africa now has a set of matured political leaders and workers who are strengthening national cohesion without hurting the interests and sentiments of the minority whites. Can we think of a community of settlers in our country who are in control of most of the resources? Can we take the lesson of Nelson Mandela of forgetting past hatred to forge ahead together for building a bright future? The government has declared a 3-day national mourning for Mandela. It can have meaning if his ideals are seen inspiring our policies for national reconciliation to steer clear of the strife that has gripped the country.
