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	Working to honour Nelson Mandela’s Legacy by IPS, MSNBC & agencies   Dec 6 2013   Working to honour Nelson Mandela’s Legacy, by Qaanitah Hunter and Estelle Ellis. (IPS)   As the world mourns the passing of South Africa’s first democratically elected president, Nelson Mandela, his close friend and political stalwart Tokyo Sexwale says much needs to be done to honour his legacy.   “We ask people to honour Madiba by living his legacy. We are free today because of Mandela,” Sexwale told IPS after Mandela’s passing, referring to the statesman’s legacy of non-racialism and non-sexism. South Africans affectionately referred to Mandela by his clan name, Madiba.   “Death is a sad thing. But there is a lot we can celebrate of Madiba’s life. It was 95 years well spent,” Sexwale said.   Leaders around the world mourned the Nobel Peace laureate’s death, with U.S. President Barack Obama saying: “We will not likely see the likes of Nelson Mandela again.”   But it was Mandela’s close friend and confidant, Ahmed Kathrada, who brought tears to many with his heartfelt tribute.   “We have known each other for 67 years, and I never imagined I’d be witness to the unavoidable and traumatic reality of your passing…to whom do I turn for solace, comfort, and advice?” Kathrada, a politicial activist and former political advisor to Mandela, said in an open letter on Dec. 6.   Kathrada told IPS in an interview before Mandela’s death that his legacy would always be remembered. He also pointed out that much had to be done to achieve the ideals Mandela had when he was released from 27 years of imprisonment in 1990.   “There’s a lot that one has to do, because the main message Madiba came out of prison with was that of non-racialism. That means you live in a country of various political beliefs,” said Kathrada.   In Kathrada’s office there is a portrait of him sitting on a couch next to Mandela, his former commander-in-chief, laughing as if they shared a private joke.   “It is time for you to retire, Madala,” wrote Mandela in cursive on the portrait, which he gifted to Kathrada in 2001.   “We called each other ‘madala’. Old man,” Kathrada explained. “The whole world calls him Madiba but he was my ‘madala,’” Kathrada said.   The portrait provides a glimpse of the deep bond the two shared, stemming from the many years they spent together during the struggle for a free and democratic South Africa. Both Kathrada and Mandela had been sentenced to life imprisonment during the 1963 to 1964 Rivonia treason trial – they and other leaders of the African National Congress had been accused of trying to sabotage the apartheid government. They served time together on Robben Island.   Kathrada maintains some five decades later that he shared a very frank and open relationship with Mandela in their pursuit for democracy.   “Madiba was not a saint but he had very redeemable qualities. He did not give up his commitment to fight injustice…he was a tiger.”   “We knew we would win the struggle. That we will get democracy but it didn’t cross my mind that Mandela would ever be president,” he said. Mandela became South Africa’s first black president in 1994 and served only one term of office, stepping down in 1999.   But judge Siraj Desai, who practiced as a legal activist and was closely involved in many legal battles against the apartheid government, said that during that time Mandela, a former lawyer, was able to radically reform South Africa’s legal system.   “His contribution in introducing human rights and a legal framework based on human rights is immeasurable. He changed the way we practiced law completely,” he told IPS. “His legacy is spelled out in the Bill of Human Rights.”   Desai added that South Africans could not close their eyes to the reality of poverty. “The realisation of these socio-economic rights have not happened yet, but I think that it is a question of failed political implementation, not failed legal reform,” Desai said.   South African social justice activist Fazila Farouk said that the issues Mandela touched on in his speech during the Rivonia treason trial were still very relevant today.   “Mandela spoke about people in rural areas, how they suffered through soil erosion and droughts. He spoke about the appalling employment conditions of black farm workers. He spoke about income inequality [in urban areas], a bifurcated education system and the massive impact that poverty and malnutrition have on children’s ability to learn,” Farouk told IPS in an interview before Mandela’s passing.   “The sad reality is that you can cut and paste sections of his speech from 1963 and use it just like that to address the reality that so many South Africans face today,” she said, adding that it was shocking that the lives of so many South Africans had still not changed.   She admitted that access to education has improved radically since South Africa became a democracy in 1994.   “If we look at our country today, we realise what is striking about his speech is that we have, in many ways, failed him.   “Income inequality lies at the heart of many of government’s failures to realise human rights – if we don’t deal with it, we will not overcome our problems,” Farouk said.   However, gender activist Lindsay Ziehl said that legislatively, South African women were significantly better off because of Mandela’s influence.   “He made a significant contribution in levelling the playing field for women. We now have better laws, better training at police stations and the courts. For the first time people understand that domestic violence is not just a matter for married people,” she told IPS before Mandela’s death.   South Africa implemented a Domestic Violence Act in 1998, which recognised economic, emotional and physical abuse in domestic relationships.   She added that there are now more women involved in politics than ever before. South Africa is ranked third in the world in terms of gender representation in parliament.   But Daygan Eager from the Rural Advocacy Health Project told IPS before Mandela’s death that on analysis of health rights for South Africa’s poor “honestly there has not been much of a change – in fact there has, in some areas, been a decline.”   He said that the country’s macro-economic policy was more focused on urban areas while rural areas were very much neglected.   “Immediately after 1994 there was an initial massive increase in the number of health services being built – but there was no focus on service delivery or the sustainable use of resources,” Eagar said.   Eagar said that Rural Advocacy Health Project research shows that at the moment about 15 percent of rural households are impoverished by the “catastrophic effect” of transport costs to get medical help.   As the world mourns Mandela’s death, Kathrada said the precedent Mandela set through his actions and life was enough to create a “world of young Madibas”.   “Remember what Madiba stood for and sacrificed all his life. It is to build one united nation under one flag, under one anthem,” Kathrada said.   http://www.ipsnews.net/topics/inequality/   Everyone Loves Mandela, writes Gary Younge. (MSNBC & agencies)   Shortly before Nelson Mandela stepped down as president of South Africa in 1999, racial anxiety was a lucrative business. At the public library in the affluent area of Sandton, I attended a session at which an emigration consultant, John Gambarana, warned a hundred-strong, mostly white audience of the chaos and mayhem to come. Holding up a book by broadcaster Lester Venter called When Mandela Goes, he told them, “People, this book is a wake-up call. The bad news is [when Mandela leaves] the pawpaw’s really going to hit the fan. The good news is the fan probably won’t be working.”   And so it was that, even in the eyes of those who made a living peddling fear, less than a decade after his release from prison, Mandela had been transformed from terrorist boogeyman to national savior.   White South Africa has come to embrace him in much the same way that most white Americans came to accept Martin Luther King Jr.: grudgingly and gratefully, retrospectively, selectively, without grace but with considerable guile. By the time they realized that their dislike of him was spent and futile, he had created a world in which admiring him was in their own self-interest. Because, in short, they had no choice.   As the last apartheid leader, F.W. de Klerk—who had lost the election to Mandela—told me that same year, “The same mistakes that we made were still being made in the United States and the ex-colonies. Then we carried them on for around twenty years longer.” There are myriad differences between apartheid South Africa and America under segregation. But on that point, if little else, de Klerk was absolutely right. Neither the benefits of integration nor the urgency with which it was demanded were obvious to most Americans during King’s time. A month before the March on Washington in 1963, 54 percent of whites thought the Kennedy administration was “pushing racial integration too fast.”   In 1966, nearly twice as many Americans had an unfavorable view of King as a favorable one. Only after he was assassinated—arguably only because he was assassinated—did the country begin to appreciate that his efforts, along with the broader civil rights movement, had spared it the ignominy of being the last to rid itself of legally sanctioned racism. It took about thirty years for the mud that had been slung at King to be cleaned off and his legacy polished to the gleam befitting a national treasure. By 1999, a Gallup poll revealed that only Mother Teresa was a more admired public figure in the twentieth century. In 2011, 91 percent of Americans (including 89 percent of whites) approved of a memorial to King being placed on the National Mall.   Despite the apartheid regime’s best efforts, it did not manage to kill Mandela or break his spirit. In frail health as I write, he has not only outlived most of his international detractors—including Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan; he has outclassed them in his pursuit of a peaceful transition and an embrace of inclusive democracy. To cite just one example, South Africa’s Constitution, promulgated by Mandela in 1996, was the first in the world to outlaw discrimination based on sexual orientation.   Yet one should not sanctify Mandela, for two reasons. First, to make him a saint is to extract him from the realm of politics and elevate him to the level of deity. And as long as he resides there, his legacy cannot be fully debated or discussed, because his record is then rooted not in his role as the head of a movement, but in the beatified soul of a man and his conscience.   Second, to make him a saint is to render all who come after him a devil. Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma, the presidents who followed him, would then be judged not by the standards of other leaders in the region or globally (and for all their faults, compared with Silvio Berlusconi, Vladimir Putin or George W. Bush, to name a few, they come off well), but by the unattainable level of a canonized myth.   Similarly, it would be a mistake to look at the inequities of post-apartheid South Africa and argue, as some on the left have done, that nothing much has changed. One need not be in denial about how bad things still are to recall how bad things might have been. It was at the time when the Soviet Union was collapsing and capitalism was at its most triumphant that Mandela emerged from prison, charged with leading a developing nation under racial dictatorship and at war with itself. The year he was elected, Afrikaners set off car bombs, and the African National Congress engaged in a bloody shootout with the Inkatha Freedom Party in central Johannesburg that left many dead. Given the centuries it took to entrench the nation’s racial inequalities, it is not reasonable to have expected him, or the government he led, to eliminate them in short order.   White South Africans have every reason to love Mandela. The price they had to pay for keeping most of the things they had stolen and the privilege that came with them was to live in a democracy welcomed back into the international community. That’s a very good deal—arguably too good. But black South Africans and progressives worldwide have good reason to love him, too. One may argue that in negotiating the transition, Mandela conceded too much or too little to vested interests, but one cannot reasonably argue that he gained nothing. For when it was time for him to step down, there was an election in which everyone could participate, and five years later another—both of which passed off peacefully, returning the African National Congress to power. In the nine years between his release and his stepping down, Mandela delivered peace, stability and democracy. Given the state of the fan and the amount of “pawpaw” he inherited, that alone is worth celebrating.   http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/nelson-mandela-history-radical http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2013/12/mandela-and-the-politics-of-forgiveness.html http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-12-06/mandela-in-his-own-words/5140554 Visit the related web page
	Sharing South Africa"s hero with the world by Mosibudi Pheeha   Dec 2013   South Africans of all colours and creeds have remembered Nelson Mandela in a day of prayers, holding him up as a symbol of freedom, forgiveness and hope for the nation and the world.   The former president and anti-apartheid hero passed away last week at the age of 95 after a year-long battle with a lung infection.   Churches, synagogues, mosques and temples were crowded as millions of people gave thanks for a man celebrated as "Father of the Rainbow Nation".   At the cavernous Regina Mundi church in Soweto, the nation"s largest Catholic Church, hundreds of mourners, young and old, gathered to pray for Mandela and the nation"s future.   Mandela"s former wife Winnie Madikizela-Mandela attended a Methodist service in Johannesburg, where president Jacob Zuma hailed the values of the country"s most beloved statesman.   "We should pray for us not to forget some of the values that Madiba stood for, that he fought for, that he sacrificed his life for," Mr Zuma told the congregation.   "When our struggle came to an end, he preached and practised reconciliation, to make those who had been fighting to forgive one another and become one nation.   "He preached and believed in peace, that we should live in peace, that we should live in unity, we should be united as a Rainbow Nation.   "He believed in caring and he cared for our nation. He believed in forgiving and forgave, even those who kept him in jail for 27 years."   Lindiwe Zulu, a senior member of the ruling African National Congress (ANC) party, told ABC News the mood in South Africa is sombre and celebratory at the same time.   "This is the man that assisted us to have reconciliation in South Africa. This is a man that took us from a very difficult situation into the current South Africa in which we live today," she said.   "We remember him for all his resilience and we remember him particularly because, despite the 27 years of incarceration, he came out being the man that managed to get us in the African National Congress - or in all the liberation movements - to think about reconciliation, to work towards a new South Africa that is democratic, non-racial and non-sexist."   Dec 2013   Sharing South Africa"s hero with the world, by Mosibudi Pheeha.   I was 10 years old when I stood amongst my classmates - black and white - and celebrated Nelson Mandela becoming the first black president of a democratic South Africa.   In 1992, my 8-year-old mind had been sheltered from the turbulent politics of our country by my parents. Whilst the reality of the state our country was in was evident in my mother"s protective nature, my siblings and I were growing up behind high walls of an all-white neighbourhood, in a house we moved into in 1990, the very year Nelson Mandela was released from prison.   I watched on screen as the young character of Sarafina was manoeuvring through the days of the Soweto uprising (1976). I was introduced to the effect that Mandela had on us as a nation, as opposed to the picture I still held in mind of his release two years prior: fist up in the air in solidarity with thousands of people around the world.   Two things happened to me that fateful afternoon when I watched that film. Firstly, I knew I wanted to become a filmmaker. I wanted to master this tool of storytelling so my people could know our truth.   Secondly, I understood. I understood whom Tata (father), as we have affectionately came to know him as, was. He was our Madiba.   Sarafina represented the collective thought of black people in the monologues she had directed at Madiba. They all dreamed and talked to him, they could not believe how long he had been away. They were desperate for answers and change. They were dying. They were crying for him and they did not know he could hear them.   The South Africa I knew in my backyard meant jumping over the wall to visit my childhood friend Suney. Her parents had no idea that when they were gone the maid would let their daughter play with the new blacks next door. (Soon they found out and moved).   The South Africa in my front yard, however, was one in which my parents feared all day for our safety and hurried home to wipe the runny eggs that were thrown at our garage door by not-so-approving neighbours.   I was too young then to understand the struggle. Our country was isolated from the rest of the world, as it had become the home for racism and racial oppression. My naďve self couldn"t grasp that a regime passed a law that imprisoned thousands of people because of their fight for equality and basic human rights.   Nelson Mandela had now become the face of the political freedom fighter. People who were blind too, and others who had assisted in the plight of the black man in South Africa, now understood the arduous journey that he had travelled.   I would later, in my teen years, be taught about the Rivonia trial.   Mandela, who was arrested in 1962, and was already serving a five-year prison sentence for inciting workers to strike, was then prosecuted with Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki, and Ahmed Kathrada amongst others. Their trial was a mechanism through which the government attempted to mute the African National Congress (ANC). They were prosecuted and subsequently found guilty.   After a worldwide protest that "intimidated" the apartheid regime, they did not impose the requested death penalty but sentenced them to life in prison, on Robben Island.   Ten years old, in 1994, I stood in the courtyard of my primary school amongst other children - black and white - and we celebrated Nelson Mandela becoming the first black president of a new democratic country.   I appreciated the opportunity that was offered to me. I had access to the best schools, best health care and a neighborhood in which no one threw eggs at my garage anymore.   Being part of the transition generation that grew up in the infant stages of a democratic South Africa came with its blows.   The laws were easier to change now and protected me as a young black child, but the mindset of people was a little harder to change.   The friends I made and have kept to this day who were encapsulated by the influence of Madiba"s immense love and ability to forgive, like me, did not see colour.   This man had led us to become a rainbow nation. Years later we, as a nation, share Madiba with the entire the world.   He believes that no single person can liberate a country and one can only liberate a country if it acts as a collective. Most of us have a little Madiba in us and the world has great hope.   Tata Madiba, whose words are penned in his autobiography - Long Walk To Freedom - has entrusted us to continue that walk:   My people, today I am free. I am free because you have not forgotten me.   http://www.nelsonmandela.org/ http://www.nelsonmandelachildrensfund.com http://www.sabc.co.za/mandela http://madiba.mg.co.za/ http://www.un.org/en/events/mandeladay/ http://allafrica.com/specials/Nelson_Mandela_Life_And_Times/ http://www.trust.org/spotlight/South-Africas-Nelson-Mandela-dies/ Visit the related web page
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