It seems that everyone had something good to say about Mandela, the day that his light finally went out. Everyone admires, respects, venerates the man. It’s easy to forget that it wasn’t always this way.
There was a time when you would not have found politicians of all stripes queuing up to contribute their eulogies. There was a time when the evil, brutal apartheid system had its defenders outside of the extreme fringes of white suprematism. There was a time when some world leaders saw white South Africa as a bastion against Marxism, and opposed sanctions aimed at undermining the apartheid regime. There was a time when the public schoolboys in the FCS produced t-shirts saying Hang Nelson Mandela. (Some of them are in government today, paying their respects, and hoping that those past statements and actions don’t surface.)
There was a time when it seemed hopeless, impossible that South Africa could ever be a place where the black majority and the white minority could live together, without bloodshed. For all the problems it has today, there are generations who are and will be born free, and for that Mandela must be thanked, because he was probably the one man who de Klerk could deal with, a man forged by his long imprisonment, who had mastered his anger and bitterness and who was prepared to risk the accusations that he had ‘sold out’ in order to win freedom for his people.
For all the reasons to despair – and there are many – we have to recall how far we’ve come, in my lifetime. I would not have believed, in my twenties, anyone who told me that, before I reached old age, we would have a black President in a democratic South Africa, where there had been no bloody civil war. That there would be a black President in the White House. That the Berlin Wall would have fallen. That gay men and women would be free to marry, in so many parts of the world and, soon, here. These things haven’t come about through violent revolution but through the Mandelas of the world, some well known but many quite anonymous, against the odds, in the face of the haters and the threats, insisting on justice. As Richard Stengel’s Time tribute to Mandela says:
deep in his bones was a basic sense of fairness: he simply could not abide injustice. If he, Nelson Mandela, the son of a chief, tall, handsome and educated, could be treated as subhuman, then what about the millions who had nothing like his advantages? “That is not right,” he would sometimes say to me about something as mundane as a plane flight’s being canceled or as large as a world leader’s policies, but that simple phrase — that is not right — underlay everything he did, everything he sacrificed for and everything he accomplished.
http://world.time.com/2013/12/05/nelson-mandela-1918-2013-remembering-an-icon-of-freedom/
Passing Time 
#1 by nickycrewe on December 7, 2013 - 9:43 am
Great post – thank you. I too have a long memory.
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