Happy Birthday, Nelson Mandela:
7 Ways to Celebrate
by Maria PopovaWhat Apartheid has to do with Victorian poetry and using peace as a weapon of mass reconstruction.
Today, the great Nelson Mandela — one of the most exceptional living icons of our time — celebrates his 93th birthday. To mark the occasion, here are seven timeless gems that honor his life and legacy.
FIRST RECORDED INTERVIEW
In 1961, Mandela became leader of the ANC’s armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe, and coordinated sabotage campaigns against military and government targets. On 21 May that year, mere months before being arrested for sabotage and other charges and sentenced to life in prison, a 42-year-old Mandela gave his first-ever interview to ITN reporter Brian Widlake as part of a longer ITN Roving Report program about Apartheid. At that point, the police are already hunting for Mandela, but Widlake pulls some strings and arranges to meet him in his hideout. When the reporter asks Mandela what Africans want, he promptly responds:
The Africans require, want the franchise, the basis of One Man One Vote — they want political independence.”
Towards the end of the interview, Mandela tries to reconcile the difficult dynamic between peace and violence, suggesting that the full force with which the police had gone after him might have triggered this shift from nonviolent to violent protest means — violence, it seems, does only breed violence.
THE RELEASE (1990)
On 2 February 1990, President F. W. de Klerk reversed the ban anti-apartheid organisations, announcing that Mandela would shortly be released from prison. Nine days later, after 26 years in prison, Mandela reentered the free world and gave a seminal speech to the nation. The event was broadcast live all over the world, and this recording from the BBC archive is the only surviving footage of the momentous moment. Here, a deeply overwhelmed Mandela shares his first impressions of the new South Africa he had just brushed up against and revisits the complex relationship between peaceful means and armed struggle.
I have committed myself to the promotion of peace in the country. But I have done so as part and parcel of the decisions and campaign that have been taken by the ANC . . . The armed struggle is a defensive act against apartheid . . . There is not a single political organization in this country, inside and outside of Parliament, which can ever compare to ANC in its total commitment to peace.” ~ Nelson Mandela
INAUGURAL ADDRESS
On April 27, 1994, South Africa held its first multi-racial elections in which full enfranchisement was granted. The ANC won with a 62% majority, and Mandela, as leader of the organization, was inaugurated as the country’s first black President on 10 May, 1994. His inauguration address was as much a vision for South Africa’s future was it was a declaration of humanity and justice for a new global era.
Our daily deeds as ordinary South Africans must produce an actual South African reality that will reinforce humanity’s belief in justice, strengthen its confidence in the nobility of the human soul and sustain all our hopes for a glorious life for all. All this we owe both to ourselves and to the peoples of the world who are so well represented here today.” ~ Nelson Mandela
CONVERSATIONS WITH MYSELF
Released last fall, Conversations with Myself is a timecapsule of (an) extraordinary character if the world ever saw one — a remarkable anthology of materials that capture Mandela’s essence with equal parts humility and heroism. The Guardian‘s Peter Godwin eloquently called it not “so much a book as a literary album,” with its varied snippets of Mandela’s life — letters, calendars, prison diaries, vignettes of personal life, and transcripts from over 50 hours of audio recordings by TIME magazine editor Richard Stengel, who ghost-wrote Mandela’s autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. With a foreword by Barack Obama and an introduction by Verne Harris, head of the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory, the book is an absolute treasure about an absolute treasure, reminding us, as Godwin puts it, that we often see history through retrospectacles that lead us to think what happened was somehow inevitable, whereas in fact it, not unlike human character, is a series of conscious and not always easy choices.
The cell is an ideal place to learn to know yourself, to search realistically and regularly the process of your own mind and feelings.”
NEED TO KNOW: NELSON MANDELA
For the biographically inclined, this short documentary from The Biography Channel manages to cover the essential Mandela, from his birth in the small African village of Mvezo in the Thembu tribe to his early interest in political activism to his imprisonment, release and eventual rise to presidency, in just under 7 minutes.
WISDOM
Andrew Zuckerman’s fantastic Wisdom project is a longtime favorite. Driven by the insight that the greatest heritage of a generation is the wisdom gained from life’s experience, Zuckerman went wisdom-hunting among 50 of our time’s greatest thinkers and doers — writers, artists, philosophers, politicians, designers, activists, musicians, religious and business leaders — all over 65 years of age. The resulting brilliant book-and-film, Wisdom: The Greatest Gift One Generation Can Give to Another, features remarkable interviews with and portraits of icons like Nelson Mandela, Jane Goodall and Desmond Tutu, among a treasure trove of others. (Zuckerman subsequently divided the great tome into four smaller, more digestible sub-volumes, each with its own thematic DVD: Wisdom: Life, Wisdom: Love, Wisdom: Peace, and Wisdom: Ideas.)
It is what we make out of what we have, not what we are given, that separates one person from another. Peace is the greatest weapon for development that any people can have.” ~ Nelson Mandela
More on the project here.
INVICTUS
Say what you will of Hollywood, but they certainly know how to send chills down your spine. In 2009, Clint Eastwood’s Invictus, starring Matt Daemon and Morgan Freeman as Mandela, swept the awards circuit to great acclaim. Titled after the short Victorian poem of the same name, published by William Ernest Henley in 1875, the film captures Mandela’s journey and character through the events in South Africa before and during the 1995 Rugby World Cup, hosted there immediately following the dismantling of apartheid.
In the closing scene, Matt Daemon’s character visits Mandela’s prison cell as Morgan Freeman’s voiceover reads Henley’s poem, which Mandela has professed to have inspired him in prison. The vignette is nothing short of an emotional tour de force — try, if you can, to stop the goosebumps from enveloping your whole body.
(In true Hollywood fashion, the studios seem to have disabled embedding on all clips of the Freeman-narrated poem floating around on YouTube.)
Invictus is based on John Carlin’s excellent book, Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Changed a Nation.
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Happy Birthday
Nelson Mandela!
South African Icon Turns 93
There are few people in the world who can say they received millions of birthday wishes. But this morning millions of school children across South Africa sang a special Happy Birthday song in tribute of their country’s most esteemed icon.
As he turns 93 today, Nelson Mandela, affectionately called “Madiba” by South African children, has done in his years on earth, the work of many lifetimes. The leader and former President of South Africa was instrumental in the reversal of the racist Apartheid policies that once permeated that society. Mandela spent 27 in prison before becoming South Africa’s first black president and was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for his fight against racial and economic injustice. He is not only a respected figure within his country, Mandela’s influence is global in reach. Today, world leaders including President Obama and the current South African President Jacob Zuma paid their respects and sent their best to Mandela. Obama’s statement called Mandela “a beacon for the global community, and for all who work for democracy, justice and reconciliation.”
In recent years, Mandela has struggled with his health, making a surprise appearance last month to meet with First Lady Michelle Obama while she was on the South Africa leg of her trip. Today, he is expected to spend his special day quietly with his family in his home the village of Qunu, some 600 miles south of Johannesburg.
Speaking on the impact of Mandela, South Africa’s Desmond Tutu said in an interview today:
Many young black people don’t know very much about the oppression we had here in South Africa — and it only ended 20 years ago! They don’t know what Madiba [Mandela] did for our country. Maybe it’s a good thing that they don’t mull over things that are too awful to think about. But I worry that because they don’t know the past, they’ll forget the price that was paid for our freedom. Then they may not value their freedom.
Giving his thoughts on Mandela’s old age, Tutu said it weighs heavy on his heart as it does for many others:
It’s becoming increasingly clear that there will have to be a life after Madiba. People are preparing themselves, but it will devastating. That’s why some of us have been saying, “let’s prepare ourselves for the inevitable”. He has given so much of himself and has been fantastic as an icon of reconciliation and forgiveness. The best memorial to him is for us to become the kind of people he gave his life for: a free, caring and compassionate South Africa, and a South Africa that belongs to all who live in it.
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Video: Happy Birthday Nelson Mandela!!
Over a decade ago, Nelson Mandela (affectionately called “Madiba” by millions of people) appeared on stage with South African singer/songwriter, Johnny Clegg, during his live performance of “Asimbonanga.” At 4:00 mins into the video, Mandela tells the crowd: “It is music and dancing that makes me at peace with the world and at peace with myself” before he hands the microphone back to Clegg and resumes his iconic “Madiba Dance” (a dance in which he slowly throws his elbows around in a way that only Madiba can).
No matter his age, Mandela remains as timeless as the ideas of peace that he speaks. His words are no less true now than they were then – music and dancing makes us at peace with the world and with ourselves. Happy 93rd Birthday Nelson Mandela!