by C. Fraser Smith
Dolan Media Newswires
BALTIMORE, MD -- When he was a congressman, traveling to South Africa on various missions, Kweisi Mfume occasionally met with Nelson Mandela.
Every time they talked, Mfume says, Mandela delivered an impassioned lecture on the civil rights movement in the U.S.
“You think what Martin Luther King did was uplifting for your people,” Mandela said, or words to that effect. “Of course, it was, but it was so much more than that. People in my country and in many other countries saw Dr. King and the movement as an example of what they could achieve.”
Here was the now famously magnanimous Mandela giving credit to another great fighter against racism and repression.
After Mandela’s death last week at the age of 95, after so many stories hailing his capabilities as a negotiator, one marvels at the origin of such strength and ability. Where does that confidence, that wisdom, that patience come from?
Mandela seemed to be saying King inspired him just as Gandhi’s life and adherence to non-violence had inspired King. The arc of history, King said, bends toward justice. Not without leaders, though, not without leaders Mandela and King, Gandhi and Lincoln.
Some of the lessons in Mandela’s life seem sublimely simple: He never conceded greater humanity to anyone, white or black. Even at the remove of continents, the power of his faith and conviction resonated.
He had no time for hate, he told The New York Times. Hate clouds the mind. He wanted to hear the collective wisdom of his many constituencies.
Of course, when the oppressor was murderously determined to subjugate, more active resistance was needed. Mandela prepared at one point in his life to combat apartheid with force. The U.S. put his name on a terrorist watch list. One man’s terrorist, as they say, is another’s freedom fighter.
In 1964, facing death by hanging, Mandela told a South African judge: “I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons will live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. … But, my lord, if it needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”
Both men may have been comforted in King’s belief that history’s arc bends toward justice. Nevertheless, King knew he might not make it to the mountaintop. He moved forward, as did Mandela.
In the deep slough of violent repression, South African authorities made it a crime to have a photograph of Mandela in your home. They knew the power inherent in his image. At one point, a white South African musician wrote a song claiming to have such a picture, confronting the ban.
That law and so many others fell away as Mandela was freed.
Several days after his death, mourners around the world held candlelight vigils featuring pictures of the leader with his reassuring fatherly or grandfatherly smile.
In the late 1980s, I stepped away from the opportunity to report for The Sun in South Africa. I had gotten a contract for a book about Len Bias, the University of Maryland basketball player who died of a cocaine overdose. My book was about more than basketball. It was about the mistreatment of young black men like Bias, recruited by U.S. universities to fill stadiums in exchange for an education they would never have time to acquire. Chronicles of injustice, sadly, can be written anywhere.
I’m not unhappy with my decision to finish the Bias book. But I would have felt privileged to watch the triumphant conclusion of Mandela’s long walk.
His legacy lies in his gift of freedom to the country he loved — and, as he said of King’s, to the world.
C. Fraser Smith is senior news analyst at WYPR-FM. His column appears Fridays in the Daily Record. His email address is fsmith@wypr.org.
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