Fight For Your Freedom

       Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, (the South Africans call him Madiba, meaning “Saviour”) remains an icon of freedom around the world today because of the price he paid for his countrymen and women to be liberated from Apartheid.  For 27 grueling years, this man remained behind bars and refused to be released on conditions by the white Boars who ruled South Africa for many decades and desecrated and dehumanized the blacks.

          Mandela along with other black freedom fighters like William Nkomo, Walter Sisulu and Oliver Tambo stood their grounds until they gained freedom for their people.  During the whole of the 1950s, Mandela was the victim of various forms of repression.  He was banned, arrested and imprisoned.  For much of the latter half of the decade, he was one of the accused in the mammoth Treason Trial, at great cost to his legal practice and his political work.  After the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960, the African National Congress (ANC) with Mandela as one of the leaders was outlawed, and Mandela, still on trial, was detained.

          This man was forced to live apart from his family, moving from place to place to evade detection by the government’s ubiquitous informers and police spies.  He had to adopt a number of disguises, sometimes dressed as a common labourer, at other times as a chauffeur.

          During one of his trials, specifically in the Rivonia Trial for sabotage, Mandela’s statements in court during these trials are classics in the history of the resistance to apartheid, and they have been an inspiration to all who have opposed it.  His statement from the dock in the Rivonia Trial ends with these words:

I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination.  I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities.  It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve.  But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.

          Mandela was sentenced to life imprisonment and started his prison years in the notorious Robben Island Prison, a maximum security prison on a small island 7 kilometers off the coast of Cape Town.  In April 1984, he was transferred to Pollsmoor Prison in Cape Town and in December 1988, he was moved to the Victor Verster Prison near Paarl from where he was eventually released.  While in prison, Mandela flatly rejected offers made by his jailers for remission of sentence in exchange for accepting the Bantustan policy by recognizing the independence of the Transkei and agreeing to settle there.  Again in the 1980s, he rejected an offer of release on condition that he renounces violence.  “Prisoners cannot enter into contracts.  Only free men can negotiate”, he said.

          In a life that symbolizes the triumph of the human spirit over man’s inhumanity to man, Nelson Mandela accepted the 1993 Nobel Prize for Peace on behalf of all South Africans who suffered and sacrificed so much to bring peace to that land.

        In the next write-up, I will pick on another freedom fighter that is worthy of emulation.  Keep your fight for freedom on.  Freedom is never free!