Ubuntu and the Emancipation of Humans Everywhere
By Horace Campbell
December 12, 2013 "Information
Clearing House -"Counterpunch"
Beijing, China.
On Thursday
December 5, 2013 the people of South Africa lost one of the
foremost freedom fighters and revolutionary who made his mark on
humans everywhere. Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela was born in South
Africa in 1918 and matured as Africans in South Africa rose to
the challenges posed by the most brutal social and economic
system of that moment, the system called apartheid. Mandela has
now joined the ancestors and he has left his mark beside those
great humans (such as Mahatmas Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr,
Rosa Parks, Umm Kulthum, Che Guevara and Rosa Luxemburg) whose
greatness emerged from the movements that created them. The
forms of struggle that emerged from South Africa inspired the
refinement of the philosophy of Ubuntu. This is a philosophy
that says one’s humanity is being enriched by another’s and that
as humans we are linked to a wider universe and spiritual world.
Mandela had said clearly of Ubuntu, “The spirit of Ubuntu – that
profound Africa sense that we are human beings only through the
humanity of other human beings – is not a parochial phenomenon,
but has added globally to our common search for a better world.”
The philosophy of
Ubuntu challenged the ideals of individualism, greed, unhealthy
competition, obscene self-enrichment and those destructive forms
of human association that have brought the planet to the brink
of extinction. When the movement elevated Nelson Mandela to the
position as President of a politically free South Africa in
1994, after 27 years of incarceration, the political leadership
of South Africa sought to give practical meaning to the
philosophy of Ubuntu by establishing a Truth and Reconciliation
Commission (TRC). In all parts of the world, the international
media remember Mandela and his contributions to peace and
reconciliation but the same corporate media seeks to confuse the
youth by marketing Mandela as an unusual individual who
performed the ‘miracle’ of ending apartheid. In the process of
the wall to wall media coverage of the celebration of the life
of Nelson Mandela, it is important that the voice of Africa is
clear on the meaning of Mandela. Mandela was against racism and
the dehumanizing social system that created hierarchies.
As peace activists
it is vital that we remember Mandela as a defender of peace and
social justice and the fact that he was an extraordinary human
being. What is important to remember is a product of a social
movement; the extraordinary circumstances of the oppression of
apartheid created this Mandela. Mandela joined a social
movement, the anti-apartheid movement and for a moment in
history, he became the symbol of the struggle against war and
apartheid. His freedom came from the sacrifices of millions,
especially the youth of Soweto and the workers from the Mass
Democratic Movement who laid down a marker for the new tactics
of revolution. While he was the President of South Africa,
Mandela worked for peace in Burundi and Central Africa and
worked hard to end the western manipulation of who can be
branded as a terrorist.
Those who branded
Mandela as a terrorist are seeking to program the minds of the
youth to see Mandela as some sort of visionary leader “dropped
from heaven” without links to real struggles for peace. Mandela
was very clear that his life was linked to the collective
struggles of humans everywhere, and when he was released in
February 1990 he said, “Amandla, Amandla … I greet you all in
the name of peace, democracy and freedom for all. I stand here
before you not as a prophet but as a humble servant of you, the
people.”
This media coverage
of Nelson Mandela challenges contemporary freedom fighters to
contemplate new tactics, new tools of struggles and new networks
for peace in order to complete the tasks of ending global
apartheid. The African National Congress in government had been
trapped by its inheritance of the social capital of the
apartheid state. New forms of organization and new ideas will be
needed as humans gird themselves to fight against the nefarious
forms of racism, exclusion and oppression that have been refined
by global capital as unbridled capitalism seeks to turn our
youths into mindless consumers. It is up to the youth to gird
themselves for the new phase of internationalism and peace
activism so that we can create the conditions for the
inspiration presented by the life of Nelson Mandela to be
grasped in all corners of the globe. Mandela lived a full life
and we want to add to the tributes as we celebrate his life of
struggle.
The society that
created Nelson Mandela
As soon as it
became clear that the most obscene forms of white supremacy
could not survive after the massive resistance of peoples in all
parts of the globe, international news programmers began to
present Nelson Mandela who, as a visionary leader, single
handedly ended apartheid. Books, films, documentaries, blogs and
other mainstream media seek to present the changes in South
Africa without reference to the reality that Nelson Mandela
always represented a liberation movement. Inevitably, as the
movement mobilized around the release of Nelson Mandela when he
had been incarcerated for 27 years, Mandela became a symbol of
the anti-apartheid struggle. As the struggle matured in the
final phase after his release from jail on February 11, 1990 the
myth making was developed as part of an election campaign. It is
this mythmaking that ensured the positive and the negative in
the representation of Nelson Mandela to a generation that was
not yet born when the liberation struggles were at the peak.
When Mandela was
born in the village of Qunu, in the province that was called
Cape Province, the Union of South Africa had been formed eight
years earlier. The Union government had celebrated the crushing
of the Bambata rebellions and in the face of the failure of open
military rebellions by regional military forces, the African
National Congress had been formed in 1912. Mandela grew up in
South Africa in the turbulent period of the 1930’s capitalist
depression. It was in the midst of this depression when the
capitalists of South Africa refined the repression of black mine
workers and inculcated in white workers the idea that they
(whites) were not workers but from a superior race. With the
villages of South Africa and the wider region of Southern Africa
providing cheap labour for the mines, mining capital reaped
super profits at a moment when the instability in the
international monetary system required a steady supply of gold
from South Africa.
The royal families
of the pre –Union society could not escape the effects of the
deformities of segregation and dehumanization. Missionaries were
deployed to teach sons of chiefs and it was from one of the
missionaries that Mandela received the name Nelson because the
missionaries had difficulties saying Rolihlahla. After this
missionary education Mandela was sent to Fort Hare University
and it was in this University where the other famous
anti-apartheid and anti-colonial stalwarts were groomed. Z. K.
Matthews, Govan Mbeki, Oliver Tambo, Joshua Nkomo, Walter
Sisulu, Robert Sobukwe, Desmond Tutu and Robert Mugabe were some
of the notable students in the forties at this University. As an
activist he was expelled from Fort Hare and he went on to study
Law at the University of Witwatersrand.
Nelson Mandela
joined the African National Congress (ANC) in 1942 and in 1944,
along with Walter Sisulu, Robert Sobukwe, and Oliver Tambo, they
formed the Youth wing of the ANC. This youth wing joined the
hundreds of anti-colonial movements all over the world and when
the repressive legal structures of apartheid were formalised to
support the social divisions, the peoples responded with a
Freedom Charter. The Sharpeville massacres of March 21, 1960
foreclosed all possibilities of a peaceful non –violent
opposition to apartheid and in 1962 Mandela was dispatched to
the independent states of Africa to gain support for the armed
wing of the ANC, Umkhonto we Sizwe (abbreviated as MK,
translated as “Spear of the Nation). Mandela was one of the
co-founders of MK and he received training in many African
countries before he returned to South Africa. Mandela
participated in the debates about unity and struggle that were
at that time raging in the Pan African Freedom Movement for East
and Central Africa (PAFMECA).
Self
Organization of the Youth of Soweto
South West
Johannesburg (Soweto) was one of those dormitory towns that were
a reservoir of cheap labour for the rich and middle class whites
in the suburbs of Johannesburg. Mandela was arrested in 1962 for
planning “sabotage” of the government and was branded a
terrorist by the South African state. The US military and
intelligence agencies worked hand in glove with the apartheid
military to crush opposition from the African majority. From
1973 the workers of Durban had given notice that there would be
new organizational forms to oppose apartheid and the youth of
Soweto followed with the massive uprisings of 1976. These
rebellions are central to the kind of politics that developed in
the period when Mandela was incarcerated after the Rivonia
trials in 1964.
The sacrifices of
the youth and their determination had created new alliances and
these alliances matured in the Mass Democratic Movement and the
United Democratic Front (UDF). While Nelson Mandela as a lawyer
had been groomed to focus on the legal questions of the
apartheid laws, the social questions of health, education,
housing, police brutality placed the fight against apartheid on
a new terrain as the ANC worked to remain alive in the heat of
the conservative push of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.
The formation of the UDF had provided for an alternative source
of political power at the grassroots and strengthened the
capacity of the resistance to transform their conception of the
long term struggles to create an alternative to the social
system.
Forward planers for
the investors in the Johannesburg Stock Exchange were
sufficiently alarmed when the rebellions of the youth rendered
South Africa ungovernable and apartheid unworkable. After the
killing of Steve Biko, the planners sought out the brightest
from among these rebellious youth to send them to be trained as
future leaders in North American and European Universities.
Those educated in the schools of the West became the experts
after return to South Africa to be at the forefront of the
negotiations for the form of society to be built after
apartheid. Free Mandela Committees were an integral of the
global antiapartheid struggles. In response to these local,
regional and international alliances to end apartheid the South
African Defence forces (SADF) spread death and destruction in
the townships and across the region of Southern Africa. The
terrorism of apartheid along with the killing of more than 2
million in the neighboring states did not break the will of the
people. If anything, international solidarity intensified with
the support of the Cubans assisting the Angolans to fight the
apartheid army at Cuito Cuanavale.
The importance
of Cuito Cuanavale
One of the many
tasks of western propaganda organs has been to downplay the
sacrifices of the peoples of the region of Southern Africa for
the independence of Namibia 1990, the release of Nelson Mandela,
and the negotiations to end apartheid. The epic battles at Cuito
Cuanavale between October 1987 and June 1988 changed the history
of Africa. The SADF had invaded Angola with the plan to impose
Jonas Savimbi in Luanda and to defeat the freedom fighters from
Namibia of the South West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO).
The apartheid army became bogged down at the crossroads of two
rivers in Southern Angola. In order to intimidate the peoples of
Africa the SADF had manufactured tactical nuclear weapons with
the assistance of the Israeli state. When the South African army
became bogged down the President of South Africa, P.W.Botha flew
to the frontlines of the battles in Angola to broker a debate
between the generals on whether South Africa should deploy and
use its nuclear capabilities.
The international
isolation of the white racist regime meant that there was no
sympathy for this option, even from the conservative Reagan
Administration. The racist army had to fight against a confident
Angolan military with Cuban reinforcements. After nine months
fighting the SADF was roundly defeated with the remnants of the
SADF retreating on foot to Northern Namibia. In order to rescue
the SADF so that the military would not be routed as the French
army was routed at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, in stepped the US
Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, Chester
Crocker to broker the decent withdrawal of the SADF from
Namibia. This battle was episodic and Fidel Castro rightly
asserted that the History of Africa will be written as that of
before Cuito Cuanavale and after Cuito Cuanavale.
Nelson Mandela
and the South African struggles after Cuito Cuanavale
Nelson Mandela’s
walk of Freedom out of incarceration in 1990 had represented a
major step in the peoples of the world for a new system after
apartheid. However, those who owned the banks, the mines, the
insurance companies and the land were planning for a
post-apartheid society where the capital remained in the hands
of the white minority along with new black allies. International
capital had grasped the full implications of black partners in
societies such as Kenya, Zimbabwe, Cameroons, Algeria and
Nigeria. Hence even while the negotiations were on going for the
New Society in The Convention for a Democratic South Africa
(CODESA,) the more far sighted elements such as the Oppenheimer
family of Anglo-American Corporation worked to support those
within the movement that believed that the end of Apartheid was
for the development of a class of black entrepreneurs under
Black Economic Empowerment (BEE). The nature of the inequalities
in South Africa today demonstrates the success of the plan to
create black allies. Cyril Ramaphosa is the poster child of a
militant trade union leader of the anti-apartheid era who became
a mining magnate after apartheid, exploiting the very workers he
had vowed to defend. The image of Cyril Ramaphosa who had
escorted Nelson Mandela out of Prison in 1990 operating and
multibillionaires was one sign of the class formation in South
Africa. In 2012, the political leaders of the ANC oversaw a
government that shot 34 Marikana workers who were striking for
better conditions at the Platinum Mines in South Africa. It was
a proper clarification of the politics of transformation when
Ramaphosa, a multibillionaire, emerged as the spokesperson for
the owners of the Platinum Mines in rejecting the demands of the
workers for better working conditions and better wages. The ANC
and its tripartite alliance of the Communist Party, the Congress
of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) had fashioned a
theoretical basis for the enrichment of a few by arguing that
before South Africa could enter the phase of transformation
beyond capitalism there had to be the development of the
productive forces. Nelson Mandela was caught in 1994 in the
midst of the alliance and within five years sought to extricate
himself by stepping down as President of South Africa in 1999
after one term.
Ubuntu in
practice, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC)
One of the sterling
contributions of the South African struggle was to be able to
clarify the differences between restorative justice and
retributive justice, based on Ubuntu. In fact, Mandela not only
embraced Ubuntu, under his political leadership, there was an
attempt to bring the ideas of Ubuntu from its philosophical
level to the level of practical politics in ways that helped
avert bloodbath to form a better society, however imperfect. And
this was in part done through the establishment of a Truth and
Reconciliation Commission.
In the three years
after the release of Mandela, the international media was
predicting a bloodbath in South Africa if Blacks were to emerge
victorious from the first democratic elections in 1994. Those
with strategic control over the means of violence sought to make
this bloodbath a reality right up to the moment when Mandela was
inaugurated in May 1994 as the first Black President of a
Democratic South Africa. One year after Mandela became
President, the Parliament of South Africa established the
Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act, No. 34 of
1995. This became the legal framework for the establishment of
the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Mandela threw his
international weight behind the process of Reconciliation. While
the TRC was holding sessions under the Chairperson Desmond Tutu,
Mandela made a number of public gestures to demonstrate the fact
that he supported full reconciliation between the oppressed
blacks and the oppressors. Of the two most public of these
gestures were the visit to have tea with Mrs Betsie Verwoerd at
Oriana in 1995 and donning the jersey of the segregated South
African rugby team in the World Cup in South Africa.
Mrs Verwoerd, the
widow of the architect of the most brutal apartheid structures
had retreated to the town of Orania in the Cape seeking to
establish an all-white town because the whites could not live
under a black political leadership. The extreme Afrikaners
around Mrs Verwoerd had chosen the small community to set up a
laager and the whites in the town did not want any black around,
not even black servants. These whites did not recognize Mandela
as the legitimate President of a Free South Africa. Mandela took
the bold step of travelling to this all white town of Orania to
demonstrate to Mrs Verwoerd that the new South Africa was based
on forgiveness and willingness to share, core principles of
Ubuntu. This gesture was relayed all over the world by the local
and international media as Mandela sat down to have tea with the
people who were responsible for arresting and incarcerating him.
Two months earlier Mandela had orchestrated another public act
by going to the Rugby World Cup Match and putting on the jersey
of the South African team. Sporting activities had been one of
the strongest bases for segregation in the society and in all
areas of sporting activity Mandela inspired South Africa to rise
above the structural violence that had become part and parcel of
South Africa.
At the legal level,
South Africa’s post-apartheid constitution is one of the most
progressive in the world, and it draws on Ubuntu to enshrine
equal constitutional rights for all – black, white, colored,
women, youths, elderly people and same-gender-loving persons.
This effort at
Reconciliation at the legal level and at the public level went
side by side as the TRC started hearings in Cape Town in 1996.
The mandate of the commission had been to bear witness to,
record and in some cases grant amnesty to the perpetrators of
crimes relating to human rights violations, as well as
reparation and rehabilitation. Witnesses who were identified as
victims of gross human rights violations were invited to give
statements about their experiences, and some were selected for
public hearings. Perpetrators of violence could also give
testimony and request amnesty from both civil and criminal
prosecution. Witnesses who were identified as victims of gross
human rights violations were invited to give statements about
their experiences, and some were selected for public hearings.
Perpetrators of violence could also give testimony and request
amnesty from both civil and criminal prosecution.
A new politics was
being developed in the context of seeking restorative justice
beyond the Nuremberg Model of winners’ court. The Healing power
of the process was manifest in the rituals that emanated from
victims and oppressors, creating a space that could be the basis
of holding the society together. This ritual of the TRC with the
spiritual underpinnings of forgiveness and healing was a
powerful antidote to the three hundred years of white racist
oppression. Malidoma Some had written a book on the Healing
Wisdom of Africa: Finding Life Purpose Through Nature, Ritual,
and Community. It was in the TRC where one saw some of the
ideas being worked out. During the Hearings of the TRC there
were public hearings as the narratives of perpetrators and
victims moved in a constant motion across time (from present to
past and present to future) and space (spiritual, social,
physical, emotional) in a movement that may be called recursive.
Here was a profound
moment in the history of South Africa as the African people
offered a crucible for healing the society. Nelson Mandela and
Desmond Tutu will go down in history as individuals who opened
up the possibilities for another form of society. This healing
process offered by the TRC, despite its imperfections, placed
Ubuntu on the philosophical map breaking the ideation baggage of
individualism, greed, competition and revenge.
If the Black people
and the oppressed majority were willing to turn a corner,
international capital was not. Plans for the Reconstruction and
transformation of South Africa were shelved in the face of the
timidity of the political leadership in calling for the
cancellation of the apartheid incurred debt. The repercussions
of managing the neo-liberal programe of international capital
cut off the top leadership of the ANC from the rank and file.
Questions of the social reconstruction after apartheid had to be
shelved until new emancipatory formations arise in South Africa.
International capita took the lessons of South Africa to heart
and sought to promote a neo-liberal agenda where a small
minority collaborated with international capital in the new
template for the exploitation of the majority. This form of
class rule came to be understood as the globalization of
apartheid without its racial baggage.
Mandela and
Ubuntu overseas
Mandela was opposed
to the Western designation of states as sponsoring terrorism and
openly supported Fidel Castro of Cuba, Yasser Arafat of the
Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) the Saharwi Arab
Democratic Republic and the political leadership in Libya. As
one who had been placed on the US list of international
terrorist, Mandela in 1992 had made a clear statement about the
standoff between Libya and the West over the downing of the 1998
Pan American Airways flight 103. This plane had exploded over
Lockerbie Scotland and the West accused two Libyans of planting
the bomb. This is despite the fact that at the precise moment of
the bomb, western media had blamed Iran for planting the bomb.
In 1998 Mandela
travelled to Libya three times within one week to mediate
between the British government and the Libyan authorities. After
travelling back and forth between the western leaders and
Muammar Gaddafi the head of the Libyan state, Mandela struck a
deal where Gaddafi handed over the two suspects in return for
the lifting of international sanctions against Libya. Gaddafi
accepted the offer of Nelson Mandela and offered to pay US $2.7
billion , approximately $10 million for each of the victim’s
families. Gaddafi went further to open up his economy to western
oil companies and in 2004 dumped his plans for the acquisition
of Chemical and Biological weapons. Despite this opening and the
intense investments of the West, International capital was not
satisfied and in 2011 orchestrated the invasion, bombing and
destruction of Libya under the banner of Responsibility to
Protect. Gaddafi was executed and humiliated as the West sought
to roll back all ideas of African Unification and Liberation.
Mandela as a
Peace maker
After Nelson
Mandela was rid of the responsibility of managing the structures
of the apartheid economy, he became even more outspoken against
inequalities. He was assertive on the question of the need for
health for all and the provision of retroviral medicine for
those affected by HIV AIDS even while other leaders of the ANC
were equivocal over the response of the government of South
Africa to this pandemic. Outside of South Africa Mandela shamed
the leaders of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) who had
stood by while the fastest genocide unfolded in Rwanda in 1994.
After the passing of Julius Nyerere in 1999, Nelson Mandela
engaged the peace process in Burundi and threw his considerable
international stature behind a tough process of negotiations to
end the decades of warfare in Burundi.
Mandela was opposed
to the deployment of US military personnel in Africa and he
spoke out firmly against the Africa Crisis Response Initiative
(ACRI), the forerunner to the current Africa Command. When
George W. Bush started his buildup for the war against the
peoples of Iraq Mandela offered himself up as a peace maker to
be a human shield against US bombs. In an interview with
Newsweek Magazine in 2002 prior to the invasion, Mandela called
the USA a threat to the peace of the world.
“If you look at
those matters, you will come to the conclusion that the attitude
of the United States of America is a threat to world peace.
Because what [America] is saying is that if you are afraid of a
veto in the Security Council, you can go outside and take action
and violate the sovereignty of other countries. That is the
message they are sending to the world. That must be condemned in
the strongest terms.” As a peace activist, Mandela took issues
personal with George Bush over the decision to invade Iraq.
Addressing the International Women’s Forum in Johannesburg in
2003, a visibly furious Mandela stated unequivocally: “What I am
condemning is that one power, with a president [George Bush] who
has no foresight, who cannot think properly, is now wanting to
plunge the world into a holocaust. … If there is a country that
has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the
United States of America. They don’t care.”
The legacies of
Nelson Mandela
The differing
legacies of the political leadership of Nelson Mandela were on
full display at the massive memorial event held in Soweto on
December 10, 2013. There the mass of people expressed themselves
in the admiration and warmth of Nelson Mandela and at the same
time expressing their opposition to the corruption of the top
leadership of the ANC. The people booed the current leader of
the ANC, Jacob Zuma, every time his face appeared on the giant
TV screens in the stadium. Mandela had always remarked that he
was a disciplined member of the ANC and his membership of the
organization pointed to the differences between the promises of
the anti-apartheid struggles and the realities of the enrichment
of a new class of African exploiters. It was appropriate that
this celebration of the life of Mandela marked a new stage for
the corrupt leadership of the ANC.
In the period of
the anti-apartheid struggles, funeral ceremonies were occasions
for mass mobilization and education The entire proceedings
played out before over 90 heads of states and governments
reflected the new relationship between the ANC and the mass of
the poor. Despite the fact that this occasion represented a
huge logistical challenge, one could negatively compare the
planning of the leadership on this occasion with the World Cup
in 2010. Hence, for one of the most important public events in
the history of South Arica, for most of the time the stadium was
half empty. The ANC did not provide transportation to the
stadium as promised. The poor travelled from near and far by
train only to find that there were no buses to take them up to
the stadium. Even those who braved the downpour of rain to
make it to the stadium was not allowed to celebrate the way
South Africans are used to celebrate at such events. Instead
they were expected to sit and listen like little children. At
such events people would sing and dance. In fact, before each
speaker someone would raise a song and people would follow and
sing until the speaker was ready to speak. Even Zuma would start
a song and dance before he spoke. Jacob Zuma, the leadership
and Cyril Ramaphosa wanted the people to forget the kind of mass
mobilization that was engineered to end apartheid. They are
afraid that this mass mobilization will sweep the billionaires
from power.
The political
leadership of Nelson Mandela in the anti-apartheid struggle had
both focused attention on him as an individual and released the
energies of various groups whose task was to clarify the details
of the real meaning of transformation beyond apartheid. In this
and in many other ways, Nelson Mandela symbolized the dialectic
of resistance and transformation. His own life has mirrored the
way in which a social movement shaped individuals. Hence, the
youth who are hearing the tributes to Mandela are faced with the
contradiction between focusing on great leaders and the kind of
media coverage that is geared towards the depoliticizaion of the
youth. Richard Falk summed up very lucidly the place of Mandela
for humans everywhere when he wrote,
“It was above all
Mandela’s spiritual presence that created such a strong
impression of moral radiance on the part of all of us fortunate
enough to be in the room. I was reinforced in my guiding belief
that political greatness presupposes a spiritual orientation
toward the meaning of life, not necessarily expressed by way of
a formal religious commitment, but always implies living with an
unconditional dedication to values and faith that transcend the
practical, the immediate, and the material.”
In his earthly
life, Mandela could not escape this tension between the
spiritual and the material. The spiritual energies of the
peoples had been unleashed to fashion a non-racial democracy.
Liberal conception of democracy could not understand this
attempt to transcend the ideas of the Western Enlightenment,
which itself built on human hierarchies that carved a supreme
space for the enlightened white man. Nelson Mandela had been
reared in these ideas at Fort Hare and as a lawyer but the
struggles elevated him to be special human beings among
revolutionaries. The world salutes Nelson Mandela and we join
with those who are sending tributes to his family.
We will also add
that the people should not mourn but organize for the next round
of struggle.
Horace G .Campbell,
a veteran Pan Africanist, is a Visiting Professor in the School
of International Relations, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. He is
the author of Global
NATO and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya, Monthly Review
Press, 2013.
Way to go Horace!!!!
