When They Go Low, We Go High

by Philip Collins

  And so we have to labour and to work, and work hard, to give reality to our dreams. Those dreams are for India, but they are also for the world, for all the nations and peoples are too closely knit together today for any one of them to imagine that it can live apart. Peace has been said to be indivisible; so is freedom, so is prosperity now, and so also is disaster in this one world that can no longer be split into isolated fragments. To the people of India, whose representatives we are, we make an appeal to join us with faith and confidence in this great adventure. This is no time for petty and destructive criticism, no time for ill will or blaming others. We have to build the noble mansion of free India where all her children may dwell. The appointed day has come – the day appointed by destiny – and India stands forth again, after long slumber and struggle, awake, vital, free and independent. The past clings on to us still in some measure and we have to do much before we redeem the pledges we have so often taken. Yet the turning point is past, and history begins anew for us, the history which we shall live and act and others will write about. It is a fateful moment for us in India, for all Asia and for the world. A new star rises, the star of freedom in the east, a new hope comes into being, a vision long cherished materialises. May the star never set and that hope never be betrayed!

  The process of persuading the various maharajahs and regional princes to sign up to the new independent entity ‘India’ had been fraught. The settlement was precarious. The very idea of ‘India’ as a unitary body was still a novelty. Nehru approached the task of defining the nation by placing it in a global context. The story of India is written into the world, which is depending on us. Again, he glosses over the contradiction of destiny. A fate that is ordained cannot be betrayed.

  It cannot be stressed enough what a difficult task Nehru has in this speech and just how much scepticism there was that the nation could endure. But this is the first intimation of the remarkable way in which democracy itself becomes the unifying element of Indian society. India had long been a land but never a nation. It was and is split across many of the dimensions which are usually required to foster coherent nationhood. By religion and language it was many-sided.

  Consciously and in defiance of all expectations, Nehru launched the process of constructing the idea of democracy as the very thing that bound Indians of all regions and all creeds. Seventy years later it is hard but important to recall how audacious that claim was at the time. There are many people who would deny it still. Nehru says that the star of democracy has risen in the East. There is a strong school of thought that democracy is an intrinsically Western idea. India is a standing rebuke to this cultural pessimism, and Nehru the first disciple of optimism.

  We rejoice in that freedom, even though clouds surround us, and many of our people are sorrow-stricken and difficult problems encompass us. But freedom brings responsibilities and burdens and we have to face them in the spirit of a free and disciplined people. On this day our first thoughts go to the architect of this freedom, the father of our nation, who, embodying the old spirit of India, held aloft the torch of freedom and lighted up the darkness that surrounded us. We have often been unworthy followers of his and have strayed from his message, but not only we but succeeding generations will remember this message and bear the imprint in their hearts of this great son of India, magnificent in his faith and strength and courage and humility. We shall never allow that torch of freedom to be blown out, however high the wind or stormy the tempest.

  This is Nehru’s acknowledgment of his split with Gandhi, which was both stylistic and intellectual. Nehru erects a bridge between his own beliefs and Gandhi’s by describing them both, rather flatly, as lovers of freedom. As long as the torch is alight then Gandhi’s legacy is preserved. This is studiedly vague.

  Gandhi was not in the chamber. He was in Calcutta trying to quell the riots. Gandhi had suggested that a Muslim be appointed the ruler of an undivided India, something Nehru regarded as an unrealistic proposition. This was the culmination of a rupture that had been a long time in the making. It was a split about method rather than about objective. Nehru was, in the end, a conventional politician, albeit a highly gifted one. This is the kind of artful rhetoric that Gandhi, a purer thinker, would not have countenanced.

  The distance between the two was symbolised by a dispute over how the president of the Indian republic should live. Gandhi wanted a frugal lifestyle but Nehru preferred to retain the imperial style. Releasing a people from the shackles of imperial domination needed the doctrinal purity and idealistic commitment of Gandhi, but the next stage, the piecemeal change of democratic politics, called for different skills. To that extent, the rift between Gandhi and Nehru is really a description of different stages of democratic development. India was lucky to have them both, the prophet of liberation and the analyst of politics. The new nation needed them both. All nations do.

  Our next thoughts must be of the unknown volunteers and soldiers of freedom who, without praise or reward, have served India even unto death. We think also of our brothers and sisters who have been cut off from us by political boundaries and who unhappily cannot share at present in the freedom that has come. They are of us and will remain of us whatever may happen, and we shall be sharers in their good and ill fortune alike. The future beckons to us. Whither do we go and what shall be our endeavour? To bring freedom and opportunity to the common man, to the peasants and workers of India; to fight and end poverty and ignorance and disease; to build up a prosperous, democratic and progressive nation, and to create social, economic and political institutions which will ensure justice and fullness of life to every man and woman.

  Partition was a brutal tragedy. It caused 15 million people to leave their homes, the largest migration in human history. In total one million people died. It is true that the transfer of power from Britain to India was, in comparative historical terms, peaceful, but we should spare the congratulations. While Gandhi ‘celebrated’ the tragedy of partition by fasting in Calcutta, the Punjab erupted into flames. The fatal flaw of the whole enterprise was that there were no borders. Cyril Radcliffe, who had never before been to Asia, had arrived in India only thirty-six days before the date of the partition. He finished drawing the map on 9 August, but the viceroy insisted that the details stay secret. Two days later the boundaries were announced. They became the focus of four wars and seven decades of animosity between India and Pakistan. For many millions on the subcontinent today, all the promise that came with independence remains unfulfilled. These words, on the lack of social justice in India, a country with so many malnourished children, would still read like a hope for the future seventy years after they were written.

  We have hard work ahead. There is no resting for any one of us till we redeem our pledge in full, till we make all the people of India what destiny intended them to be. We are citizens of a great country, on the verge of bold advance, and we have to live up to that high standard. All of us, to whatever religion we may belong, are equally the children of India with equal rights, privileges and obligations. We cannot encourage communalism or narrow-mindedness, for no nation can be great whose people are narrow in thought or in action. To the nations and peoples of the world we send greetings and pledge ourselves to cooperate with them in furthering peace, freedom and democracy. And to India, our much-loved motherland, the ancient, the eternal and the ever-new, we pay our reverent homage and we bind ourselves afresh to her service. Jai Hind [Victory to India].

  Destiny makes its final appearance, this time in individual form. Destiny has designs on every Indian and its objective is to make them free. This is a gesture towards an overtly religious idiom, in a devotional country, from a secular man. The peroration befits the moment. It is grand and momentous, as well it might be. The style has two functions. It is grand to meet the moment and it is grand to unite the nation. This speech is the beginning of the post-colonial world and the founding document of Indian democracy. The tryst with destiny is a far more famous document than the Indian con
stitution itself. It names Indian democracy in a spirit of optimism which, against so many predictions of doom, thrives today in a diverse land of more than one billion people.

  This was a fitting soundtrack to an extraordinary day on which at midnight, after 163 years of British rule, India set out on an adventure. Outside the Assembly, Delhi rang to the sound of guns, temple bells and fireworks. The rejoicing in the streets included the burning of an effigy of imperialism. In Bombay, the sirens of hundreds of mills and factories, the whistling of railway engines and hooting from ships ushered in independence at midnight. There was, indeed, a mountain of hard work ahead, and it is not done yet, but Nehru’s words defined the possibility of the nation that India is in the constant process of becoming.

  NELSON MANDELA

  An Ideal for Which I Am Prepared to Die

  Supreme Court of South Africa, Pretoria

  20 April 1964

  Nelson Mandela (1918–2013) became, for a generation of people, within South Africa and far beyond, the captain of their soul. There is a case for suggesting that Mandela’s incarceration was a blessing for his political reputation. Deprived of the capacity to speak and make public errors, Mandela emerged from a quarter of a century in prison as a candidate for sainthood, which his subsequent grace justified.

  Mandela’s magnanimous and generous response to the loss of twenty-seven years of his life to imprisonment helped keep the fissiparous nation of South Africa together. Mandela’s essentially peaceful revolution elevated him to the presidency of his nation, which he served between 1994 and 1999. When Mandela died in 2013 his death shook the world like that of no politician since John F. Kennedy.

  Nelson Mandela was born in Mvezo, near Umata, in the native reserve of the Transkei in the Eastern Cape, into the royal house of the Thembu people, though his father’s branch did not stand in the line of succession of the Xhosa tribe and it was not a luxurious childhood. ‘Apart from life, a strong constitution and an abiding connection to the Thembu royal house, the only thing my father bestowed upon me at birth was a name,’ he recalled in his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom.

  Mandela was the first member of his family to go to school, and it was one of his teachers who gave him the name Nelson. On the death of his father, the nine-year-old Nelson was entrusted to the care of the Thembu regent, David Dalindyebo, who brought him up as his own child and groomed him to become a counsellor to the future king. From there he proceeded through Methodist schools to Fort Hare University College, South Africa’s only black university. He ran away to Johannesburg in 1941 to escape an arranged marriage and took work as a night watchman guarding the compound entrance of a goldmine.

  It was the future ANC leader Walter Sisulu who introduced Mandela to the legal profession and also to radical politics. In 1948, the exclusively Afrikaner Nationalist Party won the whites-only general election, and began to institute its policy of apartheid across South Africa. Every individual was categorised by race and it became illegal to marry across the colour line.

  Mandela was by this time the deputy leader of the ANC’s youth movement. He had also set up the only black legal firm in South Africa with Oliver Tambo. The failure of conventional politics to make any headway led Mandela to the conclusion that the ANC had no alternative but to take up armed resistance. In December 1956 he was arrested for high treason. The prosecution dragged on for years trying to prove violent intent, and was still going on when, on 26 March 1960, sixty-nine Africans demonstrating against the pass laws were shot dead by the police in Sharpeville, near Johannesburg. Mandela went underground, earning himself a reputation as ‘the black pimpernel’. He was captured in August 1962 while masquerading as a chauffeur and sentenced to three years for incitement and another two years for leaving the country without a passport.

  With this speech we see Mandela in court after the police had raided the headquarters of the resistance movement in Rivonia, a northern suburb of Johannesburg. Mandela was one of ten men charged with sabotage and faced the prospect of death by hanging. All ten pleaded not guilty: ‘My lord, it is not I, but the Government that should be in the dock today. I plead not guilty.’ Mandela was imprisoned, for much longer than anyone had ever imagined, in a tiny cell on Robben Island with a slop bucket for company and no proper bed. The emotional pain of imprisonment was always intense, but it would hit its peak when Mandela received the news, by telegram, that his eldest son Madiba had died in a car crash. Mandela’s vulnerability is evident in his prison letters, which are exquisitely written records of pain.

  Throughout his imprisonment Mandela was offered the chance of release, but always with unacceptable conditions attached. Finally, in 1989, in a meeting with President P. W. Botha shortly before he was succeeded by F. W. de Klerk, Mandela sensed a change of attitude. It was de Klerk who had the courage to concede, as he put it in the speech with which the two accepted a shared Nobel peace prize in 1993, that ‘a terrible wrong had been done to our country’. On 4.14 p.m. on 11 February 1990, televised live, Mandela walked out through the gates of Victor Verster prison near Cape Town into a world that he did not recognise but that recognised him.

  In May 1994, Mandela, a figure of immense bearing and dignity, was inaugurated as president after the first non-racial, democratic election in South Africa. He had missed the modern world. When Mandela was first imprisoned John F. Kennedy was still president of the United States of America.

  Mandela was a hero with feet of clay, as all heroes are, and it does him a disservice to canonise him. He had many personal failings, and the ANC government under his command showed little imagination and even less competence. Behind the scenes, Thabo Mbeki was essentially running the show. But Mandela understood the importance of political theatre for a display of unity. His calls for calm as violence increased among rival political and ethnic groups was a crucial command. His decision to stand down, in 1999, was perhaps as important as his becoming president in the first place, because it showed that the fledgling democracy could transfer power without violence.

  He was an extraordinary man and his was an extraordinary life. He was born Rolihlahla, a name that means ‘troublemaker’. He died ninety-five years later as Nelson Mandela, in a time he had done so much to change, on 5 December 2013, for all his flaws a hero unmatched in his time.

  I am the first accused. I hold a bachelor’s degree in arts and practised as an attorney in Johannesburg for a number of years in partnership with Oliver Tambo. I am a convicted prisoner serving five years for leaving the country without a permit and for inciting people to go on strike at the end of May 1961. At the outset, I want to say that the suggestion made by the state in its opening that the struggle in South Africa is under the influence of foreigners or communists is wholly incorrect. I have done whatever I did, both as an individual and as a leader of my people, because of my experience in South Africa and my own proudly felt African background, and not because of what any outsider might have said. In my youth in the Transkei I listened to the elders of my tribe telling stories of the old days. Amongst the tales they related to me were those of wars fought by our ancestors in defence of the fatherland. The names of Dingane and Bambata, Hintsa and Makana, Squngthi and Dalasile, Moshoeshoe and Sekhukhuni, were praised as the glory of the entire African nation. I hoped then that life might offer me the opportunity to serve my people and make my own humble contribution to their freedom struggle. This is what has motivated me in all that I have done in relation to the charges made against me in this case.

  A trial defence rests more on the character of the plaintiff than any other rhetorical form. The connection is historic. Demosthenes was a pleader in court, as was Cicero. One of the most famous of classical speeches is Plato’s account of the speech Socrates gave in his defence when he was accused of impiety. Socrates faced the death penalty as Mandela does here. Mandela does what Socrates refused to do and opens with his credentials. In a paragraph he summarises the case which, over more than four hours, he puts painstakingly to t
he court. His defence is to be highly personal, predicated on his status as an African. The prosecution was trying to paint Mandela as in some way a puppet of foreign forces and a man of violence. The speech, at its full length, is a detailed rebuttal of these charges.

  Here Mandela presents his summary defence, evoking his African heritage as a way both to anchor him within it and to define the nation as widely as possible, a clearly vital tactic in a nation which has defined him and his kind out of existence. Mandela is also seeking to humanise his people. These are people too, he is saying, and these are their names. They are called ‘Dingane and Bambata …’ His tone is sorrow rather than anger. This is going to be a humble submission, although always a proud one, and the style will be forensic, as befits an attorney making a case for a client in court. This time the attorney is speaking for himself, but also for all Africa and at the price of his own life.

  Having said this, I must deal immediately and at some length with the question of violence. Some of the things so far told to the court are true and some are untrue. I do not, however, deny that I planned sabotage. I did not plan it in a spirit of recklessness, nor because I have any love of violence … Firstly, we believed that as a result of Government policy, violence by the African people had become inevitable, and that unless responsible leadership was given to canalise and control the feelings of our people, there would be outbreaks of terrorism which would produce an intensity of bitterness and hostility between the various races of this country which is not produced even by war. Secondly, we felt that without violence there would be no way open to the African people to succeed in their struggle against the principle of white supremacy. All lawful modes of expressing opposition to this principle had been closed by legislation, and we were placed in a position in which we had either to accept a permanent state of inferiority, or to defy the government. We chose to defy the law. We first broke the law in a way which avoided any recourse to violence; when this form was legislated against, and then the government resorted to a show of force to crush opposition to its policies, only then did we decide to answer violence with violence. But the violence which we chose to adopt was not terrorism. We who formed Umkhonto[the organisation Umkhonto we Sizwe: Spear of the Nation] were all members of the African National Congress, and had behind us the ANC tradition of non-violence and negotiation as a means of solving political disputes. We believe that South Africa belongs to all the people who live in it, and not to one group, be it black or white. We did not want an interracial war, and tried to avoid it to the last minute. If the court is in doubt about this, it will be seen that the whole history of our organisation bears out what I have said, and what I will subsequently say, when I describe the tactics which Umkhonto decided to adopt … In 1960 there was the shooting at Sharpeville, which resulted in the proclamation of a state of emergency and the declaration of the ANC as an unlawful organisation. My colleagues and I, after careful consideration, decided that we would not obey this decree. The African people were not part of the government and did not make the laws by which they were governed. We believed in the words of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that ‘the will of the people shall be the basis of authority of the government,’ and for us to accept the banning was equivalent to accepting the silencing of the Africans for all time … What were we, the leaders of our people, to do? Were we to give in to the show of force and the implied threat against future action, or were we to fight it and, if so, how?