When They Go Low, We Go High

by Philip Collins

  One of the charges against Mandela is that he committed the ANC to violence. He had been in prison for almost the whole period since the Sabotage Act was passed. He might have been expected to seek exoneration on those grounds. Here he signals that he is going to do the opposite. He affirms he was a leader of the ANC and the small splinter group that settled on violent means. This is, at least in the language and the logic of the court, a guilty plea.

  With the court, according to contemporary reports, spellbound and silent as Mandela read from his script, the accused went to great lengths to clarify exactly what happened. He candidly concedes that he did advocate a shift to violence from pacifism, but enters two extenuating points. The first is that the violence was always directed against buildings and symbols of the apartheid state rather than against people. The targets were power lines, railway tracks and public buildings. The state responded brutally with arrest, killings and torture. The intention never to hurt anyone, says Mandela, was a conscious and important choice. If resistance is confined to sabotage, as Mandela argued it was, the prospect of a transition to democracy is left open. The second defence is that the resistance movement was left with no viable option beyond an armed struggle. The Sharpeville massacre was a pivotal moment. The black demonstrators killed by the police had been protesting about the pass laws that required them to carry identification.

  Mandela therefore goes through, for the benefit of the court, the legislation enacted by the white supremacist government, which makes it impossible to live a free and dignified life in South Africa as a black person. This legislation has led Mandela, regretfully and sorrowfully, to the conclusion that armed resistance cannot be avoided. Black people cannot join the nation in any other way.

  Another of the allegations made by the state is that the aims and objects of the ANC and the Communist party are the same. I wish to deal with this and with my own political position, because I must assume that the state may try to argue from certain exhibits that I tried to introduce Marxism into the ANC … The ideological creed of the ANC is, and always has been, the creed of African nationalism. It is not the concept of African nationalism expressed in the cry, ‘drive the white man into the sea.’ The African nationalism for which the ANC stands is the concept of freedom and fulfilment for the African people in their own land. The most important political document ever adopted by the ANC is the ‘freedom charter.’ It is by no means a blueprint for a socialist state. It calls for redistribution, but not nationalisation, of land; it provides for nationalisation of mines, banks, and monopoly industry, because big monopolies are owned by one race only, and without such nationalisation racial domination would be perpetuated despite the spread of political power … The ANC, unlike the Communist party, admitted Africans only as members. Its chief goal was, and is, for the African people to win unity and full political rights. The Communist party’s main aim, on the other hand, was to remove the capitalists and to replace them with a working-class government. The Communist party sought to emphasise class distinctions whilst the ANC seeks to harmonise them. This is a vital distinction …

  To foreign observers of the apartheid regime the vital distinction at issue seemed to be obvious. It was there in black and white: it was racism. The Rivonia trial was in fact more complex than that, which explains why Mandela is so careful to distance his own world view from that of the communists, though he is generous enough to acknowledge that the South African communists were allies of the black people when almost nobody else was. The charges Mandela was forced to answer included aiding foreign military units in their attempt to invade the Republic, acting in ways to further the objects of communism, and soliciting and receiving money from named foreign sources. He was up on a charge of being a traitor to the nation and of being a communist. He had been imprisoned under the Suppression of Communism Act.

  There is a Cold War aspect to the trial which is easily forgotten but which it is imperative for Mandela to deal with. This is what he is doing here. The Cold War comparison may go further still. In his reflections on the time, F. W. de Klerk noted that apartheid was not really defeated by protests, boycotts or sanctions. It fell because millions of educated black South Africans had become economically indispensable and the prejudice of a generation of young whites had been quelled by working with black colleagues. The apartheid generation were succeeded by their more liberal children. This is the case that Mandela is making. He is not enlisting Africans in the international fraternity of the working man. He is instead seeking to harmonise class interests under a heading of prior importance: African nationalism.

  I have always regarded myself, in the first place, as an African patriot … The basic task at the present moment is the removal of race discrimination and the attainment of democratic rights on the basis of the Freedom Charter. In so far as that party furthers this task, I welcome its assistance. I realise that it is one of the means by which people of all races can be drawn into our struggle. From my reading of Marxist literature and from conversations with Marxists, I have gained the impression that communists regard the parliamentary system of the west as undemocratic and reactionary. But, on the contrary, I am an admirer of such a system. The Magna Carta, the Petition of Rights, and the Bill of Rights are documents which are held in veneration by democrats throughout the world. I have great respect for British political institutions, and for the country’s system of justice. I regard the British Parliament as the most democratic institution in the world, and the independence and impartiality of its judiciary never fails to arouse my admiration. The American Congress, that country’s doctrine of separation of powers, as well as the independence of its judiciary, arouses in me similar sentiments. I have been influenced in my thinking by both west and east. All this has led me to feel that in my search for a political formula, I should be absolutely impartial and objective. I should tie myself to no particular system of society other than of socialism. I must leave myself free to borrow the best from the west and from the east …

  Mandela here identifies himself historically and decisively as a democrat. He completes the task of distancing himself from communism but then goes much further to establish his credentials as a patriot as well. It is essential to do this because Mandela was aware that white South Africans feared that the universal franchise would extinguish their capacity to determine their own future. It was not just communism that the whites were scared of. They feared majoritarian democracy too, perhaps even more so, as it seemed possible.

  That is why Mandela allies himself so explicitly with the democratic systems. The naming of Magna Carta, the British Parliament and the American Congress has the effect of making a case that cannot be gainsaid. A Marxist could never say any such thing, representative democracy being strictly inferior to historical destiny as a route to power. Mandela instead yokes the Freedom Charter to the history of democratic institutions to defend himself against the trumped up charge of being a communist but also to reduce the atmosphere of fear in which the trial was held. This is an account of an authentic liberal democratic nation. It is a long way from the manifesto of a terrorist.

  Africans want to be paid a living wage. Africans want to perform work which they are capable of doing, and not work which the government declares them to be capable of. Africans want to be allowed to live where they obtain work, and not be endorsed out of an area because they were not born there. Africans want to be allowed to own land in places where they work, and not to be obliged to live in rented houses which they can never call their own. Africans want to be part of the general population, and not confined to living in their own ghettoes. African men want to have their wives and children to live with them where they work, and not be forced into an unnatural existence in men’s hostels. African women want to be with their menfolk and not be left permanently widowed in the Reserves. Africans want to be allowed out after eleven o’clock at night and not to be confined to their rooms like little children. Africans want to be allowed to travel in their own count
ry and to seek work where they want to and not where the labour bureau tells them to. Africans want a just share in the whole of South Africa; they want security and a stake in society.

  A passage of fine rhetorical technique in which Mandela speaks of the nation he wants to exist. Ten successive sentences begin either with ‘Africans’, ‘African men’ or ‘African women’. The repetition builds momentum as the listener is on guard for the next item in the list. The importance of the litany of demands is precisely that they are quotidian. Everyone wants a living wage from work they are capable of doing. Everyone wants to live where they choose and own their own home. Everyone wants to live with their family rather than be separated from them and everyone wants to be free to pass through the streets and travel unhindered and safe through the country. There is nothing ‘African’ about these demands. Mandela is pointing out, with exemplary gentleness, that black Africans do not currently enjoy these basic liberties.

  Mandela shows in this passage how a resounding point can be made sotto voce. He could have ascended the heights and lamented the absence of justice in tones of anguish. The result is all the more impressive for being so routine. The court is simply invited to draw its own conclusions about a land in which such everyday freedoms are denied to one set of its people. He is simply saying that we black Africans, we are ordinary too. There is nothing transgressive about the lives we wish to lead. Unjust nations define sections of their people out of the fraternity of the citizenry. This is Mandela’s simple and effective claim for the black Africans to be readmitted.

  Above all, we want equal political rights, because without them our disabilities will be permanent. I know this sounds revolutionary to the whites in this country, because the majority of voters will be Africans. This makes the white man fear democracy. But this fear cannot be allowed to stand in the way of the only solution which will guarantee racial harmony and freedom for all. It is not true that the enfranchisement of all will result in racial domination. Political division, based on colour, is entirely artificial and, when it disappears, so will the domination of one colour group by another. The ANC has spent half a century fighting against racialism. When it triumphs it will not change that policy. This then is what the ANC is fighting. Their struggle is a truly national one. It is a struggle of the African people, inspired by their own suffering and their own experience. It is a struggle for the right to live. During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. 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.

  This is one of the greatest endings to an important speech of all time, perhaps second only to Martin Luther King. The draft of this speech made Mandela’s lawyers apprehensive that he would antagonise the judge. They begged him, in particular, to excise the last paragraph. Mandela refused. He spoke the last paragraph from memory, looking directly at Judge De Wet. Mandela expected to hear the death sentence declared, as twenty-year sentences had been issued for relatively minor offences.

  Mandela was not really a renowned speaker. None of his other speeches are liable to make it to anthology. These are brave words on an extraordinary occasion, which is the essence of the great speech. Mandela’s life was on the line. Peril sharpens his words, which are lent their resonance because of the injustice they describe. The concrete writing makes the case reasonably and the emotion is better evoked by being implicit.

  But there is, in retrospect, a supplementary beauty to the words because we know they were sincere. We know this because of the grace that Mandela showed, a quarter of a century later, when he was released and we know how he acted as the president of the recovering republic.

  So much can be said in silence, and in one of history’s great rhetorical gestures, Mandela showed how it can be done. Rugby in South Africa had always been the sport of the Afrikaner, the sport of the oppressor, the sport of the white man. In 1995 South Africa hosted and won the Rugby World Cup and Mandela, in defiance of his closest aides, strode out onto the pitch in Ellis Park in Johannesburg, wearing the Springbok shirt with a 6 on his back, the number of the captain, Francois Pienaar. In one moment, with that gesture, Mandela brought the country together. When South Africa beat New Zealand in the game, Mandela presented the trophy to Pienaar, with whom he had forged a close friendship. The beautiful story is told in the film Invictus. It is an enduring image that stands for what Mandela is talking about in this passage: the captain and the captain of the soul.

  It sounds like a happy ending, but all happy endings are provisional in a democracy. Half the black population of South Africa still live below the poverty line. At least 6 million South Africans are HIV-positive. Twenty per cent of the white population has emigrated. Utopia has not arrived in South Africa. It could, however, have been much worse. Mandela could have delivered the other speech he had ready. His handwritten notes to counsel, returned to him after his release from jail twenty-six years later, show that the prisoner had prepared some remarks in the event that he was handed down a sentence of death. ‘If I must die, let me declare for all to know that I will meet my fate like a man.’ The words were never spoken, mercifully never needed.

  As Mandela ended with the amazing words ‘an ideal for which I am prepared to die’ there was silence in the courtroom for as much as half a minute. Thirty seconds of silence in a crowded room is an eternity. Only the sound of heavy breathing broke the silent tension until, in the gallery, a woman broke into tears. After a minute the judge broke the spell by saying to the defence team: ‘You may call your next witness’.

  AUNG SAN SUU KYI

  Freedom from Fear

  European Parliament, Strasbourg

  10 July 1991

  The demand for liberty cannot always be voiced. The dangers of nationhood are evident in the fact that Jawaharlal Nehru, Nelson Mandela and Aung San Suu Kyi were imprisoned by governments that wanted to silence them. Words that cannot be spoken can still be read, however, and these words of Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma’s pro-democracy leader and Nobel Peace laureate, written when she was under detention, are what she would have said had she been free to speak. These words are her definition of the idea of Burma.

  Aung San Suu Kyi was born on 19 June 1945, the daughter of Burma’s independence hero, Aung San, and of Khin Kyi, her stern and principled mother who founded the Burmese Girl Guides. Hers was a childhood of some propriety. Biscuit-dunking was banned and Suu Kyi was not allowed to lick stamps, which were to be wetted with a sponge. Years later, friends in Oxford noted her habit of enforcing the rules of children’s games with unyielding exactitude. Her father was assassinated when she was only two years old, leaving his daughter with the burden of his legacy. She was educated in Burma, India and the United Kingdom. While studying at Oxford University, she met Michael Aris, a Tibet scholar whom she married in 1972. They had two sons, Alexander and Kim.

  In 1988 Suu Kyi returned to Burma to nurse her dying mother, and she soon became engaged in the country’s nationwide democratic uprising. The Burmese military suppressed that uprising with brutal force, killing up to 5,000 demonstrators in August 1988 and establishing a military regime the following month. This prompted the formation of a pro-democracy party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), of which Suu Kyi was appointed general secretary. The pressure on the regime forced a general election in 1990, but the process was a sham. Aung San Suu Kyi was detained for campaigning for the NLD and banned from standing as a candidate. The NLD won 82 per cent of the vote, whereupon the regime refused to recognise the result and clung to power regardless.

  Suu Kyi was held under house arrest until July 1995 and faced restrictions on her ability to travel when she was released. In 1999 her husband died of cancer in London. His request to visit his wife one final time had b
een rejected by the Burmese authorities. If Suu Kyi had left Burma she would not have been permitted to return. In 2000 she was again placed under house arrest after repeated attempts to leave Rangoon to attend political meetings. In 2002 the regime gambled that Suu Kyi would have been forgotten by the population and so ended her detention. When tens of thousands of people turned out to see her, the generals devised a political front, the Union Solidarity and Development Association (USDA), to harass NLD meetings. On 30 May 2003, the USDA attacked Suu Kyi’s convoy in a disguised attempt to assassinate her. Suu Kyi’s driver managed to drive her to safety, but more than seventy of her supporters were beaten to death. The attack became known at the Depayin Massacre and the incident has never been investigated.