In the years that followed, Mandela mesmerized South Africans with his commitment to reconciliation. He met with and befriended the prosecutor who had led the case against him. He was elected president of South Africa in the first free elections in the country’s history and entered the parliament with his arm around former president de Klerk, the man who’d led the previous, racist regime. As he sat in the chamber that had once enforced the brutality of apartheid, Mandela cheered the newly elected members of parliament, even shaking the hand of General Constandt Viljoen, the leader of the nine-member white separatist delegation. Together with his fellow antiapartheid hero Archbishop Desmond Tutu, he formed a national truth and reconciliation commission to work toward granting amnesty to all who had committed atrocities during the years of oppression. He became not only a hero of political justice but a global icon of freedom, forgiveness, and peace.
If there was ever an individual who understood leadership, it was Mandela, and like people all over the world, I wondered over and over again how he did what he did. What was the secret of his leadership? How could he look into the faces of those people who had beaten him, denied him his own children, murdered his brothers and sisters in the struggle, and then put his arms around them? How does a man endure so much suffering and return it with friendship?
During Mandela’s presidency, Special Olympics’ movement in South Africa was small and poorly known. Hundreds of thousands of people with intellectual disabilities were stigmatized, their existence seen as proof that their parents were cursed or guilty of sin. Parents reported keeping their children hidden so as to avoid the mockery of peers. Orphanages were filled with babies and children with many different challenges, abandoned by families too poor to raise them. The AIDS epidemic added to the problem, as the disease contributes to developmental delays and disability.
So, needless to say, in the post-apartheid era, all of us in Special Olympics were eager to increase our visibility and effectiveness in South Africa and enable people with intellectual differences to be a part of the country’s newfound focus on equality and justice for all. Beginning in 2000, my indomitable colleague Peter Wheeler flew there several times to talk with our local volunteers and scope out the possible level of support we might be able to get from government, media, and business. His goal: to come up with a breakthrough event that would grab the attention of South African media and create the traction necessary to grow Special Olympics not only throughout the country but across all of sub-Saharan Africa. And in South Africa, there was really only one breakthrough figure: Nelson Mandela.
When Peter called me in Washington to say that he had reached out to former president Mandela’s team and had found them receptive and open to helping launch a national campaign for Special Olympics, I was ready to dance on a tabletop. “We’ve got to get them a proposal,” he reported. “They’re willing to ask Madiba [South Africans often called Mandela by his clan name], but we’ve got to get them a plan.”
In the days that followed, we mapped out an audacious if achievable scenario for a major event: we would ask former president Mandela to launch a Special Olympics campaign for inclusion and acceptance from his own prison cell in Robben Island. There, in the place the world had come to see as the epicenter of discrimination and intolerance, we would ask Nelson Mandela himself to light the Special Olympics “Flame of Hope,” our most powerful symbol of the freedom we aspire to achieve for all. And from that cell, with Mandela himself carrying that flame of hope accompanied by Special Olympics athletes, we would announce a campaign of national awareness, sports, joy, and inclusion. We would then “run” the flame off of Robben Island and into Cape Town and up to the seat of government, Pretoria, where we would present it to the leaders of the country with a call to action: change South Africa to make it a place of tolerance not just based on race or ethnicity but also based on “difability.”
Peter submitted the proposal and the waiting began. But it wasn’t long before the word came back from Mandela’s staff: “He wants to do it! He’ll go to Robben Island for Special Olympics.” We were ecstatic: the world’s most loved and recognizable hero of freedom was going to join our team! The planning began in earnest.
A few short months later, Linda and I and all our children, together with my sister Maria and her entire family, landed in Cape Town for the launch of “African Hope 2001.” Our delegation was led by Ricardo Thornton, a Special Olympics athlete from Washington, DC, who had spent many years of his life locked up in institutions. Like Mandela, Ricardo had been “incarcerated.” He had been held against his will for thirteen years, from 1966 to 1979, until he was finally freed and, against all odds, got married, found a job, and moved into his own apartment where he and his wife, Donna, raised their son. Ricardo was joined by Theo Tebele, an athlete from Botswana, and of course, there was Loretta Claiborne.
The first stop of “African Hope 2001” was the prison camp at Robben Island. Together with about two hundred volunteers and supporters from Special Olympics South Africa, we rode the ferry from Cape Town harbor out to the cursed island and then started the short walk from the dock to the prison door. We walked in nervous disarray, the younger children racing ahead, all of us looking down the path at the prison wall, the morning glare shooting darts off the stony ground and into our eyes. There was little conversation. The walk was short enough—just a few minutes—so nothing needed saying.
As we approached the prison, the door swung open and there was Mandela, awaiting our arrival like a host awaiting guests for a banquet. It was morning and his eyes were alight with anticipation. “Welcome!” he bellowed, and began bantering playfully with the children and greeting each of the athletes with that mesmerizing smile. We walked through the narrow prison door into the courtyard a few steps away. The inside of the prison was dim with walls of concrete and stone. Mandela continued his welcome. “What sport do you play?” “Are you ready for a match?” “You’re a champion? Is it so?”
Within a few minutes, Mandela led Ricardo, Loretta, Theo, and another local athlete, Danielle September, down the prison hallway to his old cell. He entered the barren cell with the athletes, and as they held a torch, Mandela lit it. The world-famous photographer Richard Corman captured the moment. In all of the photos, Mandela is smiling from ear to ear.
I followed Mandela and the athletes as they carried the lit torch out of the cell, down the dark prison hallway, and out into the courtyard, where a crowd of Special Olympics athletes and volunteers and press had gathered. This was the courtyard where Mandela and other prisoners had lined up daily to do hard labor, breaking stone and hauling loads. I kept glancing at him to see if being in that cursed place brought back the pain. I kept waiting for signs that the dark memories were surging back.
Our short program started. Ricardo spoke about what it meant to grow up in an institution, not understanding why he could never leave. “We would just go about our day after day. We didn’t know nothing else, nothing about what was outside or how people lived or if people cared about each other. We didn’t know why we were in there and forced to live like that but we knew it was a bad place.” He described what happened eight years after he was released: “By then, my wife, Donna, and me were married and wouldn’t you know she was pregnant and going to have a baby.” Huge smile. “But a lot of people said we was wrong to do that, that people like us shouldn’t have a child and we didn’t know how to take care of a child and I guess they were right in some ways because we didn’t. And then when we were in the hospital and the doctors were helping Donna, and the baby was finally born, and they handed little Ricky to Donna and she was crying and she looked up at the doctor and asked him, ‘Doctor, when my baby grows up, will he love me?’” The crowd in the courtyard was hushed. “That’s why we all need to be free so we can know that we can love each other and not worry that we’re so bad that not even our own children will love us.”
Ahmed Kathadra, a fellow prisoner of Mandela’s and, by then, the curator of the Rob
ben Island museum, hurried the program along because of the heat. Mandela smiled through it all, playfully gesturing to people in our audience, happily posing for picture after picture, speaking only to say that the athletes of Special Olympics deserved, like everyone else, to be free.
It struck me that day that Mandela was leading the same movement that the athletes of Special Olympics were leading as well. His words echoed the message I’d heard from Loretta and so many others: “To be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.” Like Mandela, our athletes were victimized by the projection of threat and fear—in his case, the projection of threat and fear was attached to skin color, while in our movement, it was attached to a score on an IQ test. The Nobel Prize–winning economist Amartya Sen wrote a powerful book, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny, that laid out the scholarly argument of why Mandela and the athletes of Special Olympics belong in the same movement. Identity, Sen argues, is about many things. Think of anyone you know and you can probably think of dozens of ways of defining their identities. A person might be a woman, an American, a Republican, a doctor, a soccer player, a mother, a wife, a daughter, an aunt, a poet, a gardener, and so on. In another person’s many identities, we often find common ground. We have something in common with that person because he or she is in some way like us. Friendship and solidarity come from sharing some dimension of identity with another.
But the opposite can also happen: our many identities can be reduced to a single one. Violence and stigma, according to Sen, result when social and political structures narrow identity and reduce a group to a singular identity. We become only that “Republican” or “Black man” or “retard.” And once we have become reduced to a “choiceless singularity of human identity, [it] not only diminishes us all, it also makes the world much more flammable.” We no longer share things in common. We live in different worlds.
Singularity doesn’t just make the world more dangerous; it also adds to the likelihood that our empathy will be short-circuited. As the noted psychopathologist Simon Baron-Cohen has found, empathy can be explained as easily as “our ability to identify what someone else is thinking and feeling and to respond to their thoughts and feelings with an appropriate emotion.” Empathy is a key capability for all of us, helping make relationships possible, communication clear, and violence less likely. But we all know of countless examples where empathy has seemed totally absent—where cruelty and violence were perpetrated on helpless victims while the perpetrator lacked any empathy whatsoever. We often wonder how it’s possible for such cruelty to exist—the savagery of the Holocaust, the random violence of a vicious criminal act, the capricious killing and raping by warlords, or the callous dehumanization of a person with disability. Baron-Cohen offers the psychological correlate to Sen’s “singularity.” “Empathy erosion arises from people turning other people into objects” (emphasis original). When you treat another person as an object, interacting with them as though only your own side of the story mattered, then your “empathy has been turned off.”
That’s what had happened to Mandela, and that’s what had happened to his fellow leaders who stood with him on that day in the prison courtyard, Loretta and Theo and Ricardo and Danielle. They were placed in what Sen calls a “set of rigid boxes” and the labels on those boxes were used to turn them into objects and to justify making them seem strange, loathsome, and dangerous. South African “whites” (a singular descriptor) loathed South African “blacks” (another singular descriptor).
Similarly, Loretta and Theo and Ricardo and Danielle were loathed by “normal” people (an all-encompassing positive descriptor) because of their “disability” (a singular negative descriptor). South Africa became defined by a “primal way of seeing the differences between people,” as did most communities where people with intellectual disabilities live. In both cases, there was a massive empathy turn-off. And the price paid for those empathy turn-offs was the suffering of millions of people and nearly the loss of Mandela, Loretta, Theo, Ricardo, and Danielle.
Who wouldn’t have understood if Mandela had had an empathy turn-off of his own and excluded whites and nationalists from his government and agenda? But he never returned hate with hate. He never put anyone else into a rigid box. As the event wound down at Robben Island, I realized that I wouldn’t have the chance to ask Mandela the question I’d longed to ask: How had he become so forgiving? The crowd pushed us toward the doorway of the prison, and it was time to return to the ferry and carry the torch to Pretoria. As we neared the door, I looked at him, smiling and thanking everyone, showing no residue of the painful memories of that space, no bitterness or weariness, and I was left to wonder: How does a human being do that? And what do I need to do to live like Mandela?
In the following years, we made repeated requests of Mandela, and over and over again, he said yes. He came to Ireland for the 2003 World Games. He recorded public awareness videos. I thought there was nothing else he could do for us—he seemed to have done everything. So imagine my surprise when I received a call from his office in 2004 telling me that Madiba wanted to dedicate his eighty-fourth birthday party to Special Olympics and to hold a huge festival to celebrate the gifts of our athletes. Peter Wheeler flew down months ahead and again created an event to mesmerize the nation. This time, he planned a full-day celebration in Limpopo Province, where more than five-hundred school-age children with and without intellectual disabilities would come together to meet, play games, learn about difference, and celebrate the birthday of their hero, Nelson Mandela. Limpopo is a rural province, both poor and remote. It is far from the centers of South African power, Cape Town and Johannesburg, and unknown for any distinctive attractions. I suppose that’s why Mandela chose it for his party. For our part, we were happy to bring the Special Olympics message to those who needed it so much.
The birthday arrived and this time, my mother was able to make the trip. Across the fairgrounds, sports games had been set up. You could chip golf balls, kick soccer balls, toss bocce balls. The children with intellectual differences arrived on school buses and fanned out across the grounds going from game to game. Hundreds of children from orphanages raced around the field, their eyes intermittently bulging with excitement and then falling back down toward the ground into what was surely a learned inwardness. There were children of all colors from mainstream schools there to meet them. Both children with intellectual differences and those without played together and stopped in special tented “classrooms” to discuss the challenges of overcoming discrimination and share openly about how much misunderstanding existed. Large white pads were used to capture all the ideas the kids were sharing about how to change their country. Parents were invited to come and share their hopes and dreams as well. “We do not believe our children are cursed,” one mother of a child with intellectual disabilities insisted. “We love our children.”
No matter how much we all expected Mandela, it was still as though we gasped for air when he appeared. By the time he arrived, tens of thousands of local residents had swarmed the bleachers, and a huge cheer arose when he paraded into the center of the stadium on a golf cart. Even though he was not on foot, the same demeanor he’d shown in his departure from prison was unmistakable. In the stands, the murmur of excitement quickly turned to cheers. “Amandla!” the crowd chanted as the golf cart inched toward the stage. Power! The response was equally strong: “Awaaytu!” To the people! “Amandla!” Power! “Awaaytu!” To the people! The chanting intensified as Mandela walked slowly up to the stage in his beautiful paisley African shirt, his signature red AIDS ribbon on his lapel, and his generous and triumphant smile beaming its way naturally across the field. There was no jumbotron, no gaudy decoration or signage or lighting. There was just a small stage, hundreds of children with intellectual disabilities, thousands of supporters, and that wildly welcoming smile.
There were a few short speeches by athletes, a musical performance or two, an
d the requisite remarks from the governor of the province and other government officials. Through it all, Mandela sat next to my mother, smiling, the two of them whispering back and forth. My mother was never happier than when she was with a president, and this particular former president was in a class all to himself. She was beaming like a little girl, glancing over at me occasionally with a wink as if to say, “Can you believe it?” A young boy with Down syndrome came without permission and sat down between them. My mother looked over to me as if to ask who had invited him up to the stage. I laughed and shrugged my shoulders. Whoever he was, he had chosen the right time and place: seated on the lap of Nelson Mandela next to Eunice Shriver in front of hundreds of cameras and thousands of fans. I never caught his name, but he is in every picture of the day. Perfect.
As the festivities continued in a mix of chaos and spectacle, I remember wondering about Mandela and my mother, both in their eighties, both having seen their share of suffering, both resolute in their desire to wage the fight for freedom, wherever it took them. On that July 18, the fight had taken them to a celebration in the park and then to a birthday cake that looked as big as the field itself. Mandela blew out the candles with a gang of our athletes. Together, he and my mother released white doves. Our athletes clamored to touch him and take pictures. The stage was overrun with cheers and appreciation. The hidden children were in the open. The cabbage child was a smiling beauty. The scorned parents were on the stage with the star. Amandla! Awaaytu!
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