The Legacy of Nelson Mandela and the South African Revolution: Who was the Man Behind the Enigma of the Charismatic Madiba?

Introduction: Describing Nelson Mandela, the Conundrum- A Riddle Intricately Intertwined Within an Enigma

On December 5, 2013, the world lost what the African National Congress (ANC) of South Africa declared to be a "colossus." Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, born on July 18, 1918, became one with the ages at the ripe old age of 95. The world is engrossed in a state of mourning over the passing of a revolutionary figure universally considered a hero and perhaps worthy of beatification, and the vast majority of the world's literate people are easily provided access to reading of his triumphs, his martyrdom, and the liberation of a most multifarious nation with nearly three-quarters of its citizens. His victory over the evil institution of Apartheid in South Africa is more than considerable because it lifted the oppressed peoples comprised of the black ethnicities in the nation into the realm of being recognized with equal rights under the protections of the law. There can be no mistaken that what Mandela achieve, the figure whom many deify him when the general population of the nation refers to him by first his commonly-known tribal name "Madiba," but also as "Tata," which means "Father." In all, Mandela, through ending the scourge of Apartheid in his beloved South Africa, will forever be remembered as "the father of the nation."

Mandela is often spoken of for his achievements in the same spirit as those of Mohandas "Mahatma" Gandhi of India and Martin Luther King, Jr., the American civil rights figurehead who more than any other figure during the struggles for India's independence from the British Empire by Gandhai and for racial equity and the recognition that all American regardless of race, ethnicity, religion, or creed are loved the same by the one and only God whom all were borne of His Grace. These two revolutionaries in their respective nations represented a form of civil disobedience one would associate with the Transcendentalist principles behind Henry David Thoreau's literary works such as Resistance to Government (also known simply as Civil Disobedience) that was first published in 1849. For Gandhi, he is believed by some scholars to have interpreted Thoreau's definition of civil disobedience to be an argument for pacifism or for exclusively nonviolent resistance to suggest an equivalence between Thoreau's civil disobedience and his own satyagraha, which he defined in his words:

"Truth (satya) implies love, and firmness (agraha) engenders and therefore serves as a synonym for force. I thus began to call the Indian movement Satyagraha, that is to say, the Force which is born of Truth and Love or non-violence, and gave up the use of the phrase “passive resistance”, in connection with it, so much so that even in English writing we often avoided it and used instead the word “satyagraha” itself or some other equivalent English phrase." (Courtesy of Wikipedia)

In September 1935, a letter to P.K. Rao, Servants of India Society, Gandhi disputed the proposition that his idea of Civil Disobedience was adapted from the writings of Thoreau:

"The statement that I had derived my idea of civil disobedience from the writings of Thoreau is wrong. The resistance to authority in South Africa was well advanced before I got the essay of Thoreau on civil disobedience. But the movement was then known as passive resistance. As it was incomplete, I had coined the word satyagraha for the Gujarati readers. When I saw the title of Thoreau’s great essay, I began the use of his phrase to explain our struggle to the English readers. But I found that even civil disobedience failed to convey the full meaning of the struggle. I therefore adopted the phrase civil resistance. Non-violence was always an integral part of our struggle." (Courtesy of Wikipedia)

He described it further as the following:

"I have also called it love-force or soul-force. In the application of satyagraha, I discovered in the earliest stages that pursuit of truth did not admit of violence being inflicted on one’s opponent but that he must be weaned from error by patience and compassion. For what appears to be truth to the one may appear to be error to the other. And patience means self-suffering. So the doctrine came to mean vindication of truth, not by infliction of suffering on the opponent, but on oneself." (Courtesy of Wikipedia)

For Thoreau, however, his position towards unjust laws proving to be injurious to the public such as the peculiar institution of slavery he so detested was that they deserve no respect and should therefore be broken. Thoreau would have consider Gandhi's satyagraha principles to be cowering before the unjust sovereignty of the government, and therefore, emblematic of the "prison" metaphor he described below as the state in which mankind exists under intolerable laws:

"Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.… where the State places those who are not with her, but against her,– the only house in a slave State in which a free man can abide with honor.… Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence. A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight. If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to choose. If a thousand men were not to pay their tax bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible." (Courtesy of Wikipedia)