“A Nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest
citizens, but it's lowest ones”
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| Image from Lonely Planet |
Apartheid is something I knew very little of prior to
reading Long Walk to Freedom. It is racism and suppression at their finest. And
while I am sure there are many triumphs and great things in South Africa’s
history, they are overshadowed by the dark cloud of apartheid.
While reading Mandela’s account, I couldn’t help but draw
parallels to treatment African Americans throughout our own troubled past. In
both cases, blacks and coloreds were thought of as less than their white counterparts.
They had no rights and no voice.
Interestingly, during the 50s (and during the height of the
Cold War and McCarthyism) when nonviolent protests were rising in both
countries (South Africa and America), the protesters were labeled communist and
oftentimes arrested on such charges. What easier way to discount the repressed
than to play on the fear of many.
“No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite."
As for Mandela himself, he gave his life to the belief of
equality for all men. Denied the basic
rights many of take for granted, he stayed the cause leading nonviolent
protests fighting for the freedoms that whites considered inherent, but blacks
saw just out of reach. His recount of time spent in prison (where racism was
just as rampant) away from family and friends, with a complete lack of freedom
is harrowing.
“I wondered--not for the first time--whether one was ever justified in neglecting the welfare of one's own family in order to fight for the welfare of others. Can there be anything more important than looking after one's aging mother? Is politics merely a pretext for shirking one's responsibilities, an excuse for not being able to provide in the way one wanted?”
With the defeat of apartheid came the release of Mandela and
other political prisoners, yet as his points out, there is still much left to
do, both in South Africa and the rest of the world. Mandela is a true role
model that many should look to especially when waning and in want of
inspiration in the fight for equality for all.
“Although few people will remember 3 June 1993, it was a landmark in South African history. On that day, after months of negotiations at the World Trade Centre, the multiparty forum voted to set a date for the country’s first national, nonracial, one-person-one-vote election: 27 April 1994. For the first time in South African history, the black majority would go to the polls to elect their own leaders.”
Further Reading: Born a Crime by Trevor Noah
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