COULD the mountain really ever learn from the plain? Do the lowly carry a message that the high and mighty could also benefit from hearing?
Hard to imagine, isn’t it?
After all, it is usually those who are lower in station that tend to learn from the masters, right?
Well, last week marked the 95th birth anniversary of a man who, as things go, is probably one of the lowly.
Nelson Mandela would probably have been just another African politician—one among so many. There was nothing that distinguished him from those of his generation, at least not until he was released by his captors, and became the leader of the people whose cause he championed, and for whose freedom he gave almost a third of his entire life.
What is remarkable about the man is his humanity, something that we do not see so much of these days.
For example, one of the quotes attributed to him goes: “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.”
Remember, these words came from a man who was victimized by a system that institutionalized the practice of racism. Apartheid was a form of social structure that taught that the races should not be mixed and allowed to exist together—a perverse form of social dynamic that in many ways mirrors the ideology practiced by the Nazis.
Of course, there weren’t the gas chambers and concentration camps in South Africa. The world had seen too much of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen that even the most dedicated White Supremacists would probably never have thought of doing such things again. But there was pervasive police brutality, torture and incarceration inflicted on all those
who opposed the system. And Mandela himself was one of its victims.
But credit the man for not losing his humanity in the midst of all of the inhumanity.
When Mandela came out of his Robben Island prison in 1990, he could have been forgiven for hating his captors, the same people who were the perpetrators of the institutional racism he had fought so hard to dismantle.
But what he did would distinguish him from the rest of his contemporaries.
Upon becoming leader of the nation he freed from oppression, he did not turn inwards and do a Robert Mugabe. Instead he did something that seemed unthinkable—he embraced his captors, and welcomed them into the new South Africa.
Perhaps nothing captures this spirit of reconciliation more than his support of the South African Springboks, in their memorable run to the rugby world cup victory in 1995. After all, the Springboks team was always known as a white team, and the game of rugby itself as a white man’s game.
But Mandela saw in the Boks the chance to galvanize the entire nation, and unite it around a common desire to win.
Immortalised in the movie “Invictus,” the world cup victory exemplified Mandela’s outlook on governance—a truly color-blind model that saw everyone as a contributor to the new South Africa.
In a world still torn by strife and violence due to differences in race and creed, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela’s name stands apart, as a paragon of leadership that everyone ought to emulate.
Happy 95th birthday, “Madiba.”
(http://asbb-foreignexchange.blogspot.com & http://twitter.com/asbbatuhan)