5- December-2023-Aljazeera
Ten years after the anti-apartheid icon passed away, his embrace with Yasser Arafat and his donning of the keffiyeh remain powerful symbols of South Africa’s special warmth towards Palestine.
In late February 1990, 16 days after his release from prison, Nelson Mandela descended the steps of a plane in Lusaka, Zambia, which was home to the African National Congress’s exiled leadership at the time. A who’s who of leaders sympathetic to the ANC cause – from Zambia’s Kenneth Kaunda to Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe – greeted the anti-apartheid leader with smiles and handshakes.
But the most emotional embrace of all came from a short, stout man with his trademark keffiyeh wrapped around his head: Yasser Arafat, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Pulling the 6-foot-4-inch tall Mandela’s face down towards him, Arafat placed kisses on Mandela’s cheeks
Mandela would reciprocate that show of support in his own way three months later, when he attended a summit in Algiers wearing the Palestinian keffiyeh. While it is unclear where he got it or why he chose to wear it that day, it could not have been an accident – Mandela was notoriously deliberate about how he dressed.
Mandela’s ghostwriter Richard Stengel observed: “Mandela was always aware of his own image. His sense of this was curiously modern, far ahead of what his colleagues and enemies understood at the time
In 1962, after being charged with leaving the country illegally, Mandela – known for his smart suits and shiny shoes – arrived in court in a jackal-skin kaross, a beaded necklace and a shoulder bracelet. His new wife Winnie, also clad in traditional Xhosa attire, cheered him on from the public gallery. He knew exactly what he was doing. As Mandela wrote: “It was to assert myself. To go to the white man’s court as an African, wearing my own outfit and not the one that is desired by court
In 1995, a year after becoming the first democratically elected president of South Africa, Mandela famously wore the Springbok rugby jersey – for many, a symbol of apartheid – to present Francois Pienaar with the Rugby World Cup trophy. This time, his goal was to mend the divisions in his fractured nation.
Mandela felt a special bond with the Palestinian people. In 1997, while still president of South Africa, he said the ANC’s struggle was ongoing. “We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians
In 2004, after the death of Arafat, he paid tribute to the leader of the PLO: “He was an icon in the proper sense of the word. He was not only concerned with the liberation of the Arab people but of all the oppressed people throughout the world – Arabs and non-Arabs – and to lose a man of that stature and thinking is a great blow to all those who are fighting against oppression.”
Three years after Mandela’s death on December 5, 2013, the people of Palestine repaid the favour by unveiling a giant statue of the South African leader in the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah.
That sentiment of warmth – and the iconic imagery of Mandela and the keffiyeh – returned to underscore the nature of South Africa’s relationship with the Palestinian struggle after the October 7 Hamas attack on southern Israel
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa condemned that attack, but as Israeli bombs began killing thousands of innocent people in Gaza, he stepped in front of cameras, wearing a black and white keffiyeh around his neck, and holding a small Palestinian flag in his hand
They [the Palestinian people] have been under occupation for almost 75 years … waging a struggle against an oppressive government that has occupied their land, but also a government that has in recent times been dubbed an apartheid state,” he said.
After his release in February 1990, however, he wasted no time in getting up to speed on the ANC’s international relations and expressing his foreign policy views. In June of that year, four years before he became president of South Africa, Mandela was invited to the US by President George HW Bush. At a town hall meeting chaired by ABC News’s Ted Koppel, Mandela was challenged about the public support he had given to leaders like Fidel Castro, Muammar Gaddafi and Arafat, who faced accusations of human rights violations.
Without skipping a beat, Mandela responded: “One of the mistakes which some political analysts make is to think that their enemies should be our enemies
ANC and foreign policy
Historian Matthew Graham says South Africa’s foreign policy is a product of the ANC’s history. “The ANC’s support networks in exile crossed the Cold War divide,” he explained. “The party was very good at talking to anybody and everybody. They had an office in London but were also talking to Gaddafi and Castro and the like.”
But, Graham stressed, “Their real support came from the Eastern bloc. This meant it developed really close relations at the very top of the ANC, which persisted well into the post-apartheid era.” Mandela’s inauguration in 1994, for instance, saw Arafat and Castro sitting a discreet distance away from US Vice President Al Gore and First Lady Hilary Clinton at a time when Washington treated the PLO and Cuba’s communist government as pariahs
The end of history’
There is a cruel irony that the ANC’s coming to power coincided with the fall of the Berlin Wall – what Francis Fukuyama famously referred to as “the end of history”. Simpson believed that Mandela and his comrades “felt hemmed in by a new order, which was hostile to the kinds of changes that they wished to engineer within South Africa”. “The ANC was scared of the Washington Consensus and becoming overly reliant on the IMF and Washington.”
Simpson argued that both Bush presidents offered South Africa a deal to act as a “point man” in Southern Africa – but the ANC was reluctant to take it.
He believed the reasons for their refusals were more about domestic affairs than foreign policy. “Under apartheid, state power had been used to create inequality. The struggle was one for power, to overcome inherited, largely socio-economic backlogs
And while the ANC assumed political power in 1994, large sections of the economy remained – as some still remain – under white control. “It’s all about the externalisation of an internal struggle,” said Simpson. “Pushing back against a global economic order, buttressed by US military power, and the internal extension of that order, which manifests itself as racialised inequality.”
From the outside, South Africa’s foreign policy can seem incoherent. From a moral standpoint, it is hard to square the government’s abstention from the United Nations vote condemning Russia’s annexation of Ukrainian territories with their impassioned support for the Palestinian cause
But this, Graham said, misses the point. As he wrote in his book, The Crisis of South African Foreign Policy: “There is still a belief that the ANC remains the champion of democracy and human rights ideals, which it itself had so vociferously proclaimed. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth, because when issues of democracy and human rights are pitted against the anti-imperial agenda, the ANC’s anti-imperialism triumphs every time. This only serves to fuel perceptions of incoherence and contradiction.”
Peace over violence
Like most anticolonial movements, the anti-apartheid struggle grappled with questions of if and when it was appropriate to respond to a brutal state apparatus with violence.
Yet, the ANC itself was founded on principles of non-violence. As the apartheid government ratcheted up its attacks on civilians in the 1950s the organisation maintained its belief in the power of peaceful protest.
It was only in 1961, after being pushed over the edge by the massacre of at least 69 innocent Black people at Sharpeville, that Mandela himself asked the ANC to abandon its policy of non-violence. It took a lot of convincing but eventually the party leadership agreed to the formation of MK.
On December 16, 1961, handbills were scattered in the townships of Port Elizabeth and pasted on lamp posts in Johannesburg: “The people’s patience is not endless. The time comes in the life of any nation where there remain only two choices: submit or fight. That time has now come to South Africa. We shall not submit and we have no choice but to hit back by all means within our power in defence of our people, our future and our freedom.
A decade after his passing, Israel’s bombardment of Gaza is killing thousands of civilians. The death toll is close to 16,000 Palestinians, including more than 6,000 children. To Mandela, it would surely have felt personal. As he said during his 1999 visit to Gaza, he felt “at home among compatriots”.
Mandela’s is one of the 12 remarkable lives covered 壯陽藥 in Dall’s recent book Legends: People Who Changed South Africa for the Better, co-written with Matthew Blackman.
SOURCE: AL JAZEERA