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Today, July 18th, is designated by the United Nations as the first annual international holiday honoring former South African president Nelson Mandela, on the occasion of his 92nd birthday. South African design blogger Lana explains the purpose of the commemoration well:
"Nelson Mandela has given 67 years of his life fighting for the rights of humanity so the idea is to now give 67 minutes of your time and help someone less fortunate in your local community."
If you are too young to remember what South Africa was like and what it meant to the world before 1990, it might be difficult to appreciate how remarkable it is that this man commands such widespread love and admiration that he can convene a council of world leaders dedicated to peace-making, challenge entrenched attitudes and enlist unlikely allies in a common struggle against the scourge of AIDS, and inspire tributes such as this statement from US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, which reads, in part:
"Nelson Mandela is a hero to people of all backgrounds and experience who strive for freedom and progress. His story is filled with amazing strength and integrity of spirit."
It's a day for celebration and gratitude to a man who, although born as Rolihlahla Madiba to a family of royal lineage, grew up under a steadily-tightening noose of racial oppression that climaxed with the South African National Party's imposition of apartheid law in 1948. Apartheid forced South Africans to carry passes designating their race, and it relegated black citizens to overcrowded "homelands" that were unfit for cultivating food or much of anything else.
Mandela was in his 20s when he and fellow students Oliver Tambo and Walter Sissulu joined the African National Congress Youth League, ratcheting up the 32-year-old organization's human rights efforts with acts of non-violence civil disobedience and calls for a fully democratic state. In the 1950s, an increasingly defiant ANC published its Freedom Charter and Mandela burned his passbook. The government struck back, most notoriously during the March 21, 1960 Sharpeville Massacre, in which government troops fired on a group of 7,000 peaceful protesters against the pass laws, killing 69 and wounding 168.;
In response, Mandela and other leaders within the ANC dropped their pledge of non-violence and began a campaign of sabotage and armed resistance. In 1964, Mandela was convicted of treason and sentenced to life in prison. Rethabile at Black Looks has part of the statement he made at that trial as he faced what most observers assumed would be a death sentence, complemented by a poem that serves as a breathtaking coda to his powerful testimony.
"During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if need be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die."
Mandela and with fellow ANC leader Sissulu would spend the next 26 as prisoner 46664 on Robben Island, much of that time in solitary confinement. He endured private grief, including the death of his mother and oldest son, and he was barred from their funerals. To the consternation of the leaders of the apartheid regime, his legend grew during his confinement, and along with it, so did sympathy for the anti-apartheid cause. An international sanctions movement rose up. South African sports teams were banned from the Olympics and other international contests. Scholars and entertainers boycotted the country.
In the face of these pressures, the Afrikaner regime went to brutal lengths to hold on to power. Journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault recalled what she saw while reporting from there in the mid-1980s:
"I could not have imagined the lengths to which the apartheid state had gone to and was going to go to
