Mandela: Messiah of Poor or Puppet of Exploiters? #2

~ Baba ~

MANDELA:

MESSIAH OF POOR OR PUPPET OF EXPLOITERS?

~ Part 2 ~

Note: If you are very emotional or very attached to a particular point of view, then you may want to pause before reading this, or not read it at all. If you easily become emotionally charged or have a tendency for knee-jerk reactions, here again you may want refrain from reading. Those who over-react and fail to keep calm demeanor will not be able to understand this subject matter. This posting presents an article by Reuters - a credible news agency that engages in investigative reporting, not hearsay. Before reading please think whether you can manage this sensitive issue or not. A rational and calm mind is needed; those who get reacted easily must have control over their emotions, otherwise they may not be able to manage these hard facts. Those who do not want to hear "the other side of the story" should not read.

We should not forget that these days the media is controlled by capitalists - so the media does not present the plight of the impoverished masses. It is very rare for the news media to take the side of the exploited people - rather they present the stance of the exploiters. As we know, Nelson Mandela is universally praised as a great hero and veritable saviour. One of the key reasons for this is that Mandela himself maintained the economic inequality in South Africa where white exploiters maintained sheer and utter domination of South Africa's natural and financial resources, including the vast gold-mining operations. In result, the capitalist owned media agencies presented Mandela as a great agent of peace and equality. When in fact the truth is that Mandela protected the advantages of the exploiters. This reality is not widely known because the capitalist media covers it up, but that is important for all to know about. Please read the following.

Mandela's legacy: peace, but poverty for many blacks

Thu Dec 5, 2013
By Ed Cropley

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) – In the 10 years after he withdrew from public life, Nelson Mandela divided his time between a mansion in one of Johannesburg’s wealthiest suburbs and his ancestral home in Qunu, a village in South Africa’s impoverished eastern Cape.

The contrast could not have been starker.

In one, his neighbours were cast in the image of the white “Rand Lords”, the mining magnates and bankers who built the sprawling city – and Africa’s biggest economy – from the vast gold reserves in the rock beneath their feet.

In the other, they were black peasant farmers living in thatched “rondavel” huts and eking out a living on windswept hillsides in scenes that have hardly changed in centuries, let alone the two decades since the end of apartheid.

While few query Mandela’s achievement in dragging South Africa back from the brink of civil war in the early 1990s and brokering a peaceful end to three centuries of white dominance, tougher questions are being asked of the country he leaves behind.

Despite more than 10 years of affirmative action to redress the balance under the banner of “black economic empowerment”, South Africa remains one of the world’s most unequal societies and whites still control huge swathes of the economy.

In the words of leading trade unionist Zwelinzima Vavi, its structure is akin to an Irish coffee – black at the bottom, with some white froth and a sprinkling of chocolate on the top.

On average, a white household earns six times more than a black one, and nearly one in three blacks is unemployed, compared with one in 20 whites.

Such ratios are fodder for critics of the 1994 settlement that brought the curtain down on nearly half a century of institutionalised white-minority rule and saw Mandela anointed South Africa’s first black president.

The numbers also support the anecdotal evidence from wealthy urban neighbourhoods – including Mandela’s Houghton – where, 19 years after the birth of his “Rainbow Nation”, most of the black people to be seen are housemaids, security guards or gardeners.

“Mandela has gone a bit too far in doing good to the non-black communities, really in some cases at the expense of (blacks),” Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe said in a documentary aired on South African television in May 2013.

“That’s being too saintly, too good.”

POLITICAL OR ECONOMIC POWER?

The defenders of Mandela’s settlement note that Mugabe’s violent seizure of white-owned farms in neighbouring Zimbabwe from 2000 triggered an eight-year economic collapse and confirmed his fall in the eyes of outsiders from respected liberation hero to international pariah.

Yet his criticism of Mandela finds echoes in some corners of the African National Congress (ANC), the 101-year-old liberation movement that joined forces with the unions and the Communist Party to topple apartheid.

In a 2010 interview with the wife of British author V.S. Naipaul, the anti-apartheid firebrand and “Mother of the Nation” Winnie Madikizela-Mandela accused her former husband of selling out after being broken by his 27 years in apartheid prisons.

“Mandela did go to prison and he went in there as a burning young revolutionary. But look what came out,” she was quoted as saying.

“Mandela let us down. He agreed to a bad deal for the blacks. Economically, we are still on the outside. The economy is very much ‘white’. It has a few token blacks, but so many who gave their life in the struggle have died unrewarded.”

Even among academics, there is broad acceptance that in its sparring with then-president FW de Klerk in the early 1990s, the ANC under Mandela, a self-confessed economic novice, focused too much on the quest for political rather than economic power.

In less polite terms, the ANC’s stance translated into a quip popular at the dinner parties of wealthy whites: “We’ll give them the vote but keep the banks.”

William Gumede, a professor at Wits Business School in Johannesburg, said it was wrong to argue that Mandela sold out.

“However, the economic negotiations were not as robust as the political ones,” he said.

“There was a glib acceptance among most in the ANC that all they needed to do was capture political power, and then they could transform the economy. It was a simplistic argument, and it was also the Mandela argument.”

South Africa and the world watched in awe when, on February 11, 1990, Mandela left Cape Town’s Victor Verster prison and raised his fist in salute to the crowds as he stepped out on his and the nation’s “Long Walk to Freedom” – the title of his subsequent autobiography.

The start of a momentous political transition, it was also a key moment in the evolution of a cult of Mandela both at home and abroad.

MAN AND MYTH

In 1993, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, jointly with de Klerk, and in 1995 he won over all but the most diehard right-wingers as he saluted the overwhelmingly white Springbok side that won the Rugby World Cup in Johannesburg.

He is immortalised in a stained glass window in Soweto’s giant Regina Mundi church; statues of him dancing, boxing or raising his fist are dotted across the country; and in 2012 the central bank issued a set of bank notes bearing his face.

The announcement about the notes came on February 11, the 22nd anniversary of his release from prison.

In such an atmosphere, it was perhaps inevitable that some episodes of his single five-year term as president are glossed over.

His close personal friendship with Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi drew criticism – and a fierce rebuttal from Mandela, who said: “Those who feel irritated by our friendship with President Gaddafi can go jump in the pool.”

The 2010 “blood diamonds” testimony of British supermodel Naomi Campbell at a Hague war crimes tribunal also shone an uncomfortable light on a dinner Mandela hosted in 1997 for Liberian warlord Charles Taylor, whose presence at the table called into question South Africa’s ‘ethical’ foreign policy.

Then there is the infamous ‘Arms Deal’, a $5 billion defence equipment contract that erupted into a massive scandal for Mandela’s successor, Thabo Mbeki, and remains the defining episode in the ANC’s slide from post-apartheid grace.

Amid fierce criticism of Mbeki and the current president, Jacob Zuma, also embroiled in the furore, many South Africans have chosen to forget that the deal was first announced in 1998, when Mandela was still in office.

On the streets of the sprawling black township of Soweto, where police and disgruntled unemployed youngsters still face off in sporadic, violent protests over poor housing and public services, there are plenty who do not buy the Mandela myth.

“Mandela kept on saying: ‘I am here for the people, I am the servant of the nation.’ What did he do? He signed papers that allowed white people to keep the mines and the farms,” said 49-year-old Majozi Pilane, who runs a roadside stall selling sweets and cigarettes.

“He did absolutely nothing for all the poor people of this country.”

(Additional reporting by Tiisetso Motsoeneng; Editing by Kevin Liffey)

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HERE BELOW ARE SOME OF BABA'S RELATED TEACHINGS:

DO NOT FORGIVE THOSE WHO DID COLLECTIVE HARM

"In collective life one has no right to forgive anyone; in individual life you can extend maximum forgiveness – rather, the more forgiveness, the better. Forgiveness is something personal; it is not a collective matter. Suppose you are an inhabitant of India. If someone harms the collective life of India, you must not forgive them. Likewise, as you belong to the entire human race, you must not forgive anyone who harms humanity." (AMIWL-11, Taking the Opposite Stance in Battle)

BLUNDER: MANDELA SOUGHT POLITICAL GAIN NOT ECONOMIC JUSTICE

JUST LIKE WITH INDIAN INDEPENDENCE MOVEMENT

India’s Fight for Independence

In this fight for independence, the Indian leaders committed a blunder. They should have engaged themselves in an economic fight instead of starting a political movement. The British took advantage of this blunder of the Indian leaders...

leaders of India should have started a struggle for economic independence instead of launching a political movement. All Indians could have fought together unitedly, there being no Hindu, Muslim, Punjabi or Marathi feelings in this economic struggle, and as a result an anti-exploitation sentiment could have been developed in India. This sentiment could have made Indians stronger...

when India would have gained economic independence, Hindus and Muslims would have lived together as brothers and sisters in undivided India. The fight for economic independence would have brought political independence also. There might have been some delay in it, but political independence would have surely come...

Had they started a movement for economic independence instead of accepting the partition of India, it would have been possible to form a united and independent India...

The economic struggle could not have remained confined to British exploitation only, but would have extended to the Indian exploiters (social, economic, psychological). When the British would have realized that their exploitation was not going to continue, they would have been compelled to grant political independence to India, and with political independence exploitation by the local people would have come to an end also. But the Hindu and Muslim leaders came from the bourgeois class and so they did not like this idea. They wanted liberty keeping capitalism (social, economic, psychological, etc.) alive. For this reason they accepted the political independence of divided India. (To the Patriots)

ONE SHOULD NOT FORGET

We should not forget that Prout is the voice of those who are voiceless. Prout always supports the exploited mass - not the exploiters. The following article does just that - it gives voice to the voiceless, exploited mass. It reveals how the poor are suffering due to severe exploitation at the hands of the capitalist elite. The majority of people are living in dire poverty while a few wallow in absolute luxury. Still today, the native people are working for slave wages doing menial tasks for the exploiters. How can we overlook this situation. Mandela himself supported that status quo - he did nothing to end this economic tyranny.

The European exploiters reached South Africa, ruled for centuries, captured the abundant natural resources, and made native Africans their slaves by stripping them of their rights etc. Just recently, the native people achieved political freedom (1994) but not economic freedom. Prout demands economic justice as well as political freedom. That is why we are highlighting the hypocrisy of Mr. Mandela - who deceived his own, native peoples into thinking he was for them, when in fact he was upholding the status quo - i.e. the stance of those exploiters.

Namaskar,
Mahadeva
M.S. Wolcott (Cape Town)

Note 1: LINK TO EARLIER LETTER ON THIS TOPIC

http://anandamarganewsbulletin.blogspot.com/2013/12/mandela-messiah-of-poor-or-became.html