Do not capitulate, you liberate!

You could not turn anywhere without all the major broadcast news stations providing wall-to-wall tribute programs in memory of the great man.

CNN, BBC and AlJazeera strove to outdo each other in coming up with tribute programs. Their presentation were so comprehensive one can only imagine how much work went before hand compiling and canning the packages without appearing to will on his demise while he was still alive. (The Malaysian media too faces this unenviable task as we have a clutch of very senior citizens who are well past their allotted three score years and ten).

Miles of tribute line the route – from Bonn to Belize, Songkhla to San Francisco, as the tears flowed freely. South Africa’s loss was our loss too, indeed this was the whole world’s loss.

No one could have felt anything but a sad sense of great grief that here was a man who still had a lot to contribute, if not by physical deeds then by his sheer magnetic presence. One need not have to travel all the way to Mandela’s native South Africa to get a frisson of the aura of the man.

Perhaps even Mohamad Ali, lovably acknowledged as THE Greatest, THE Loveliest, THE Sweetest might well bow in deference to the man everyone wishes were their own grandpa.

I was still hardly a babe in arms when Mandela began life breaking boulders and shifting stones on Robben Island, banished to the penal island by the perpetrators of Apartheid.

The name itself sounds so grossly indecent – Afrikaans for apartness. Through some wanton illogic, its founding fathers declared that skin colour established one’s deserved station in society and role in human hierarchy.

That became the flimsy basis by which the races were segregated to their allotted homeland ghettoes, allowed only to venture out at the break of dawn only to find themselves scrambling to be shunted back at sunset. That too only at the behest and pleasure of the white master race.

Come to think of it, there are still some societies whose base is deeply rooted in the claim as god’s chosen one – Zionism and the subjugation of the Palestinians immediately springs to mind.

This exercise of one’s exalted place in the world order has meant trampling on human rights and forced eviction of Arabs from their homes.

THE EXERCISE OF MIGHT AT THE EXPENSE OF RIGHTS There’s also the expropriation of property (in any society, that’s outright thievery) as well as the exercise of military might and the callous discharge of M16s on the pretext of defending what amounts to stolen property (that’s murder in even the most skippy of kangaroo courts!).

The distinction of course needs to be drawn between Zionism and Jewry – some of the most implacable opponents of Apartheid were South African Jews whose left wing bent brought them together with their black comrades to become the driving forces behind the African National Congress (ANC).

Malaysia can claim its share in pressuring the Afrikaan bastion of Boer supremacy until the notion of infallibility was breached and finally broken. Our implacable support for the Non-aligned Movement (NAM) efforts to bring about change through the imposition of political and economic sanctions throughout the 70s and 80s showed the developing world’s resolve to bring about change.

Here the developed nations of the western hemisphere should hang their head in shame. Dear Margaret Thatcher when she was Prime Minister regarded the ANC as a terrorist organization and resisted imposing sanctions to safeguard British trade and political interests. (Now with both of them new residents in the great political pasture in the sky, perhaps she can make up for her misplaced intransigence).

I had the opportunity to visit Mandela’s Robben Island after the fall of Apartheid where he began almost three decades of incarceration when I was a mere three-year-old.

One cannot help but marvel at the power of symbolism in the struggle for freedom so effectively orchestrated from behind prison bars.

For within and without South Africa, many anti-apartheid campaigners carried out the struggle to liberate. Names like Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the late liberal parliamentarian Helen Suzman, the sports boycott and political isolation were all weapons that initially ate away at the base that built the system before showing signs of falling apart in the 1980s.

Of course it was the fall of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989 that removed the ogre of Soviet support for the ANC that made its struggle more palatable.

LOSING ALL ONE’S INHIBITIONS

It took the last white president F W De Klerk to lift the ban on the ANC followed by the release of Mandela and his election as South Africa’s first black president to right one huge wrong. With one election, Apartheid was consigned to the dustbin of history!

In one memorable interview reminiscing about those momentous moments, De Klerk who shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Mandela revealed the measure of the Madiba the man. Mandela asked for all parties to dispense with fear at the unknown, having to sacrifice long held positions and dogma. The phrase Mandela used in persuading abandoning apartheid simply with the declaration; “You do not capitulate, you liberate!”

Indeed, this is one advice we as Malaysians can take to heart. The question of racial dominance is one big barrier that needs novel solutions if our nation is ever to truly become one. There is much to imbibe for us so we are strong enough to drop our hang-ups about our racial differences. Just as the white Afrikaans found, this is the path to liberation, never an act of capitulation.

Somehow, all the noise made by the world’s media failed to penetrate the thick wall encasing PWTC, venue for the weeklong UMNO jamboree that took place at about the same time as his demise.