NELSON MANDELA : GANDHI, THE SACRED WARRIOR
■ Both Gandhi and I suffered colonial oppression,
and both of us mobilized our respective peoples against governments that
violated our freedoms. The Gandhian influence dominated freedom
struggles on the African continent right up to the 1960s because of the power it
generated and the unity it forged among the apparently powerless. Nonviolence
was the official stance of all major African coalitions, and the South African
A.N.C. remained implacably opposed to violence for most of its existence. Gandhi remained committed to nonviolence; I
followed the Gandhian strategy for as long as I could, but then there came a
point in our struggle when the brute force of the oppressor could no longer be
countered through passive resistance alone. We founded Unkhonto we Sizwe and
added a military dimension to our struggle. Even then, we chose sabotage because
it did not involve the loss of life, and it offered the best hope for future
race relations. Militant action became part of the African agenda officially
supported by the Organization of African Unity (O.A.U.) following my address to
the Pan-African Freedom Movement of East and Central Africa (PAFMECA) in 1962,
in which I stated, "Force is the only language the imperialists can hear,
and no country became free without some sort of violence." Gandhi himself never ruled out violence
absolutely and unreservedly. He conceded the necessity of arms in certain
situations. He said, "Where choice is set between cowardice and violence, I
would advise violence... I prefer to use arms in defense of honor rather than
remain the vile witness of dishonor ..." Violence and nonviolence are not mutually
exclusive; it is the predominance of the one or the other that labels a
struggle. Gandhi arrived in South Africa in 1893 at the
age of 23. Within a week he collided head on with racism. His immediate response
was to flee the country that so degraded people of color, but then his inner
resilience overpowered him with a sense of mission, and he stayed to redeem the
dignity of the racially exploited, to pave the way for the liberation of the
colonized the world over and to develop a blueprint for a new social order. He left 21 years later, a near maha atma (great
soul). There is no doubt in my mind that by the time he was violently removed
from our world, he had transited into that state. He was no ordinary leader. There are those who
believe he was divinely inspired, and it is difficult not to believe with them.
He dared to exhort nonviolence in a time when the violence of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki had exploded on us; he exhorted morality when science, technology and
the capitalist order had made it redundant; he replaced self-interest with group
interest without minimizing the importance of self. In fact, the interdependence
of the social and the personal is at the heart of his philosophy. He seeks the
simultaneous and interactive development of the moral person and the moral
society. - Nelson Mandela.
India is Gandhi's country of birth; South
Africa his country of adoption. He was both an Indian and a South African
citizen. Both countries contributed to his intellectual and moral genius, and he
shaped the liberatory movements in both colonial theaters. He is the archetypal anticolonial
revolutionary. His strategy of noncooperation, his assertion that we can be
dominated only if we cooperate with our dominators, and his nonviolent
resistance inspired anticolonial and antiracist movements internationally in our
century.
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