Compassion Speaks: Nelson Mandela, in Memoriam

by M. Doretta Cornell, RDC

In October of 1998, I stood in the Robben Island prison yard where Nelson Mandela and many other “most dangerous” criminals of South Africa spent much of their time.  It was a wide, pale grey emptiness of rough stone, surrounded by hills of the same.  For long hours each day, in heat and in rain, the men chopped rocks and piled them on one side of the field.  When they finished, they chopped the rocks into smaller pieces, and fiannly to gravel, moving the pieces to the other side.

Colored (Indian or mixed race) prisoners wore long trousers; the Blacks were permitted only shorts. The rock chips were hard and sharp, slashing the arms and legs of the prisoners.  All worked under the glare of armed soldiers, who could and would shoot, given any perceived or actual disruption of the prison routine.

We also were permitted to stand in Mandela’s cell and in a larger common cell, where the men gathered at night.  Here, those who could read and write huddled under the door with its small wire-laced window – the only place the guards could not see fully – to teach the illiterate these basics skills. They scrawled on scraps of paper torn from the bags of cement from building roads.  This, of course, was strictly forbidden, and harsh penalties imposed.

All of the guides on this tour of Robben Island, by then a museum, had formerly been imprisoned on Robben Island.  For me, one of the most memorable moments of the trip was the answer that Mr. Elias Mzamba, our guide, gave in answer to the question posed by one of our (almost all-white) group: “Don’t you hate all white people?”

Mr. Mzamba paused for only a moment and told us he had hated white people while he was in prison.  Once he was released, however, he learned that white people from other countries had been sending clothing and money to support his child and his child’s mother. “And so,” he said, “I saw that I could not hate white people.” 

Nelson Mandela was a great man who accomplished great things in leading his people out of the era of apartheid.  We rightly honor him for his work and for his leadership, and for the example he held up for the world.  But he was not some oddity among  more common souls.   He came from a people who had a deep history of reconciliation, of dealing with those who committed atrocities and enfolding those brothers and sisters back into the community.  

Mandela’s years in prison, and the long years of fighting, thought, debate, and dreaming for a country in which they could be full participants, led him and many in South Africa to believe that the “new South Africa” could not come into existence if the Black community just reversed the order of apartheid.  All South Africans – Black, British, Afrikaans, Indian, mixed race – must be included in the revived republic.  All South Africans must be part of what the Blacks had been forbidden.  Only then would there be no more apart-heid, separation, not natural but human-created and human-enforced.

May we all come to see even our greatest enemies as capable of reconciliation and worthy of being offered the hand of reconciliation.  What an appropriate preparation for the Advent of the Prince of Peace.