Win Yourself, Win the Bully, Win Your Freedom : The Unheard Voices

As he insinuated himself into these two dubious personages' trust each was regarded as a monster by the world at large during the fraught s , he consolidated his authority over his fellow political prisoners, as he would later over the black population. I interviewed Coetsee about those meetings and, as Reinders had done, he wept at the recollection of Mandela, whom he defined as "the incarnation of the great Roman virtues — dignitas, gravitas, honestas".

Barnard was incapable of weeping but he came close, referring to Mandela always during the seven hours that we spoke as "the old man", as if he were talking about his own father. Released from prison on 11 February , Mandela went on a triumphant progress around South Africa, preaching a finely tuned message of reconciliation and defiance. No Gandhi, he refused to call off the "armed struggle", symbolic as it had largely been, until the government gave unequivocal signs of committing itself to one-person, one-vote democracy.

He had no choice, for President FW de Klerk, whom he graciously and shrewdly described as "a man of integrity", initially imagined he would get away with some sort of sui generis, semi-democratic, "minority rights" formula that would secure and perpetuate white privilege.

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The negotiations that went on over the next four years were tough, but not nearly as tough as what was going on out in the townships, especially those on the periphery of Johannesburg. The last kicks of the apartheid beast expressed themselves in a concerted attempt to derail the transition by shadowy forces in the security establishment in alliance with the conservative black organisation Inkatha, whose rightwing Zulu leader, Mangosuthu Buthelezi, a beneficiary of apartheid's Bantustan "homeland" system, was as fearful of ANC rule as any white man. The slaughter in Soweto and elsewhere reached a scale not seen in South Africa since the Boer war, nearly years earlier.

Mandela railed publicly, raged at De Klerk in private and had to be restrained by colleagues in the ANC national executive from not calling off talks altogether; from resorting — hot anger at times getting the better of his judgment — to all-out confrontation. Yet when the supreme test came he kept his cool and gave his blessing to a breakthrough compromise whereby the country's first democratically elected government would be a coalition, with ministries dispensed in proportion to the percentage of votes each party won.

He reached out to, and to a large degree pacified, the white population by persuading his own people to make another major compromise on a matter close to all South African hearts. It was at a meeting of the ANC's national executive four months before the historic elections of April There was never any doubt that the ANC would win the poll; the issue on the table was what should be the position of the new government on the delicate question of the national anthem?

The old anthem was clearly unacceptable. Die Stem was a sombre martial tune that praised God and celebrated the triumphs of Boer leaders Piet Retief, Andries Pretorius and the rest of the "trekkers" as they drove upwards through South Africa in the 19th century, crushing black resistance. The unofficial anthem of black South Africa, Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika, was the richly soulful expression of a long-suffering people yearning to be free. The meeting had just got started when an assistant walked in to tell Mandela that he had a phone call from a head of state.

He left the room and the 30 or so men and women of the ANC's supreme decision-making body carried on without him. The consensus was overwhelmingly in favour of scrapping Die Stem and replacing it with Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika. Tokyo Sexwale, the former Robben islander and now leading member of the ANC's national executive committee NEC , remembered vividly the mood at the meeting during Mandela's absence. We are singing Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika in this country and that is that.

We were having a great time! He said, 'Well, I am sorry. I don't want to be rude, but …' — my God, we all wanted to hide — 'I think I should express myself on this motion. I never thought seasoned people such as yourselves would take a decision of such magnitude on such an important matter without even waiting for the president of your organisation'. And then Mandela, as sternly schoolmasterish as his fellow ANC leaders had ever seen him, put across his point of view.

With the stroke of a pen, you would take a decision to destroy the very — the only — basis that we are building upon: The men and women of the national executive of the ANC, many of them household names in South Africa, regarded as heroes and heroines of the struggle, cringed with embarrassment. Mandela proposed instead that, for the foreseeable future, South Africa should have two anthems, to be played one immediately after the other at official ceremonies, from presidential inaugurations to international rugby matches: Die Stem and Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika.

Morally defeated, overwhelmed by the logic of Mandela's argument, the freedom fighters unanimously caved in.

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Sexwale laughed out aloud years later at the discomfiture he had felt, at the manner in which Mandela had outmanoeuvred them all. I think the matter is clear …' Nobody raised a finger to object. The national executive capitulated in the face of Mandela's wrath because they understood immediately that their vindictiveness on the white anthem had been childish, that the far-sighted political response to the dilemma was the mature generous one Mandela advocated.

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But they deferred to his judgment also because ever since the masterly performances he delivered immediately after leaving prison they had come to accept that "the old man" was far more skilful than any of them in the modern craft of political symbolism. The issue of the anthem was all about the creation of a national mood, of persuading politically by moving people's emotions. That, as his fellow ANC leaders had come to see, was the essence of his political genius, where he outclassed them all.

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He himself told me during one of our conversations in his home that he had lectured the NEC on winning over the Afrikaners, on showing respect for their symbols, on going out of your way to employ a few words of Afrikaans at the beginning of a speech. He did the same, with even more spectacular success, one year into his presidency at the rugby World Cup, staged in South Africa for the first time.

Here he managed the unlikely feat of persuading his own people to back the South African Springboks, transforming one of the most hated symbols of apartheid oppression into an instrument of unity. Despite the fact that only one of the players in the national team was not white, the black population, at Mandela's bidding, accepted the Springboks as their own, as fitting representatives of the new national flag. Unforgettably, at the final in Johannesburg, which South Africa won, the almost entirely white crowd the rugby set had hardly been in the vanguard of racial enlightenment during the apartheid years rose to bellow out his name, "Nelson!

On that day, probably the happiest — and certainly the most patriotically united — in South African history, Mandela achieved his twin mission impossible of political leadership. He persuaded a whole people, in this case the most racially divided people on Earth, to change their minds.

Nelson Mandela: the freedom fighter who embraced his enemies | World news | The Guardian

Mandela's chief purpose during his five years as president was to cement the foundations of the new democrac and banish the prospect of a terrorist counter-revolution by the heavily armed far right. South Africa, for all the problems it faces today problems which it shares with dozens of other countries, having shed the epic and awful singularity that once set it apart from the rest of the world , is a stable democracy, far more observant of the rule of law and freedom of speech than, say, Russia, another country that put paid to years of tyranny at more or less the same time.

It has been said, and will be for a long time probably, that he might have done more to redress the economic injustices of apartheid.

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Perhaps, but in a country with a high birthrate and no economic growth figures to match, it was a practically impossible challenge. The best that could be said was that Mandela's presidency saw the emergence of a potent new social phenomenon, unimaginable in the apartheid years — a flourishing black middle class. He could have set about a wholesale redistribution of the nation's wealth, but that would almost certainly have provoked what he most feared, a racial civil war.

The economy left from that would have been an economy of the graveyard. It was democracy that Mandela fought for during the better part of his life and, once that was achieved, his priority became peace. The sort of peace he brokered with John Reinders, whose treatment by Mandela shines a light on the great lesson he teaches all people everywhere, whether in political leadership or in less ambitious spheres of life.

Nelson Mandela: the freedom fighter who embraced his enemies

He was utterly consistent in what he practised and what he preached. He spoke of justice and of respect and he treated all people, however lowly their condition or however irrelevant to his political or personal objectives, with equal consideration. A year after Mandela had left the presidency, Reinders, who continued serving his successor Thabo Mbeki, received a phone call from his former boss.

Would he and his family be available to come to lunch at Mandela's home the following Sunday? Reinders turned up with his wife and two sons expecting to be part of a large gathering. But it was only his family that Mandela expected. At the beginning of the lunch Mandela raised a glass and, addressing himself to Reinders's wife and children, apologised for having deprived them for so long of the company of their husband and father: I once asked Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a Nobel peace prize winner like Mandela, and one of the people who knew him most intimately, if he could define Mandela's greatest quality.

Tutu thought for a moment and then — triumphantly — uttered one word: The book a collection of thoughts was based on my own experiences during this fast growing rate of youth problems of abortion, crime and even suicide caused by the Bullies. Not only that, I have seen the destruction, devastated effect of the killer whale: The book attempt to deal with the themes of identifying your early warning sign: Sort out problems before you reach the point of no return. Shyness is not a Character Flaw! Witty Comebacks for Idiotic Insults. How to Avoid Frustration and not be a Jerk. The Right Choice Now: How to decide if your relationship will last for life.

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