‘Visionary democratic leader’ will leave solid legacy, Edward Ramsamy predicts
Born to illiterate parents in the village of Mvezo on South Africa’s Eastern Cape, Nelson Mandela grew up to be perhaps the world’s most powerful symbol of liberation. He shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993 with F.W. deKlerk for unflinching activism against apartheid; the following year, Mandela went on to become the first black president of South Africa.
Today, the world mourns the passing of the civil rights leader, who died at the age of 95. Rutgers Today spoke with Edward Ramsamy, professor of Africana Studies at Rutgers and a member of the graduate faculty of geography, about the legacy his fellow countryman leaves.
Among Ramsamy’s chief fields of study are the comparative politics of race relations in South Africa and the United States. He has published widely on regional integration in South Africa as well as racial, ethnic and national identity in post-apartheid South Africa. Ramsamy received a Ph.D. in urban policy and public planning from Rutgers as well as a master’s in city and regional planning from the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy. He did his undergraduate work at the University of Durban-Westville in South Africa.
Rutgers Today: You were born in Stanger, on South Africa’s east coast, coming here at the age of 24 for graduate studies. Growing up under an apartheid regime, you heard about Mandela’s struggles against a long-entrenched state-sponsored form of racial oppression. What impact did his story have on you?
Edward Ramsamy: Stanger was near the home of Albert Luthuli, the revered South African leader who won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1960 for his peaceful resistance to apartheid. My family would talk often of Luthuli as they did of Gandhi, who had also lived in South Africa and fought against white supremacy decades earlier.
Before I was 10, my family visited Cape Town. On the top of Table Mountain, a promontory overlooking the city, I noticed a small island in Table Bay, a few kilometers off the coast, and asked if we could go to the pretty island. A strange hush fell over my family. My uncle explained it was Robben Island, and we could not visit it because it was a maximum security prison. He told me Mandela and other leaders of the apartheid resistance were serving life sentences there for treason. I tried to digest this terrible news as a child. That trip awakened me to the heroic role Mandela played in South Africa’s freedom struggle. He has inspired me ever since.
Rutgers Today: What aspects of Mandela’s youth and upbringing made him such an uncompromising opponent of racial inequality?
Edward Ramsamy: Mandela hails from Xhosa royalty. He said he learned to listen to differing points of view by watching elders in his village deliberate community affairs. Mandela, however, wasn’t always the wise leader he turned out to be. As a young man, he was a narrow African nationalist who believed non-Africans such as whites, Indians and the so-called “couloureds” had no place in any political order in South Africa. His world view expanded when he moved out of his rural homestead to Johannesburg. Mandela began his transformation into a visionary democratic leader when he encountered radical progressive thinkers in this metropolis.
Rutgers Today: Mandela joined the African National Congress in 1942, later serving as its president. What role did this organization play in changing South Africa’s political and social landscape?
Edward Ramsamy: The African National Congress (ANC) of South Africa was the continent’s oldest national liberation movement. The ANC initially employed non-violent Gandhian tactics to fight white supremacy and apartheid in South Africa. Mandela was part of a group within the ANC during the 1950s and 1960s which felt the methods being used were futile given the refusal of the white government to accommodate black democratic aspirations.
Mandela spearheaded the creation of a military wing within the ANC, but his efforts were short-lived; he and other ANC leaders were captured and charged with treason in 1963. South African authorities initially contemplated the death penalty for Mandela, but decided on life imprisonment because they feared further international isolation. The ANC was banned in South Africa after Mandela’s arrest, and operated from exile. Protest erupted again during the late1960s and early 1970s as the population as Steven Biko’s ideas ignited the 1976 Soweto Uprising, which shook the foundations of apartheid. The South African government murdered Biko in 1977, but the resistance he inspired led to Mandela’s release in 1990.
Rutgers Today: In 1988, more than 600 million people worldwide watched the Mandela birthday tribute from London. Songs, movies and television shows lauded him. How did one man so captured people’s imagination?
Edward Ramsamy: When Mandela was sentenced to life in prison, many feared he and other freedom fighters would be forgotten, both in South Africa and abroad, because the South African government was intent on obliterating their names from the collective consciousness. However, during his 28 years in prison, Mandela became the icon of the South African struggle for several reasons. Within South Africa, his wife, Winnie, struggled tirelessly to keep alive her husband’s legacy despite threats from the white government. Internationally, Enuga Reddy, a United Nations official, kept up the vigil with the ANC in exile and other international anti-apartheid activists to keep Mandela in the public discourse. By the mid-1980s, Reddy’s campaigns had grown into a transnational solidarity campaign for Mandela’s release and the end of apartheid. Rutgers was a part of this effort.
Rutgers Today: Why did Mandela succeed in building a foundation of freedom in his country when others failed?
Edward Ramsamy: During the 1970s and 1980s, many of us thought apartheid would end in a violent cataclysm. We were awestruck as Mandela’s astute, visionary leadership guided the nation through a relatively peaceful transition. In addition to showing that conflict can be resolved through reconciliation and negotiation, Mandela, as president, set the crucial precedent of deferring to the South African constitution, even when the courts ruled against his party and tempered the power of the presidency.
-- Fredda Sacharow