Revenge. Retribution. Rivers of blood.
That
nightmare scenario was feared by many South Africans as the 1994 national
elections unfolded. Generations of harsh white control were finally ending,
decades of violent racial apartheid had been overturned and multiracial,
democratic rule had arrived. But would the long-oppressed black majority demand
a terrible day of reckoning?
“I
was in South Africa in the days leading up to the election,” recalls a Southern
Baptist missionary. “There was near-certainty that the country would explode in
violence and descend into civil war. Those horrors were averted because one man
who was intimate with injustice had the wisdom to realize that retribution was
fatally poisonous and redemption a healing balm.”
That
man was Nelson Mandela.
The
former political prisoner, elected president that fateful year, prevented a
descent into violence by the moral force of his call for reconciliation. His
words could not be ignored, because Mandela had lived them during 27 years of
isolation and hard labor as an inmate in the windswept prison at Robben Island.
Years before he was released, he had begun negotiating a gradual end to
apartheid with the South African regime.
His
1990 release sparked national euphoria and worldwide celebration, but peace in
South Africa was anything but assured.
What
happened to the young firebrand who, decades before, had embraced armed
struggle to change South Africa when civil disobedience failed?
He
never renounced the use of violence to overthrow apartheid, but he sought to avoid
it. Suffering, solitude and study tempered and deepened Mandela during his long
years in prison. Meanwhile, international pressure — and the tide of history —
eventually forced the white regime to negotiate. When the moment came, Mandela
the savvy politician was ready. He knew times were turning in favor of his
cause, but he also knew the nation had to put anger behind, as he had worked to
do in his own life behind bars.
“As
I walked out the door toward the gate that would lead to my freedom, I knew if
I didn't leave my bitterness and hatred behind, I’d still be in prison,” he
said upon his release in 1990.
And
after serving one historic term as president, he voluntarily stepped down in
1999 — a rarity in a continent of strongmen — and spent his remaining years
fighting against AIDS and advocating for freedom and international
reconciliation.
“He
led a country in transition with grace, forgiveness, humility and dignity,” recalls
Kim Davis, a Southern Baptist author and former Africa missionary who witnessed
those historic days close up. “I feel privileged and grateful to have lived
there, and President Mandela was an inspiration to our family.”
The
influence of faith on Mandela’s post-prison philosophy of reconciliation is
open to debate. His mother was a strong Christian believer. He was baptized as
a Methodist in his teens. Like many African political leaders of the
post-colonial era, his early life and education were strongly influenced by the
impact of missionary work. “The Church was as concerned with this world as the
next: I saw that virtually all of the achievements of Africans seemed to have
come about through the missionary work of the Church,” he wrote in his memoir, Long
Walk to Freedom.
There’s
no need to idealize Mandela, as many have done, to appreciate his greatness.
The smiling grandfather of later years was once the angry young revolutionary.
He helped found the ANC’s military wing, which carried out many bombing attacks
against the regime. He once was regarded as a dangerous enemy of the United
States. The South African struggle, like many national conflicts, became a
proxy in the larger Cold War struggle between East and West. The Soviet Union
supported Mandela’s ANC. Like other world leaders, he sometimes made
questionable decisions. He unapologetically supported several notorious
international tyrants. He failed to solve some of South Africa’s deepest
problems, including violence and widespread poverty, which continue to afflict
the nation.
Mandela
himself was keenly aware of his own humanity. He resisted the secular sainthood
many tried to impose upon him.
“We
are told that a saint is a sinner who keeps on trying to be clean,” he wrote.
“One may be a villain for three-quarters of his life and be canonized because
he lived a holy life for the remaining quarter of that life. In real life we
deal, not with gods, but with ordinary humans like ourselves: men and women who
are full of contradictions, who are stable and fickle, strong and weak, famous
and infamous, people in whose bloodstream the muckworm battles daily with
potent pesticides.”
He
was human, but he changed the world through perseverance, forgiveness and a
resolute refusal to harbor hatred in his heart.
“People
must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love,
for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite,” he said.
That
is a truth the world desperately needs. The church needs it, too, especially in
Africa and other places where the fires of persecution are burning.
“The
death of Mandela may be the axis for predicting the racial futures for many
African countries, particularly sub-Saharan Africa, [which] is a deeply defined
racial and tribal-based region,” observes Nik Ripken, a longtime missionary in
Africa who has interviewed persecuted Christians in many countries. “Many
churches are asking, in relation to [attacks on Christians by Islamic militants
in] Nigeria and the Somali fundamentalist bombing of the mall in Kenya, if they
will continue to ‘turn the other cheek.’ Pastors and religious leaders have
said to me that perhaps it is time to only turn one’s cheek ‘seven times.’
After that it is time that if one bombs a church then a mosque goes, if one
kills a Christian then a Muslim life is taken.
“Will
African believers follow Jesus, and the example of Mandela, and turn the other
cheek ‘77 times’ — or align themselves racially? Will they slaughter pigs and
toss them into mosques, or be willing to love their enemies as commanded by
Jesus? Mandela chose the high road of forgiving one’s enemies. May his example
not be forgotten in all the noise.”
