Following South Africa’s 10-day period of mourning for Nelson Mandela, The Hewitt Times commences its commemoration of the life of the great Madiba. This is the first installment of a three-part series.
Nelson Mandela was South Africa’s leading fighter against the apartheid system, and he is
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known for retaliating against this practice by taking both a peaceful and violent approach.
After the election of an Afrikaner government in 1948 in South Africa that imposed apartheid sanctions designed to restrict the rights of black South Africans, Mandela became involved in the politics of his country by joining the African National Congress Youth League (ANCYL). At first, the ANYCL planned to restore rights to black South Africans without violence. Affiliates of ANYCL often boycotted against businesses owned by supporters of apartheid in order to tamper with the nation’s economy; they hoped that this would show that the country could not exist prosperously under apartheid.
In 1960, police opened fire against peaceful black protesters in the township of Sharpeville; this was when Mandela realized that fighting peacefully would not help the blacks achieve their goal of being granted full
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citizenship, especially when the ANC was being met with violence from the opposing party. The following year, Mandela founded the Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), which was a section of the African National Congress (ANC) equipped with weapons to use against the Afrikaner government.
To increase his knowledge and prowess in fighting , Mandela underwent guerilla training in Algeria and sent supporters of the ANC to China to receive training from Mao Tse-Tung, a Chinese revolutionary.
For his use of violence, Mandela was considered to be a terrorist by world leaders and remained on the U.S. terrorist watch list until 2008. The late U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher commented in 1987, “The ANC is a typical terrorist organisation … Anyone who thinks it is going to run the government in South Africa is living in cloud-cuckoo land.”
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On December 16, 1961, the Umkhonto we Sizwe launched five bomb attacks on power stations and government buildings in the cities of Port Elizabeth, Durban and Johannesburg, South Africa.
Police raided an ANC underground location in Rivonia, South Africa, where evidence was found to convict Mandela and other activists of sabotage, treason, and conspiracy; the verdict for Mandela and his associates was life in prison.