It would be inaccurate to look for a Gandhi or a Luther King, Jr., in Mandela (18 July 1918—5 December 2013). Mandela wasn’t a principled non-violent leader with a real conviction concerning the philosophy of passive resistance. However, he was a representative of an ethical-political leadership, which didn’t separate between politics and ethics within the name of a Machiavellian realism or a Leninist vanguardism.
Nelson Mandela was a person who cherished the perfect of a free society all his life, a perfect that, as he proclaimed at his trial in Pretoria in April 1964, he hoped to measure for, but if need be, die for. During his lifetime Mandela dedicated himself to the liberation struggle of the African people. to try to do this, he fought against White and Black dominations in South Africa. But quite anything, he fought for democracy as a plural society during which all persons of all races, languages, and opinions can live together consonant and with the civil rights. However, what Mandela as a political and moral leader made possible for humanity was to increase and expand our capacity to rethink politics in terms of an ethics of empathy, a politics of forgiveness, and a revolution of values in South Africa. As such, Mandela wasn’t necessary, as he proclaimed later, “an ordinary man who became a pacesetter due to extraordinary circumstances”. Truly speaking, the South African transition to democracy, under the leadership of Mandela, was an excellent work of political creativity and moral wisdom. As a matter of fact, the 2 famous definitions of a person by Aristotle, that he’s a political being and a being endowed with speech, supplement one another in Mandela’s anti-Apartheid practice of freedom. What Mandela understood through his life experience was that freedom can’t be speechless, while violence is incapable of speech. That such an outspokenness (what the traditional Greeks called parrhesia) must be intimately connected with the perfect of freedom seems to be vouched for by the legendary lifetime of Mandela himself. Mandela’s life experience speaks clearly for itself: the transformation of Mandela himself which of the South African society went hand in hand.
At his famous Rivonia trial, Mandela insisted on the African National Congress’s heritage of nonviolence and racial harmony and delivered his historical speech which received sympathetic treatment round the world. On 12 June 1962, Judge de Wet pronounced captivity for Mandela and his fellow prisoners. From that day on Mandela spent 27 years and 6 months in captivity. quite 17 years of this sentence was persisted Robben Island because the prisoner 466/64. However, as he wrote later, prison gave him any time “to stand back and appearance at the whole movement from a distance.” He revised his views and values while keeping his moral authority and his capacities for political judgment.
Nelson Mandela walked out of the Victor Verster prison at 4.14 pm on 11 February 1990, but his march to freedom still had how to travel. The second memorable moment of his life which of South African country was when he was elected on 27 April 1994, as South Africa’s first democratic President. As such, “Madiba”, as Mandela was called by his clan name, accomplished his heroic and messianic status, by having met the challenges of his life and people of his time. Either as an activist, as a prisoner or as a pacesetter in government, Mandela remained intensely aware of his moral and political responsibilities as a person to look for excellence. Even after he died on 5 December 2013, at his range in Houghton, he remained a national and international figure with a legacy of politics of excellence.
Once again, what distinguished Mandela as an ethical leader, from ordinary politicians with no moral capital, was the absence of bitterness and vengeance in him, which were certainly central to what came later in South Africa. it’s so interesting that while preserving his dignity as a prisoner and as a politician, he never tried to humiliate his political opponents. Accordingly, Mandela accumulated his moral capital as a pacesetter through his empathetic ethics and with self-conscious respect for the otherness of the opposite. that’s why, then, there have been certain moments and phases in Mandela’s life when his character as an ethical leader and as a democratic hero came closer to the Gandhian ideal of a nonviolent Satyagrahi. it’s with this Gandhian spirit in mind that Mandela accepted to hitch hands together with his enemies so as to tug South Africa out of hatred and bloodshed.
If Mandela is widely known today as a pacesetter with an ethical capital, instead of a pure Gandhian, it’s mainly because his politics of dialogue and reconciliation is more relevant than ever for all those that still believe the nonviolent pursuit of public happiness and within the actions of citizenry engaged in governing themselves.
