The world honors Mandela

What happened

Leaders and dignitaries from more than 100 countries joined millions of South Africans this week in paying tribute to the country’s first black president, Nelson Mandela, who died at age 95 last week after guiding his nation from brutal white minority rule to democracy. In a speech that received thunderous applause at a massive Soweto soccer stadium, President Obama hailed Mandela’s many acts of reconciliation, noting how he was jailed for 27 years by the apartheid regime, yet embraced his Afrikaner enemies when released. “It took a man like Madiba to free not just the prisoner, but the jailer as well,” said Obama, referring to Mandela by his clan name. Obama also made an open jab at other leaders in the audience, including Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, “who claim solidarity with Madiba’s struggle for freedom, but do not tolerate dissent from their own people.”

For many South Africans, Mandela’s death sparked anger that the country’s transformation remains so incomplete (see Best columns: International). The crowd at the Soweto memorial service booed current President Jacob Zuma, whose ruling African National Congress party has been condemned for enriching its leaders while failing to reduce persistently high levels of black poverty, crime, and unemployment.

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What the editorials said

Mandela was “the personification of grace,” said The Seattle Times. The anti-apartheid leader was sentenced to life in prison in 1964 for daring to demand equality for his nation’s black majority. Yet he refused to surrender his dignity, and “showed compassion to his jailers even as they refused to let him attend the funeral of his mother and of a son.” When Mandela was freed in 1990, “he chose unity over vengeance,” said USA Today. He campaigned for “racial peace for his people, black and white, which—incredibly—he achieved.”

Mandela wasn’t always a champion of democracy, said NationalReview.com. Before he was jailed, he advocated “armed struggle,” and he repeatedly refused to renounce violence while in prison. There, he accepted the support of “some of the worst actors in the world,” including the Soviets, Castro, and Qaddafi, and later refused to condemn human rights abuses by these regimes. Mandela was “a great man,” but that doesn’t mean we have to ignore his “blind spots and other defects.”

What the columnists said

Mandela’s story is a reminder that “America isn’t always a force for freedom,” said Peter Beinart in TheDailyBeast.com. In the 1980s, the Reagan administration and other conservatives viewed South Africa’s freedom struggle entirely “through a Cold War lens.” Since the ANC received aid from the Soviet Union, Reagan threw his weight behind the monstrous apartheid regime, which he hailed as “essential to the free world.” The value in remembering that conservatives once loathed Mandela isn’t “mere point scoring,” said Adam Serwer in MSNBC.com. “It is to remember that sometimes the radicals are correct.” When champions of social justice challenge the status quo, the Right inevitably condemns them as dangerous villains. It was only after Mandela won his epic struggle that he became a universally loved figure.

I admit it: “I was dead wrong about Mandela,” said Deroy Murdock in NationalReview.com. Like many other conservatives, I had seen communists terrorize nations around the world, and feared that Mandela’s release from jail “would create a Cuba on the Cape of Good Hope,” or even a racial bloodbath. Instead, Mandela reassured the white business class of their place in the new South Africa, embraced capitalism, and joined Gandhi and Martin Luther King as “one of the 20th century’s great moral leaders.”

“His most important act was, of course, forgiveness,” said Fareed Zakaria in CNN.com. Instead of merely giving lip service to reconciliation, Mandela learned the language of his Afrikaner oppressors, and as president kept the old white establishment—the civil service, the army, the hated police—largely in place. He knew that it was “in his country’s best interests” to avert a bloody race war. Through his “political genius” and inspirational moral leadership, Nelson Mandela single-handedly changed South Africa’s future. “And in doing so, he also shaped the conscience of the entire world.”