How I grew up with the 'unbreakable' Nelson Mandela, sitting miles away

Washington: To write about Nelson Mandela by definition is an act of overreach. Even audacity. He was simply too tall to measure and too broad for words like “legacy,” which these days is designed, not earned with deeds. Any attempt to confine him to clichés would be an offence.

Not foolish enough to go there. I just want to reminisce about growing up with “Mandela.” His name was a plank on which we rested many fond hopes for a better world. He always seemed solid. Unbreakable.

A song from an earlier era has been coming back, hauntingly ever since he went to the hospital for the last time – “To Sir, With Love” by Lulu. Even though it is not about South Africa or the anti-apartheid struggle, it somehow connects.

“But how do you thank someone who has taken you from crayons to perfume? “It isn’t easy but I’ll try….

And then

“A friend who taught me right from wrong, “And weak from strong, “That’s a lot to learn, “What, what can I give you in return? “If you wanted the moon, I would try to make a start…”

Those days of fervor and ferment when we – sitting thousands of miles away in comfortable Delhi drawing rooms – felt we were supporting the cause of the African National Congress by simply talking about it. We felt a secret pride in the Indian government’s strong anti-apartheid stand and great satisfaction in knowing the ANC had an office in New Delhi. Our collective chest welled up. Young students and journalists, we wanted to be on the ANC’s mailing list.

India was on the right side of history when the entire western world was on the wrong. And wrong for so long. The west supported and strengthened the “Despicable Them.” How could Thatcher’s Britain and Reagan’s America, with their own blotted histories in the bag, help perpetuate the same ugly, systematic and chilling subjugation of an entire people? How could they not see the brutality?

We could and clearly. Idealism of the heart was alive. Every account of the apartheid regime’s horrific conduct made it bubble some more. It kept adding to the first landmark event everyone had read about – the Sharpeville massacre of 1960 when police killed 69 innocent, unarmed black protesters. In our minds it was South Africa’s Jalianwallah Bagh massacre.

We read about other atrocities: the 1976 Soweto uprising when black high school students protested the imposition of Afrikaans language. The white government declared a war on them. Over 360 were killed. We read about the Bantustan policy of restricting blacks to tiny areas or “homelands” and pretending they were separate and free. It boggled the mind – a mind not yet cynical.

Mandela, dignified and resolute, represented resistance to the barbarism of the Bothas. His fleeting image caught from fragments of newsreels and occasional articles seemed so strong. He was serving a life sentence on Robben Island, a hell created for political opponents. Mandela and other ANC leaders, banished there in 1964, broke rocks under the hard sun. It was brutal – the glare from white lime damaged their eyes. Their jailors never issued them dark glasses. Mandela wasn’t allowed to leave even to attend his son’s funeral. Eighteen years on that island.

Sitting in New Delhi and trying to learn what was happening in South Africa wasn’t easy. News always came filtered and biased. The “objective” western press had half bought the line that ANC was Communist, a Soviet-paw. If the regime fell, it would take the rest of southern Africa with it. Along with the diamonds.

But then a song came via London in the late 80s. It was Eddy Grant’s “Give Me Hope Jo’anna,” the anthem of the anti-apartheid movement. My dear friend and fellow journalist, Jassi, who embraced all good causes, had managed to get his hands on a cassette. When he played it, I remember immediately loving its reggae beat and infectious sound. It was our “cool.”

“Well, Jo’anna she runs a country “She runs in Durban and the Transvaal, “She makes a few of her people happy, oh “She don’t care about the rest at all “She’s got a system they call apartheid “It keeps a brother in a subjugation “But maybe pressure can make Jo’anna see “How everybody could a live as one…

It is worth reading the lyrics to feel the devastating blows of its rhymes. I grew up some more when I heard Peter Gabriel’s protest song “Biko” about Steve Biko, an anti-apartheid activist who was tortured and killed in 1977 by South African police.

“ September ‘77 “Port Elizabeth weather fine “It was business as usual “In police room 619… “Oh Biko, Biko, because Biko… “The man is dead

When I got my first passport in 1980, it said “not valid in South Africa.” I felt Mandela’s cause in my hands as I held the precious document. See, we are thinking of you. No sporting ties with your oppressors. No cricket. Wish we could boycott more but India had little leverage except to exert moral pressure through resolutions at the United Nations.

They were more comforting than Reagan’s “constructive engagement” with South Africa’s white rulers – a policy I covered for Inter Press Service when I first came to Washington in 1988. If Robin Raphel personifies modern India’s deep dismay with US policy of the 90s, Chester Crocker was the same for black South Africans in the 80s. As the State Department’s assistant secretary for African Affairs for nine long years, he found ways not to punish, not to see and not to learn the truth about South Africa. Or Angola. Or Zaire – as Congo was then known and where the CIA had helped install Mobuto who robbed his country blind for 32 years.

But they were anti-Communist. No further questions.

Mandela was not a factor in Crocker’s calculus. I often wondered if the situation were reversed, would the west have blithely allowed subjugation of a white majority by a black minority for decades, all other factors being the same – Cold War phobias, diamonds, dominos?

But ordinary Americans had a moral compass. Students rallied on campuses demanding divestment in the apartheid regime. Black Congressmen pressed for a sane policy. A strong anti-apartheid campaign forced a huge tussle between Reagan and the US Congress about correcting the pendulum on apartheid. The Congress acted but Reagan vetoed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act following his ideological guru Thatcher’s advice.

In 1986, in a historic move the Congress overrode his veto, thanks to some Republicans voting against their own president. Soon US corporations were pulling out of South Africa and banks refusing to lend even though the Reagan Administration enforced the law feebly. South African exports began drying up.

Hollywood finally took note of the reality of apartheid – albeit in typical fashion where white protagonists struggled with their conscience to do the “right” thing while the real struggle ensued in the background. Richard Attenborough’s “Cry Freedom” about a white newspaper editor’s effort to highlight Biko’s torture and death and “A Dry White Season” with Marlon Brando about a school teacher’s awakening to the horrors of apartheid were of the genre. Brando, ever the “cause” guy, accepted low union wages to act in the movie.

But I used to wait eagerly for South Africa Now, a 30-minute newscast sent from ground zero and broadcast on public television in America. It was the only news I trusted.

I will never forget confronting South Africa’s foreign minister, “Pik” Botha, on one of his lobbying trips to Washington. He angrily dismissed reports of torture and deaths of activists in his jails while his security guards glared at me. But sanctions were clearly having an impact and soon he and P.W. Botha, the prime minister, were gone. F.W. de Klerk took over in 1989 and began dismantling apartheid.

Mandela was released on Feb. 11, 1990 after 27 years. Twenty-seven years. I got to see him in person four months later when he came to Washington.

P.S. I named my son Kabir Mandela.