WINDHOEK – According to Professor Joseph Diescho it is important for Africans to pause and internalise the real meaning and significance of the Nelson Mandela phenomenon.
Professor Diescho said this during the Nelson Mandela memorial lecture delivered by him earlier this week in Windhoek. The lecture was titled – ‘Pillars of Mandela’s legacy: Lessons and Insipration for the future of Namibia and Africa’. “The question for us… therefore is ‘what is it that Nelson Mandela did that no other African leader or leaders did, to be loved not only by his countrymen and women in South Africa, not only by black folk, but the entire human race?’ It is important for us to ask such a question so that we can gain understanding and inspiration from the life of this unusual human being in a world that has no good things to say about Africa, a world where all that is African is treated as not worthy of honour and many other things, but Mandela rose above that and showed a different story about Africa, Nelson Mandela was the story of the new Africa,” said Diescho. He described the late Mandela, who died on December 05 last year at the age of 95 years in South Africa, as an illustrious son of the African soil who meant so much to black people, Africans and all oppressed people around the world, as well as to the entire human family. “We are very privileged to have shared the air and space with him. Incidentally Mandela like most of us, was raised in an African village, no shoes on his feet. Like us, he was little, vulnerable and helpless. His polygamous father handed him over at his death to his uncle to raise him. When Mahtma Gandhi died on the 30th of January 1948, Albert Einstein was quoted to have said, ‘generations to come will scarcely believe that a man ever in blood and flesh walked on this land,’ and we can say the same about Nelson Mandela,” Diescho told his audience.
The question however, says Diescho, is what did Mandela do to crush white superiority in the world with one stroke that defeated the meanest power of white supremacy. “Mandela walked anywhere in the world, emperors, kings they all left the space for him to name the new world order. Indeed, what did he do? Whereas many would say he was a peace loving person, he believed in peace, but the fact is peace was not what he did (sic).” Diescho described Mandela’s early politicial journey as one that was filled with bitterness and anger, which motivated him to escape into exile in Ethiopia and Algeria to receive military training where he learned to assemble a bomb. Upon his return to South Africa Mandela started as a volunteer-in-chief, subsequently the terrorist-in-chief, ready to blow up railway lines, police stations and power points in south Africa.
“Peace therefore is not it,” according to Diescho. “Naturally, some may say Mandela was a Noble Peace Prize winner, but that is also not it, because on the record today there are five Africans who have won the Nobel Peace Prize and Desmond Tutu is one of them.” Therefore, according to Diescho, winning the Nobel Peace Prize was not what distinquished Mandela, neither was it his fight against apartheid, since there were many other leaders involved in that fight.
“Mandela reminded the world that Africa has a place to determine what happens in our lives, that we are the masters of our own destinies and future. Mandela, in his first encounter with an American television interviewer was asked, ‘we have seen destruction, we have seen people coming to power and destroying the economy, are you going to adopt a capitalist system or a socialist system?’ Mandela responded saying, ‘it doesn’t matter whether the cat is black or white as long as it catches the mice, we do not care what you might label us, we are grown men and women we determine our own policies.’”
“All in all, Mandela had the cardinal values of what the philosophers have taught us, and he made South Africans to feel and be themselves and he was always himself that’s why he was the way he was,” Diescho said.
By John Muyamba