One of the high points of my adult life was watching Nelson Mandela, Mario Cuomo and David Dinkins ride past in a motorcade in New York on June 20, 1990.
The legacy of Mandela, or “Madiba” as South Africans affectionately call him, is a complex one. His reaching out to Castro, Gadhafi and other autocrats during those days is still discomforting, though it had to be seen in geopolitical context — these were the forces unambiguously aligned against South African apartheid. Would that the U.S. and Israel could say the same.
Pockets of right-wing Jews in New York picketed Mandela — a source of great pain and embarrassment in progressive Jewish circles — over his embrace of Yasser Arafat. Three years later, Yitzhak Rabin would shake Arafat’s hand on the White House lawn. In stark contrast to Mandela, Arafat would die a failure, a mediocrity, a thug.
Omali Yeshitela, leader of the African Peoples Socialist Party, a fringe leftist cult that enjoys support from dead prez and others in the hip-hop activist world, rails against Mandela as an unpardonable sellout. Imprisoned and horribly mistreated by the apartheid government for decades, Mandela emerged and sought peace and democratic transformation. How dare he! Yeshitela, who regularly pronounces on the necessity of cleansing revolutionary violence, would have preferred a bloodbath, which he would have watched in relative comfort in the U.S. Mandela faced the awesome task of running a country at a grave historical crossroads. “Chairman Omali” lectures in churches and basements to the self-brainwashed, who tell him he’s a great man.
Happy birthday, Mandela! How far South African leadership has fallen since Thabo Mbeki took your place.
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