News & Events Rethinking Mandela, on His 100th Birthday

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Wednesday, July 18, is Mandela Day in South Africa, a national celebration of the birthday of this visionary leader. Nelson Mandela died in 2013, but if he were alive, he would turn 100 this year. To mark the moment, we spoke with Sean Redding, the Zephaniah Swift Moore Professor of History, who also teaches in the Black studies department.

Redding did her undergraduate thesis on Mandela, and taught and researched in his Transkei homeland. She is a renowned scholar of South African history and author of 2006’s Sorcery and Sovereignty: Taxation, Power and Rebellion in Rural South Africa. Currently, she’s working on her forthcoming book, Violence in Rural South Africa, 1902–1965.

His early thoughts on violence are complicated.*

KW: How did you first become interested in South African history? 

SR: In college, I’d been interested in colonialism—and South Africa was an example of colonialism that was still right there.

KW: After college, you taught high school in Transkei, which is also Mandela’s homeland. Were you close to where he was from?

SR: About 30 miles from where he grew up. He grew up in a small village called Mvezo. I was in Engcobo.

KW: You did your undergrad honors thesis, at Swarthmore, on Nelson Mandela. What was the topic?

SR: I was very interested in the period of the 1950s into the 1960s, where the ANC [African National Congress] made the transition away from nonviolent protest, toward systematic and low-level use of, initially, sabotage. And Mandela was very much part of that, founding Umkhonto we Sizwe, Spear of the Nation. I think it’s very tempting to see him as a Gandhi-ish figure, and focus on the nonviolent resistance, and much less on this. He constructed the so-called M-Plan, which was the original plan in the 1950s to create the structure for an underground movement that would use violence, strategically.

KW: A number of white-supremacist websites pose the false information that he pleaded guilty to 156 acts of public violence, including bombings that killed women and children. Can you correct the record? *

SR: Mandela was arrested initially, in 1962, for leaving the country without a passport. He was convicted of that. So he was in prison at the time of the Rivonia trial.* There were many people who were charged.  

Technically, had Mandela wanted, he could have said that the crimes for which he was being tried had happened when he was in prison for his previous charge. He made the decision that he did not want to do that, that he should be on trial, because it was the ANC effectively that was on trial. And he had been a leader of the ANC.

KW: And how did your thesis come into this?

SR: Basically, I looked at all of Mandela’s writings. He wrote quite a bit, some of it anonymously, for a lot of magazines in South Africa, most of which were banned after a year or two. He wrote about the ways in which African nationalism should develop, how to change this very systematic white supremacy to a more nonracial society.

KW: Did you come away from that experience admiring him? Having mixed feelings about him?  

SR: Oh, no, I admired him. He was a very, very principled person. Extraordinarily principled. One could certainly argue with some of the actions that he took. He was a lawyer, and he understood the law. He felt that the laws were unjust. But to demonstrate that, he really had to break the law. 

Life in the “Independent” State of Transkei

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SR: At that point, Transkei had just become “independent.” It was one of the Bantustans [territory set aside for black inhabitants of South Africa under apartheid, unrecognized by any other country]. It’s very hard to recreate all the things that made it a bizarre experience. The school had been created by a mission society a century ago. But it had been taken over as a government school, and then it had been burned down and been rebuilt as a showplace school. So everything was new, but there were no books in the library, and so on, because they hadn’t really gotten around to that part.

The leader of Transkei, Kaiser Matanzima, was a cousin of Mandela’s. They were both members of a ruling Thembu family. Two of Matanzima’s children were at this school, and I taught the daughter. So that was a little weird, because Matanzima was very much condemned as a collaborator with the apartheid state, and had famously broken with Mandela before Mandela had been imprisoned, over the issue of whether they should accept this Bantustan policy. So the upshot of that is that people didn’t talk about politics.

KW: It was considered taboo? 

SR: No, straight-up dangerous.

KW: In the course of your scholarship, where has Mandela entered into the picture?

SR: Mandela led the ANC, and it was caught in a weird dilemma, which is that a lot of its leadership were very well-educated people: lawyers, accountants, teachers. And they tended systematically to deny certain aspects of the rural culture from which they’d come. They believed in trade unionism and thought that organizing urban workers, the mine workers in particular, was going to be a more linear way of creating a certain political movement that might then create a nonracial political society. And that left the rural areas out.  

 But Africans were also not being allowed legally to move to the urban areas. So if a man had a job at the mines, he could “temporarily” move to the urban areas.

But once he was done at the mines, he had no legal right to remain there and could be prosecuted and deported.

So there was always this strong connection between these workers and the rural areas. But if you’re asking, “Where does Mandela fit in?” I think the answer is: He doesn’t, in a way. Because he personally didn’t maintain strong ties to the rural areas. He was so caught up in what was going on in Johannesburg and in the major urban areas.

Oral Histories During Apartheid Were Impossible: Nobody Would Talk 

KW: Mandela goes into prison in 1962, gets out in 1990. When you were working and researching in South Africa, how did people speak of his imprisonment? Or not?

 SR: When I was doing my dissertation research in the 1980s, a history of Mthatha, which was the largest town in Transkei, people didn’t talk about politics. I was trying to do some oral historical research and people simply wouldn’t talk. It was too dangerous.

I ended up using a lot of archival material, and of course, that’s one of the reasons why a lot of my work is really based through the 1960s. It’s because of the 30-year rule, sometimes a 50-year rule, in South Africa. The archives are not secret, but they’re not open. In general, you can’t use archives that are within this sequestered range.

But, post-1990, there was a shift. I was in South Africa for six months in 1990, in the latter half of the year: Mandela had gotten out of prison that February. And I was doing oral historical research for Sovereignty and Sorcery, and people were much more willing to talk. It was like people exhaled. Because no one—and I do mean no one—had foreseen that Mandela would be let out in 1990. It was a huge surprise.  

It Matters That Mandela Came from a Royal Family

KW: Let me read you a quote from Ahmed Kathrada, an activist who shared a prison cell block with Mr. Mandela: “The first thing to remember about Mandela is he came from a royal family. That always gave him strength.” Do you agree with that?  

SR: I think it is true. I think he was quite confident, which perhaps comes from that. Some of it also came from having grown up in the rural areas, because there weren’t a lot of white people there, frankly. Rural Africans like Mandela would not have been, on a daily basis, coming up against people who despised them, or who thought they were inferior, or who would run them down.

Also, he came from a relatively well-off family. They had access to land. Mandela was not in a position where he had to go to the mines, where he would have had those kinds of brutalizing experiences.

And, moreover, the fact that he was a lawyer. He knew the laws. He’d argued in courts in front of white judges and white magistrates, and won. I think that that, also, gave him a great deal of strength.

On Afrikaner Nationalism and South African Communists

KW: Mandela befriended the white guards at Robben Island. He reached out his hand to the opposition when he got out. So let me ask your thoughts about that.

SR: Even though he thought that apartheid was a wholly unjust system, he understood what Afrikaner nationalism had been about. It had been anti-British imperialism, and he could understand, therefore, what many Afrikaners wanted from a state.

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KW: Was Mandela just more realpolitik about making alliances, or did he actually believe in communist ideology?

SR: It was a little of both. He had been very anti-communist in the 1940s and the early 1950s. He’d felt that communism was another Westernism that was, in some sense, linked to imperialism. But on a very pragmatic level, in the 1950s, he had made alliances with not just the Communist Party, but with other nationalist or political groups more willing to work with the ANC. Mandela was an intellectual. He was interested in arguing politics with people and trying to understand where they were coming from and what they were doing.  

His Robben Island Years of Imprisonment Are Still a Black Box

KW: If you or a colleague were going to zero in on certain aspects of Mandela’s life, which ones most deserve the spotlight?

SR: His period on Robben Island. It’s a bit of a black box. There have been discussions by people who were with him on Robben Island about the ways in which he treated the prison guards, for example, or the ways in which he tried to keep people’s intellectual juices flowing, and keeping people’s minds alive, and their political ideas going. But there hasn’t been a great deal of study about that time. Partly because the sources just don’t exist, to some degree.

But then I think, post-1990, a lot of the treatment of Mandela has been very hagiographic. And that’s not necessarily wrong. I’m not trying to say that he had feet of clay. But there’s a tendency to not look critically at certain kinds of decisions that he was making in conjunction with others in the ANC. Again, you would run into an issue of sources. A lot of that material is going to be sequestered for another decade or so.

KW: This is from Bill Keller’s New York Times obituary for Mandela: “Perhaps it was too much to think that someone who can end apartheid can also fix the economy.” What do you say to that?

SR: Yes, there’s a tendency, in the United States, in particular, to see Mandela as having been a savior in some sense. We’re still very attached to this “great man theory” of history, where a great man or woman will sail in and save people, or not.

There was almost an assumption that, “Well, now Mandela’s out of prison. He’ll make everything OK.” But then it becomes “Everything’s not OK. I guess Mandela failed.” Maybe we link too much, about what’s good and what’s bad in South Africa, to Mandela. When it’s not just Mandela. It’s a complicated place. And that’s something that we lose sight of, if we focus too much on just the one person—as important, significant, and admirable as he was.