Tag Archives | Nelson Mandela

A South African media outlet, no doubt eager to be first, aired a TV obituary of Nelson Mandela. It was very positive and respectful, except for the fact he hadn’t died.

It brought back memories of writer Mark Twain’s famous observation when the same thing happened to him. His comment: “The report of my death was an exaggeration.”

When someone turns 94, medical risks are hardly an exaggeration, and its good to know that Mandela has just been released from hospital again. I was told that he told family members he intends to live to l00.

The sad truth is that there are some in South Africa who are distressed that his health seems to be the only news from South Africa that routinely attracts world attention and social concern. Perhaps that’s because so many  other stories have been grim—often about corruption of public officials or the case of the famous disabled runner who allegedly murdered his girlfriend.… Read the rest

Nelson Mandela is fighting for his life again—his third hospitalization in four months as the world looks on with silent prayers. The media attention he is receiving speaks to the respect with which he is held, even though most of the coverage points more to his age than the fact that the respiratory condition he has was contracted under brutal prison conditions and he clearly, even now, is a victim of the apartheid system he battled into submission.

The world media is pumped by another deathwatch. In South Africa, Madiba, as he is known by his clan name, is called a “FBR”—the Freelancers Best Friend—because of all the work the around the clock coverage his condition inspires. At the BBC in London, striking staffers ay they will return to work to cover his death.

When he and his comrades arrived on South Africa’s draconian Robben Island, he was the 466^th to be incarcerated in 1964.… Read the rest

Durban, South Africa: These are not the best of times in South Africa. It seems clear that there is fear and loathing everywhere as the press is packed with fresh allegations of corruption, and a restive mood spreads even as the country prepares to host the economic Summit of the BRICS countries it is part of–Brazil, Russia, India, and China which is facing a growth in joblessness and economic/political malaise.

Nelson Mandela’s wife, Graca Machel, the brilliant Mozambican leader who married the man everyone here calls by his clan name Madiba, is speaking out even as her husband Nelson Mandela no longer can because of age and infirmity.

She calls South Africa an “angry nation… on the brink of ‘something very dangerous’. She was speaking at a memorial for a Mozambican cab driver whose killing by the police was caught on a cellphone camera and went viral. The police deny they were brutal, despite the video, which further outrages a country that seems to be increasingly turning on the politicians they see as plundering its resources.… Read the rest

Cape Town, South Africa:  Nelson Mandela was released from prison 22 years ago. He has been “free” ever since. At the same time, I sometimes feel as if I became his prisoner—imprisoned by the work I have been doing enthusiastically in service to the struggle he led ever since the mid 1960’s.

I don’t blame him, of course, and he can’t release me the way he was released on that sunny afternoon of February 11,1990 while the whole world cheered.

I was cheering, too, in the darkness of a TV edit room far away in New York. We were working on a prime time documentary that would air a day later about “the day.” It was called FREE AT LAST.

My “incarceration” on the issue was well along by then. I had first visited South Africa in l967 when I was 25, a civil rights activist and soon an anti-apartheid militant.… Read the rest