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    How to Think Like Mandela
    How to Think Like Mandela
    How to Think Like Mandela
    Ebook172 pages3 hours

    How to Think Like Mandela

    By Daniel Smith

    2.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Nelson Mandela is one of the few men alive who can say he has genuinely changed the world - how we think about our place in society among other ethnic, political and religious groups and how perseverance, moral conscience and honest dialogue can help us achieve anything. Throughout his long life, he has faced struggles against odds and opposition many of us can only begin to understand, was imprisoned for decades for his beliefs, yet ultimately stood by them and saw them vindicated by a nation.

    How to Think Like Mandela teaches us how he accomplished his achievements, his methods, his speeches, the many forms of opposition, both peaceful and non-peaceful, that he employed to reach his ends and why he fought in the way he did. Comprehensive and informative, this is the ideal book for admirers of this great man.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMichael O'Mara
    Release dateFeb 13, 2014
    ISBN9781782432401
    How to Think Like Mandela
    Author

    Daniel Smith

    Daniel Smith is the author of Muses, Madmen, and Prophets and a contributor to The Atlantic, New York magazine, The New York Times Magazine, and Slate. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

    Read more from Daniel Smith

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    2.5/5

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    Book preview

    How to Think Like Mandela - Daniel Smith

    Believe You Can Make a Mark

    ‘By ancestry, I was born to rule… my real vocation was to be a servant of the people.’

    NELSON MANDELA, 2003

    When Nelson Mandela was born there was little to suggest that he was destined to become one of the most important figures in the global politics of his time. However, he never lacked for self-confidence, always possessing a deep-rooted belief that he was worth as much as any other human. This is not to say that he thought there were not people who were ‘better’ than himself – whether that meant wiser, intellectually smarter, physically superior or gifted in some other way. Instead, it was a reflection of Mandela’s fundamental faith in meritocracy; the idea that no individual should be judged on the chance circumstances of their birth but on their character and actions instead.

    That a black child in early twentieth-century South Africa would be so imbued with the ideals of meritocracy was something of a rarity, given that the society was one where ethnic background had a decisive impact on your life prospects. Nonetheless, at a time when millions had their lives utterly blighted purely because of the colour of their skin, Mandela managed to remain faithful to the notion that all humans enter the world as equals.

    He was born on 18 July 1918 in Mvezo, a small village in Transkei in the eastern part of what is now the Eastern Cape province. By the time of his birth, the majority black population had for centuries been subjugated by an uneasy mix of Dutch and British settlers. An example of their institutionalised mistreatment was the Native’s Land Act of 1913. This piece of legislation regulated the black ownership of land at a time when only about seven per cent of the nation’s territory was in their ownership, despite the fact they comprised over two-thirds of the population.

    It is conceivable that if Mandela had been born into poverty in a backwater township, the world may have been deprived of his influence. Instead, he was brought up in a family descended from Thembu royalty (the Thembu being one of twelve Xhosa-speaking chieftaincies). In accordance with the rules of patrimonial descent that operated among the chieftaincies, Mandela’s father, Gadla Mphakanyiswa, was ruled out from holding the highest offices but was a local chief and served as an advisor to the Thembu king. As the son of his father’s third wife, Mandela himself would have expected a similar role in adulthood.

    So while Mandela’s quote at the beginning of this section (which he made in 2003) could be open to misinterpretation, he was nevertheless born into an elite. When he was still very young, his father was found guilty of insubordination to a local magistrate and lost both his title and much of his wealth. Nonetheless, the young Mandela would have continued to receive a certain level of deference from his contemporaries and got to see at close hand how traditional African power structures operated.

    He held a prominent role within his immediate family unit too, being the first son of his mother, Nonqaphi Nosekeni, and older brother to three full sisters (his father had a total of thirteen children, so there were several half-brothers and sisters too). In a strongly patriarchal society, he would have felt the burden of responsibility even more acutely with the death of his father in 1927. It was an early lesson in how to deal with personal loss and tragedy – a tough but valuable lesson for a man who would experience both with dispiriting regularity throughout his life.

    Following his father’s passing, he came under the direct patronage of the Thembu regent, Jongintaba Dalindyebo. He moved to the regent’s extensive personal compound, known as the ‘Great Place’, where he received yet more exposure to the mechanisms of tribal government. He saw up close the all-male, open-air tribal meetings at which a range of opinions on disparate matters were asked for and offered until a plan of action was broadly agreed upon. This was consensual democracy in action and it would inform Mandela’s entire adult career. In a speech he made shortly after his release from prison in 1990 he reflected on some of the lessons he had learned in this period:

    In our custom and history, the chief is the mouthpiece of his people. He must listen to the complaints of his people. He is the custodian of their hopes and desires. And if any chief decides to be a tyrant, to take decisions for his people, he will come to a tragic end in the sense that we will deal with him.

    The young Mandela had been given the tools to make a difference and learned some of the strategies needed to do so most effectively. Crucially, he also had the will to take up the gauntlet.

    Challenge the Status Quo

    ‘When people are determined, they can overcome anything.’

    NELSON MANDELA IN CONVERSATION WITH MORGAN FREEMAN, 2006

    Mandela’s heritage did not fill him with arrogance but it did supply him with a certain level of self-confidence that fed his instinctive refusal to bow to anyone without good reason. Undoubtedly, he was also imbued with a rebellious spirit from his earliest days. Nelson was not the name given him by his parents. Instead he was called Rolihlahla Mandela. Was there a certain glint in the eye that his parents quickly recognized? It seems possible, given that Rolihlahla may loosely be translated as ‘trouble-maker’.

    This inclination to challenge combined with a series of other factors in his youth to create a ‘perfect storm’. His father’s death propelled him early into the role of ‘man of the household’ so that as a pre-teen he already felt responsible for the fates of those around him. Meanwhile, his love of his homeland was unshakeable. Growing up in a traditional thatched hut and helping to raise livestock, phases of his childhood were idyllic. Rural South Africa came to represent a sort of earthly paradise for him – he would in later years speak wistfully of ‘the veldt, the green open spaces, the simple beauty of nature, and the pure lines of the horizon’. Having been brought up within the Methodist Christian tradition, he would have been familiar with the idea of Eden. He was also aware that the native population had been and continued to be deprived of their Eden by the excesses of white rule.

    By the time he was in his teens, Mandela – in common with teens everywhere – was ready and eager to kick against the world. His was no aimless rebellion, though. He was already fixing his focus on what would become his life’s struggle. While in prison in the mid-1970s, he worked on a volume of autobiography that was never to be published. In it, he described how he felt his destiny even as a student: ‘At college I had come to believe that as a graduate I would automatically be at the head, leading my people in all their

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