Beyond Mandela — South Africa’s Lesson for the World
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Seeing Mandela the movie was another occasion, beyond the funeral, to reflect on what South African experiences have to teach the world.
Author Archives: Harry Boyte
Beyond Mandela — South Africa’s Lesson for the World
Seeing Mandela the movie was another occasion, beyond the funeral, to reflect on what South African experiences have to teach the world.
Beyond Mandela — South Africa’s Lesson for the World
Mandela the movie was another occasion, beyond the funeral, to reflect on what South African experiences have to teach the world.]]>
The People’s Politics of Nelson Mandela
We need to switch from the dominant "great man" view of Mandela as a singular savior of South Africa to an understanding of his citizen-empowering politics if we are to do justice to his legacy and its potential for contribution to a world in turmoil and crisis.
The People’s Politics of Nelson Mandela
We need to switch from the dominant "great man" view of Mandela as a singular savior of South Africa to an understanding of his citizen-empowering politics if we are to do justice to his legacy and its potential for contribution to a world in turmoil and crisis.
The People’s Politics of Nelson Mandela
Across the world, people have rightly celebrated Nelson Mandela as a figure who "now belongs to the ages," as President Barack Obama put it in his tribute to the late South African leader. But recognition of his people's politics has been largely absent. We need to switch from the dominant "great man" view of Mandela as a singular savior of South Africa to an understanding of his citizen-empowering politics if we are to do justice to his legacy and its potential for contribution to a world in turmoil and crisis.
Nelson Mandela was a populist not in the sense in which the term is commonly used in the media, to mean a rabble-rousing demagogue. Mandela was a populist in the deepest meaning of term. He had a profound and also unromantic belief in the potential of everyday citizens to shape the world.
Today's public discussion of Nelson Mandela is decontextualized and depoliticized, as well as sanctified. Lost is his schooling in the ancient civic culture of the Eastern Cape.
Mandela was born in Mvezo, a tiny village in the Transkei, in the southeast of South Africa. When his father, Gadla Henry Mphakanyisa, was stripped of his chieftainship after defying British authority, he was taken into the home of the paramount chief of the Thembu people.
In his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, Mandela described the meetings at "the Great Place," Mquhekezweni. "Everyone who wanted to speak did so. It was democracy in its purest form. There may have been a hierarchy of importance among the speakers but everyone was heard, chief and subject, warrior and medicine man, shopkeeper and farmer, landowner and laborer. ... All were free to voice their opinions and equal in their value as citizens."
These experiences became seasoned in the anti-apartheid movement of the 1950s called the Congress of the People (CoP). It produced the Freedom Charter of 1955, the anti-apartheid movement's manifesto, and aimed at a national awakening instilling freedom consciousness.
In the view of its organizers, the people, not the African National Congress or other political parties, were the driving force of change. As one leader, Rusty Bernstein put it, the ideas of the Charter needed to be "an exercise in getting the people to tell the leadership and self-regarding elites what THEY ought to work for in the name of the people."
The Congress of the People also challenged anti-apartheid whites to organize in their own communities. Estranged from the white mainstream, they were largely unable to do so.
This movement powerfully shaped Mandela. The Charter, he argued was "by no means a blueprint for a socialist state." Rather it was "a programme for unification" involving "a democratic struggle of various classes and political groupings."
Mandela's schooling generated a clear distinction in his thinking between ideological politics, or "party politics," and people's politics. The distinction is clear in an interview published last year in the Australian journal Thesis Eleven with Jakes Gerwel, aide to Mandela throughout his presidency.
Mandela, Gerwel argued, stressed psychological liberation akin to the emphasis of Black Consciousness Movement leader Steve Biko. "Not to be victim to your suffering [and] to be victim of those who perpetrated it against you ... He rose above that by the generosity of spirit...."
Gerwel traced such generosity to Mandela's politics. "People often talk about Mandela's values," Gerwel said. "The thing that I remember him teaching me was: 'Jakes, never let your enemy choose the terrain of combat by reacting in anger. If you act in anger to anybody, you are allowing that person to choose the terrain.' This was a combination of genuine principled morals with a great tactical sense."
Gerwel emphasized that "Mandela is a politician through and through. He understands party politics and politics to his finger tips. He is not a saint, and he often made that point. He is a hard politician [who] uses power and his political agency for the good."
In his prison years on Robben Island, Mandela further developed his commitment to nonracial people's politics. Afrikaner guards who smuggled in newspapers for him to read, provided extra rations, and taught him Afrikaans, the main language of the white population, tempered any desire for racial recrimination.
Meanwhile, exchanges with young hotheads brought home the dangers of a politics of posture. "When you say, 'What are you going to do?' they say, 'We will attack and destroy them!'" he recounted. "I say: 'All right, have you analyzed how strong they are? Have you compared their strength to your strength?'"
In 1986, Mandela, still in prison, began negotiations with moderates in the National Party government. Simultaneously, parallel efforts began to appear among whites on a large scale.
In 1986, Van Zyl Slabbert and Alex Boraine, leaders of the white opposition party in the South African Parliament, resigned in frustration at the Parliament's inability to address the country's growing crisis. They founded the Institute for a Democratic Alternative for South Africa (Idasa), with the aim of generating discussion and work across the deepening racial divide. Slabbert called this "the politics of negotiation." Their politics, in the same vein as Mandela's, took up the challenge to whites made by the Congress of the People and leaders like Mandela, more than thirty years before.
For most whites in South Africa in the 1980s, the everyday lives, concerns, talents, and oppressive conditions of blacks were invisible. Idasa's work closely paralleled Mandela's efforts.
In 1987 in Dakar, Senegal, the organization brought together white moderates among politicians, labor unionists, journalists, religious and business leaders with exile leaders of the African National Congress for the first time. The meeting reverberated around the world. Over the next seven years, Idasa followed up by organizing hundreds of meetings which brought whites together with blacks, colored and Indians.
After the 1994 election, Idasa became the leading force on the African continent emphasizing the idea that democracy is a society, not simply a state. Its grassroots popular education efforts taught organizing community methods and nonpartisan empowering citizen politics to thousands of people. Throughout its history, Mandela remained Idasa's friend.
Nelson Mandela believed that ordinary citizens can become bold, confident, responsible agents of change, able to rise to the occasion of even the most daunting challenges. He devoted his life to seeing the democratic potential of the people realized.
The wisdom of his people's politics has never been more needed.
Harry Boyte, Director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at Augsburg College and Senior Fellow at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs, lives several months a year in South Africa, where he is also a Visiting Professor at Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University.
Nelson Mandela was a populist not in the sense in which the term is commonly used in the media, to mean a rabble-rousing demagogue. Mandela was a populist in the deepest meaning of term. He had a profound and also unromantic belief in the potential of everyday citizens to shape the world.
Today's public discussion of Nelson Mandela is decontextualized and depoliticized, as well as sanctified. Lost is his schooling in the ancient civic culture of the Eastern Cape.
Mandela was born in Mvezo, a tiny village in the Transkei, in the southeast of South Africa. When his father, Gadla Henry Mphakanyisa, was stripped of his chieftainship after defying British authority, he was taken into the home of the paramount chief of the Thembu people.
In his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, Mandela described the meetings at "the Great Place," Mquhekezweni. "Everyone who wanted to speak did so. It was democracy in its purest form. There may have been a hierarchy of importance among the speakers but everyone was heard, chief and subject, warrior and medicine man, shopkeeper and farmer, landowner and laborer. ... All were free to voice their opinions and equal in their value as citizens."
These experiences became seasoned in the anti-apartheid movement of the 1950s called the Congress of the People (CoP). It produced the Freedom Charter of 1955, the anti-apartheid movement's manifesto, and aimed at a national awakening instilling freedom consciousness.
In the view of its organizers, the people, not the African National Congress or other political parties, were the driving force of change. As one leader, Rusty Bernstein put it, the ideas of the Charter needed to be "an exercise in getting the people to tell the leadership and self-regarding elites what THEY ought to work for in the name of the people."
The Congress of the People also challenged anti-apartheid whites to organize in their own communities. Estranged from the white mainstream, they were largely unable to do so.
This movement powerfully shaped Mandela. The Charter, he argued was "by no means a blueprint for a socialist state." Rather it was "a programme for unification" involving "a democratic struggle of various classes and political groupings."
Mandela's schooling generated a clear distinction in his thinking between ideological politics, or "party politics," and people's politics. The distinction is clear in an interview published last year in the Australian journal Thesis Eleven with Jakes Gerwel, aide to Mandela throughout his presidency.
Mandela, Gerwel argued, stressed psychological liberation akin to the emphasis of Black Consciousness Movement leader Steve Biko. "Not to be victim to your suffering [and] to be victim of those who perpetrated it against you ... He rose above that by the generosity of spirit...."
Gerwel traced such generosity to Mandela's politics. "People often talk about Mandela's values," Gerwel said. "The thing that I remember him teaching me was: 'Jakes, never let your enemy choose the terrain of combat by reacting in anger. If you act in anger to anybody, you are allowing that person to choose the terrain.' This was a combination of genuine principled morals with a great tactical sense."
Gerwel emphasized that "Mandela is a politician through and through. He understands party politics and politics to his finger tips. He is not a saint, and he often made that point. He is a hard politician [who] uses power and his political agency for the good."
In his prison years on Robben Island, Mandela further developed his commitment to nonracial people's politics. Afrikaner guards who smuggled in newspapers for him to read, provided extra rations, and taught him Afrikaans, the main language of the white population, tempered any desire for racial recrimination.
Meanwhile, exchanges with young hotheads brought home the dangers of a politics of posture. "When you say, 'What are you going to do?' they say, 'We will attack and destroy them!'" he recounted. "I say: 'All right, have you analyzed how strong they are? Have you compared their strength to your strength?'"
In 1986, Mandela, still in prison, began negotiations with moderates in the National Party government. Simultaneously, parallel efforts began to appear among whites on a large scale.
In 1986, Van Zyl Slabbert and Alex Boraine, leaders of the white opposition party in the South African Parliament, resigned in frustration at the Parliament's inability to address the country's growing crisis. They founded the Institute for a Democratic Alternative for South Africa (Idasa), with the aim of generating discussion and work across the deepening racial divide. Slabbert called this "the politics of negotiation." Their politics, in the same vein as Mandela's, took up the challenge to whites made by the Congress of the People and leaders like Mandela, more than thirty years before.
For most whites in South Africa in the 1980s, the everyday lives, concerns, talents, and oppressive conditions of blacks were invisible. Idasa's work closely paralleled Mandela's efforts.
In 1987 in Dakar, Senegal, the organization brought together white moderates among politicians, labor unionists, journalists, religious and business leaders with exile leaders of the African National Congress for the first time. The meeting reverberated around the world. Over the next seven years, Idasa followed up by organizing hundreds of meetings which brought whites together with blacks, colored and Indians.
After the 1994 election, Idasa became the leading force on the African continent emphasizing the idea that democracy is a society, not simply a state. Its grassroots popular education efforts taught organizing community methods and nonpartisan empowering citizen politics to thousands of people. Throughout its history, Mandela remained Idasa's friend.
Nelson Mandela believed that ordinary citizens can become bold, confident, responsible agents of change, able to rise to the occasion of even the most daunting challenges. He devoted his life to seeing the democratic potential of the people realized.
The wisdom of his people's politics has never been more needed.
Harry Boyte, Director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at Augsburg College and Senior Fellow at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs, lives several months a year in South Africa, where he is also a Visiting Professor at Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University.
The People’s Politics of Nelson Mandela
Bayard Rustin and the Audacity of Hope
President Obama's posthumous award of the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Bayard Rustin on November 20, 2013, marked overdue recognition of Rustin's extraordinary contributions to the civil rights movement.
Bayard Rustin and the Audacity of Hope
President Obama's posthumous award of the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Bayard Rustin on November 20, 2013, marked overdue recognition of Rustin's extraordinary contributions to the civil rights movement.
Bayard Rustin and the Audacity of Hope
President Obama's posthumous award of the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Bayard Rustin on November 20, 2013, marked overdue recognition of Rustin's extraordinary contributions to the civil rights movement. On another level, Rustin's strategic vision has prophetic relevance for our time. It embodies the "audacity of hope" that we can build a deeper and more vibrant democracy.
Rustin recognized the need for pluralistic and coalition politics which could win over the great majority of Americans to the work of creating a more egalitarian society. He realized the need for building independent centers of power through community organizing.
He also anchored his strategy for change in a challenge still largely unaddressed by either political progressives or by community organizers -- a call for the democratic transformation of the social fabric itself. In contrast, today's activists have an anti-institutional bias rooted in the widespread assumption that institutions are largely impervious to change.
As Charles Euchner shows in Nobody Turn Me Round: A People's History of the 1963 March on Washington, Rustin, organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, was indispensable to creating the platform for "I Have a Dream." He was also a key strategist of many other phrases of the movement - a main actor in creating the Freedom Rides, Martin Luther King's tutor in nonviolence during the Montgomery Bus Boycott, an architect of King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
Rustin lived a complicated life. A Quaker, he was a conscientious objector in World War II. He was gay. He had been in the Young Communist League as a young man. As a nonviolent African-American gay former communist, Rustin was extremely controversial. Civil rights leaders kept him behind the scenes. But his accomplishments were legendary.
Rustin's question was the one familiar to community organizers, how to move from the world as it is to the world as it should be, or, put differently, how to put power behind program. As Euchner shows, Rustin was sophisticated in work with the Kennedy administration as he organized the March on Washington. He recognized the importance of being in relationship with the White House, knowing well the presidency's multiple roles in setting the nation's agenda. He also was careful not to be co-opted by the White House agenda. Rustin continually kept in mind the main task, building an independent citizen movement for ending racial discrimination, achieving greater equality, and deepening democracy.
In his view, this required that the movement's goals evolve to meet the times. In his 1965 Commentary article "From Protest to Politics," Rustin pointed out the changing tasks facing African-Americans after the end of formal, legal segregation:
"The Negro today finds himself stymied by obstacles of far greater magnitude than the legal barriers he was attacking before: automation, urban decay, de facto school segregation. These are problems which, while conditioned by Jim Crow, do not vanish upon its demise. They are more deeply rooted in our socio-economic order; they are the result of the total society's failure to meet not only the Negro's needs, but human needs generally."
Rustin worried that the movement's strategic capacity was eroding, just as its tasks were growing. Thus he questioned the growing tendency of young activists, both black and white, to substitute "posture and volume" for "effect." Militants, he argued,
"...are often described as the radicals of the movement, but they are really its moralists. They seek to change white hearts--by traumatizing them. Frequently abetted by white self-flagellants, they may gleefully applaud (though not really agreeing with) Malcolm X because, while they admit he has no program, they think he can frighten white people into doing the right thing."
He proposed a different approach -- change in the nation's very institutional structure:
"Hearts are not relevant to the issue; neither racial affinities nor racial hostilities are rooted there. It is institutions--social, political, and economic institutions--which are the ultimate molders of collective sentiments. Let these institutions be reconstructed... and let the ineluctable gradualism of history govern the formation of a new psychology."
With this argument Rustin challenged conventional wisdom on a grand scale. Though he did not develop the idea in detail, as far as I know, serious institutional reconstruction to achieve greater equality and deeper democracy necessitates not only transforming institutional racism, part and parcel of American society since European settlement. It also requires reversing what the South African public intellectual Xolela Mangcu calls "technocratic creep," the bureaucratization which is a defining feature of modern societies everywhere.
Bureaucratization involves the spread of norms and practices which replace tradition and communal values with efficiency and goal-oriented rationality. Max Weber called this culture "the polar night of icy darkness." The spreading polar night, what Weber also called the "iron cage," has long been taken as inevitable.
Today, despite widespread fatalism, there are multiplying signs that inevitable technocracy is not so. In earlier Huffington Post blogs with Blase Scarnati, John Spencer, Jason Lowry, and Jen Nelson, I described democratizing cultural change in K-12 schools, colleges and universities.
In a new series in The Boston Globe, "Trench Democracy ," Albert Dzur chronicles "democratic professionals [who] are creating power-sharing arrangements in organizations, institutions, and workplaces that are usually hierarchical and non-participatory."
Finally, "Civic Studies," a new interdisciplinary area of civic engagement, is gaining authority as a citizen-centered alternative to top-down problem solving and government-centered democracy. Its framing statement, The New Civic Politicshttp://activecitizen.tufts.edu/circle/summer-institute/summer-institute-of-civic-studies-framing-statement/, co-authored by Nobel Prize winning Elinor Ostrom and six others, stresses citizens as agents of change and co-creators of democracy. Civic Studies includes revitalizing the public work roles and practices of institutions.
All these signs help to vindicate Bayard Rustin's belief that institutional reconstruction is possible. Many years ago, he called for what Italian activists once termed "the long march through the institutions."
The march may be gaining momentum.
Boyte, who worked for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference as a college student, is Director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at Augsburg College and a Senior Fellow at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey School of Public Affairs. He is also one of the co-authors of The New Civic Politics.
Rustin recognized the need for pluralistic and coalition politics which could win over the great majority of Americans to the work of creating a more egalitarian society. He realized the need for building independent centers of power through community organizing.
He also anchored his strategy for change in a challenge still largely unaddressed by either political progressives or by community organizers -- a call for the democratic transformation of the social fabric itself. In contrast, today's activists have an anti-institutional bias rooted in the widespread assumption that institutions are largely impervious to change.
As Charles Euchner shows in Nobody Turn Me Round: A People's History of the 1963 March on Washington, Rustin, organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, was indispensable to creating the platform for "I Have a Dream." He was also a key strategist of many other phrases of the movement - a main actor in creating the Freedom Rides, Martin Luther King's tutor in nonviolence during the Montgomery Bus Boycott, an architect of King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
Rustin lived a complicated life. A Quaker, he was a conscientious objector in World War II. He was gay. He had been in the Young Communist League as a young man. As a nonviolent African-American gay former communist, Rustin was extremely controversial. Civil rights leaders kept him behind the scenes. But his accomplishments were legendary.
Rustin's question was the one familiar to community organizers, how to move from the world as it is to the world as it should be, or, put differently, how to put power behind program. As Euchner shows, Rustin was sophisticated in work with the Kennedy administration as he organized the March on Washington. He recognized the importance of being in relationship with the White House, knowing well the presidency's multiple roles in setting the nation's agenda. He also was careful not to be co-opted by the White House agenda. Rustin continually kept in mind the main task, building an independent citizen movement for ending racial discrimination, achieving greater equality, and deepening democracy.
In his view, this required that the movement's goals evolve to meet the times. In his 1965 Commentary article "From Protest to Politics," Rustin pointed out the changing tasks facing African-Americans after the end of formal, legal segregation:
"The Negro today finds himself stymied by obstacles of far greater magnitude than the legal barriers he was attacking before: automation, urban decay, de facto school segregation. These are problems which, while conditioned by Jim Crow, do not vanish upon its demise. They are more deeply rooted in our socio-economic order; they are the result of the total society's failure to meet not only the Negro's needs, but human needs generally."
Rustin worried that the movement's strategic capacity was eroding, just as its tasks were growing. Thus he questioned the growing tendency of young activists, both black and white, to substitute "posture and volume" for "effect." Militants, he argued,
"...are often described as the radicals of the movement, but they are really its moralists. They seek to change white hearts--by traumatizing them. Frequently abetted by white self-flagellants, they may gleefully applaud (though not really agreeing with) Malcolm X because, while they admit he has no program, they think he can frighten white people into doing the right thing."
He proposed a different approach -- change in the nation's very institutional structure:
"Hearts are not relevant to the issue; neither racial affinities nor racial hostilities are rooted there. It is institutions--social, political, and economic institutions--which are the ultimate molders of collective sentiments. Let these institutions be reconstructed... and let the ineluctable gradualism of history govern the formation of a new psychology."
With this argument Rustin challenged conventional wisdom on a grand scale. Though he did not develop the idea in detail, as far as I know, serious institutional reconstruction to achieve greater equality and deeper democracy necessitates not only transforming institutional racism, part and parcel of American society since European settlement. It also requires reversing what the South African public intellectual Xolela Mangcu calls "technocratic creep," the bureaucratization which is a defining feature of modern societies everywhere.
Bureaucratization involves the spread of norms and practices which replace tradition and communal values with efficiency and goal-oriented rationality. Max Weber called this culture "the polar night of icy darkness." The spreading polar night, what Weber also called the "iron cage," has long been taken as inevitable.
Today, despite widespread fatalism, there are multiplying signs that inevitable technocracy is not so. In earlier Huffington Post blogs with Blase Scarnati, John Spencer, Jason Lowry, and Jen Nelson, I described democratizing cultural change in K-12 schools, colleges and universities.
In a new series in The Boston Globe, "Trench Democracy ," Albert Dzur chronicles "democratic professionals [who] are creating power-sharing arrangements in organizations, institutions, and workplaces that are usually hierarchical and non-participatory."
Finally, "Civic Studies," a new interdisciplinary area of civic engagement, is gaining authority as a citizen-centered alternative to top-down problem solving and government-centered democracy. Its framing statement, The New Civic Politicshttp://activecitizen.tufts.edu/circle/summer-institute/summer-institute-of-civic-studies-framing-statement/, co-authored by Nobel Prize winning Elinor Ostrom and six others, stresses citizens as agents of change and co-creators of democracy. Civic Studies includes revitalizing the public work roles and practices of institutions.
All these signs help to vindicate Bayard Rustin's belief that institutional reconstruction is possible. Many years ago, he called for what Italian activists once termed "the long march through the institutions."
The march may be gaining momentum.
Boyte, who worked for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference as a college student, is Director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at Augsburg College and a Senior Fellow at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey School of Public Affairs. He is also one of the co-authors of The New Civic Politics.