Nelson Mandela’s Words and How He Changed my Perspective on Protests

I used to be antagonistic towards protests, let alone riots and standing up to authority with “less-than-peaceful” methods. Earlier this year, though, I fortuitously read Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. I knew little of Mandela except for some flashbacks to his funeral and Morgan Freeman’s portrayal of him in Invictus, so I didn’t quite know what to expect to find in his life story. Little did I know this book would challenge my perception of protest, racial oppression, and what true freedom really means. This Nobel Prize-winning man of God who was the first fairly elected President of South Africa achieved peace not by sitting idly by, but by doing everything he had to do…which at times required force. A force that the watching world thanked him and his comrades for, at that.

I could write a great deal about the impact the book has had on me, but in light of the current political climate, I’d like to simply leave some quotes from Mandela himself and then finish with a closing thought. I implore you to read these words. Simply put, my perspective has changed. I view the mandatory fight for true freedom and equality differently than I used to, and I’m certain I have much more change and unspoken prejudices, perspectives, and attitudes to be worked out. Until then, I am deeply thankful to God for the gift of Nelson Mandela and freedom fighters like him here in our country. May I do my part and support the struggle that many have no choice to fight, particularly because of the faith I hold so dearly to.

NOTE: I recognize that South Africa’s political situation is not identical to the current situation in the USA. I am not saying it is a 1-to-1 comparison. However, with so many people shining light on MLK saying, “look what he achieved without violence” I think it’s important to acknowledge that there comes a time when… Well, I’ll let Mandela say it himself.

“if peaceful protest is met with violence, its efficacy is at an end. For me, nonviolence was not a moral principle but a strategy; there is no moral goodness in using an ineffective weapon.“(158)

“The lesson I took away from the campaign was that in the end, we had no alternative to armed and violent resistance. Over and over again, we had used all the nonviolent weapons in our arsenal — speeches, deputations, threats, marches, strikes, stay-aways, voluntary imprisonment — all to no avail, for whatever we did was met by an iron hand. A freedom fighter learns the hard way that it is the oppressor who defines the nature of the struggle, and the oppressed is often left no recourse but to use methods that mirror those of the oppressor. At a certain point, one can only fight fire with fire.” (166)

“there is no moral goodness in using an ineffective weapon.”

“…when a man is denied the right to live the life he believes in, he has no choice but to become an outlaw.” (256)

“But there comes a time, as it came in my life, when a man is denied the right to live a normal life, when he can only live the life of an outlaw because the government has so decreed to use the law to impose a state of outlawry upon him. I was driven to this situation, and I do not regret having taken the decisions that I did take. Other people will be driven in the same way in this country, by this very same force of police persecution and of administrative action by the government, to follow my course, of that I am certain.” (331)

“It was this desire for the freedom of my people to live their lives with dignity and self-respect that animated my life, that transformed a frightened young man into a bold one, that drove a law-abiding attorney to become a criminal, that turned a family-loving husband into a man without a home, that forced a life-loving man to live like a monk. I am no more virtuous or self sacrificing than the next man, but I found that I could not even enjoy the poor and limited freedoms I was allowed when I knew my people were not free. Freedom is indivisible; the chains on any one of my people were the chains on all of them, the chains on all of my people were the chains on me.” (624)

Now, to clarify, there’s a lot of things I’m not saying.

• I’m not saying I know when the point to switch from peaceful to “less-than-peaceful” protest is the answer.
• I’m not saying I know the organization necessary for protests, both peaceful and violent, to be effective.
• I’m not saying that we shouldn’t exhaust all possible means of protest before transitioning to “fighting fire with fire.”
• I’m not saying that violent protest necessarily means attacking people.

What I am saying is that Mandela, with great strategy, research, and zeal, exhausted all possible opportunities in order for his people to be treated like the imago dei they were… all with good Christian conscience.

We cannot in good conscience ignore the plight of our black and African-American brothers and sisters in this country.* Nor can we with any semblance of historical integrity ignore the fact that deeply seeded racism, either in law or in practice, does not simply fade away naturally. It takes freedom fighters doing whatever must be done to achieve true and lasting freedom, where it might be said of our country… “Never, never, and never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another…the sun shall never set on so glorious a human achievement.” (621)

#BlackLivesMatter

*I could step on a soapbox here discussing the Dutch Reform Church of South Africa “which furnished apartheid with its religious underpinnings by suggesting that Afrikaners were God’s chosen people and that blacks were a subservient species,” [111] or talk about the failings of the Christan church in Germany during the rising of Nazi power, ultimately drawing immediate connections to the apathy & hypocrisy so blatantly displayed by many Evangelical Christians in the United States today… but that’s another conversation for another time.