cell913blog.com #30

Eulogizing Nelson Mandela, on the day of his State Funeral, December 15, 2013, President Jacob Zuma quoted from two of Mandela’s statements made in court, one in 1964, the other in 1962:

Zuma: We will always remember you as a man of integrity who embodied the values and principles that your organization, the ANC promotes. These are: unity, selflessness, sacrifice, collective leadership, humility, honesty disciplines, hard work and mutual respect. We will promote these values and practise them, in order to build the type of society you wanted. That society is outlined in the ideals you espoused, the ideals you lived for and which you were4 prepared to die for. These ideals define your organization the ANC. You summarised them in your statement in court in 1964. You said:

Mandela: During my lifetime I had dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.

Zuma: You taught is to embrace one another as compatriots, regardless of race, ethnicity, religion or creed. You did this because you hated racism. In your first court statement in October 1962, where you objected to being a black man in a white man’s court, being tried by a white court which was enforcing laws you had had no hand in making, you had also spoken out strongly against racism. You said:

Mandela: I hate race discrimination most intensely and all its manifestations. I have fought it all during my life; I fight it now, and will do so until the end of my days.

From obamawhiteouse archives.gov, we read the words of President Barack Obama at the Memorial Service for Former South African President Nelson Mandela, at First National Bank Stadium, Johannesburg, South Africa:

(I)t is a singular honor to be with you today, to celebrate a life like no other. To the people of South Africa –(applause)—people of every race and walk of life-=-the world thanks you for sharing Nelson Mandela with us. His struggle was your struggle. His triumph was your triumph. Your dignity and your hope found expression in his life. And your freedom, your democracy is his cherished legacy. It is hard to eulogize any man—to capture in words not just the facts and the dates that make a life, but the essential truth of a person—their private joys and sorrows; the quiet moments and unique qualities that illuminate someone’s soul. How much harder to do so for a giant of history, who moved a nation toward justice, and in the process moved billions around the world. Born during World War I, far from the corridors of power, a boy raised herding cattle and tutored by the elders of his Thembu tribe, Madiba would emerge as the last great liberator of the 20^th century. Like Ghandi, he would lead a resistance movement—a movement that at its start had little prospect for success. Like Dr. King, he would give potent voice to the claims of the oppressed and the moral necessity of racial justice. He would endure brutal imprisonment that began in the time of Kennedy and Khrushchev, and reached the final days of the Cold War. Emerging from prison, without the force of arms, he would—like Abraham Lincoln—hold his country together when it threatened to break apart. And like America’s Founding Fathers, he would erect a constitutional order to preserve freedom for future generations—a commitment to democracy and rule of law ratified not only by his election, but by his willingness to step down from power after only one term. Given the sweep of his life, the scope of his accomplishments, the adoration that he so rightly earned, it’s tempting I think to remember Nelson Mandela as an icon, smiling and serene, detached from the tawdry affairs of lesser men. But Madiba himself strongly resisted such a lifeless portrait. (Applause) Instead, Madiba insisted on sharing with us his doubts and his fears; his miscalculations along with his victories. ‘I am not a saint,’ he said, ‘unless you think of a saint as a sinner who keeps trying.’ It was precisely because he could admit to imperfection—because he could be so full of good humor, even mischief, despite the heavy burdens he carried—that we love him so. He was not a bust of marble: he was a man of flesh and blood—a son and a husband, a father and a friend. And that’s why we learned so much from him, and that’s why we can learn from him still. For nothing he achieved was inevitable. In the arc of his life, we see a man who earned his place in history through struggle and shrewdness, and persistence and faith. He tells us what is possible not just in the pages of history books, but in our own lives as well….Perhaps Madiba was right that he inherited, ‘ a proud rebelliousness, a stubborn sense of fairness;’ from his father. And we know he shared with millions of black and coloured South Africans the anger born of ‘a thousand slights, a thousand indignities, a thousand unremembered moments—a desire to fight a system that imprisoned my people,’ he said.

He was not a bust of marble: he was a man of flesh and blood…(from the Obama eulogy above)

The stark comparison/contrast/foil of the marble bust and the man of flesh and blood evoke the insights of James Hillman in distinguishing between what is in professional, medical, legal and historic studies as a ‘case history’ as compared with what Hillman dubs a ‘soul history.’ The autobiography Long Walk to Freedom, details the incidents, relationships, tensions, conflicts, strategies and tactics Mandela used and experienced in his fight for freedom.

Hillman writes:

Case history reports on the achievements and failures of life with the world of facts. But the soul has neither achieved nor failed in the same way because the soul has not worked in the same way. Its material is experience and its realizations are accomplished not just by efforts of will. The soul images and plays—and play is not chronicled by report. What remains of the years of our childhood play that could be set down in a case history? Children, and so-called ‘primitive peoples,’ have no history; they have instead the residue of their play crystallized in myth and symbol—language and art, and in a style of life. Taking a soul history means capturing emotions, fantasies and images by entering the game and dreaming the myth along with the patient. Taking a soul history means becoming part of the other person‘s fate. Where a case history presents a sequence of facts leading to diagnosis, soul history shows rather a concentric helter-skelter pointing always beyond itself. Its facts and symbols are paradoxes. Taking a soul history calls for the intuitive in sight of the old-fashioned diagnostician and imaginative understanding of a lifestyle that cannot be replaced by data accumulation and explanation through case history. We cannot get a soul history through a case history. But we can get a case history by prolonged exploration in soul history which is nothing other than analysis itself. (James Hillman, Suicide and the Soul, p.64)

In the West, we struggle with ‘cardboard cutout’ images of heroes. Listing achievements, wars won, enemies destroyed, mountains surmounted, trophies, contracts and scholarships won….election victories won or lost. Notable and worthy of study are these role models, especially from the perspective of modelling for young men and women ‘to walk in the footsteps of their hero/heroine. Another, less obvious, far more inscrutable, mysterious and mystical perspective on a human being is to begin the process of considering how a ‘soul history’ might be imagined, intuited, sketched, coloured, and ‘unfolding’ in a never-ending yet layered set of images.

Hillman has set for his readers, a task of bringing psychology, the search for and the making of soul, into the street, whereby all people would engage, not so much in a process of clinical diagnosis, naming the illness, or the pathology, but rather seeing the individual through a lens of potential mythic voices, images and stories.

Mandela, in addressing the court, as the first accused, in 1964, recorded this tribal (mythical?) connection with his people of the Transkei. He was directly refuting the suggestion made by the state in its opening that the struggle in South Africa is under the influence of foreigners or Communists is wholly incorrect. I have done whatever I did, both as an individual and as a leader of my people, because of my experience in South Africa, and my own proudly felt African background, and not because of what any outside might have said.

In my youth in the Transkei, I listened to the elders of my tribe telling stories of the old days. Amongst the tales they related to me were those of wars fought by our ancestors in defense of the fatherland. The names of Dingane and Bambatha (both Zulu leaders in their fight against the British imperialists), Hintso and Makanna, Squngthi and Dalaile, Moshoeshoe and Sekhukhuni, were praised and the pride and glory of the entire African nation. I hoped then that my life might offer me the opportunity to serve my people and make my own humble contribution to their freedom struggle. This is what has motivated me in all that I have done in relation to the charges made against me in this case. (LWTF) p. 364)

And while there is a tribal heritage of names of heroes deeply embedded in both the culture and in Mandela’s personal memory, there is another profound influence on this man, Mahatma Gandhi and his deep link with the concept of non-violence. And here is a potential illustration of the Hillman notion of  the profound connection between a human life and one or more mythological voices that play out in that life.

Interestingly, and somewhat ironically, the biggest myth about non-violent action is that Gandhi invented it and he is often called ‘the father of non-violence’. Well he did raise ahimsa action to a level never achieved before him, but he was not its author or inventor. Ahimsa has bee part of the Indian religious tradition for centuries—Hindy, Jain, and Buddhist, Gandhi too the religious principles of ahimsa common to Buddhism, Hinduism and pianism and turned it into a non-violent tool (‘Satyagrapha which means ‘Truth-Force) for mass action. He used it to fight not only colonial rule but social evils such as racial discrimination and untouchability as well. (the statesman.com)

In his speeches and in his writings, Gandhi constantly referred to incidents from Mythology….Writing about Satyagraha, Gandhi writes: ‘If the political gain the upper hand, there will be no Raj in Rajkot. Ram Raj means renunciation all along the line. It means discipline imposed by the people…Writing about the World War, Gandhi writes: If the Nazis come to India Congress will give them the same fight that it has given to Great Britain. I do not underrate the power of satyagraha…Personally I think the end of this giant war will be what happened in the fabled Mahabharata war. The Mahabharata has been aptly described by a Travancorean as the permanent history of man. What is described in that great epic is happening today before our very eyes, The warring nations are destroying themselves with such fury and ferocity that the end will be mutual exhaustion. The victor will share the same fate that awaited surviving Pandavas. The mighty warrior Arjuna was looted in broad daylight by a petty robber. And out of this holocaust must arise a new order for which the exploited millions of toilers have so long thirsted. The prayers of peace-lovers cannot go in vain. Satyagraha is itself an unmistakable mute prayer of an agonised soul….(Elsewhere he writes) The whole world is on trial today. No on can escape from the war. Whilst the Ramayana and the Mahabharata are the products of poets’ imagination, their authors were not mere rhymesters. They were seers. What they depicted is happening before our very eyes. Ravanas* are warring with each other. They are showing matchless strength. They throw their deadly weapons from the ais. No deed of bravery in the battlefield is beyond their capacity of imagination. (from mallikaravikumar.com)

*Ravana is a multi-headed king of the island of Lanka, chief antagonist in the Hindu epic Ramayana. In the Ramayana, Ravana is described as the eldest son of sage Vishrava and Kaikasi. (Wikipedia.org)

It is not incidental the Mandela’s life story, and freedom fight, that Gandhi lived in South Africa for the better part of a quarter century. Often called the Gandhi of South Africa, Mandela too inspiration from Gandhi.

‘While Nelson Mandela is the father of South Africa, Mahatma Gandhi is our grandfather,’ Harris Majeke, South Africa’s ambassador to India said…Mandela was inspired by the Satyagraha campaign led by Gandhi. It was a compelling act of passive protest against oppression. This would later inspire the formation of the African National Congress and strengthen Mandela’s belief in our shared humanity. ‘The African National Congress, which in 1952 launched the first mass movement against apartheid under the leadership of Dr. Albert Luthuli, had been founded in 1912 on the model of the Natal Indian Congress, with which Gandhi has been closely associated, writes Claude Markovits in ‘The Un-Gandhian Gandi: The Life and Afterlife of the Mahatma.’ The link was continued when Gandhi asked his second son, Manilal, to stay in South Africa and continue his work. It gets more complicated from there. Manilal was present at a crucial meeting of the ANC in 1949, where he pressed the party to unconditionally adopt nonviolence, but with little success. The attitude of the party toward Gandhianism in subsequent years was best summarized by Mandela. ‘Nonviolent passive resistance is effective as long as your opposition adheres to the same rules as you do,’ Mandela states in his autobiography, unfavourably comparing the dominant Afrikaner minority in his country to British imperialists. ‘But if peaceful protest is met with violence, its efficacy is at an end. For me, nonviolence was not a moral principle but a strategy.’….’Violence and nonviolence ae not mutually exclusive; it is the predominance of the one or the other that labels a struggle,’ Mandela said….And Mandela learned from Gandhi the essential virtues of forgive ness and compassion, values that served him and his country very well on his assumption to power. (Amitabh Pal, July 2, 2013 on progressive.org)

In quantum physics, when two particles are entangled, the state of one particle is correlated with the state of the other particle, even if they are separated by a large distance. This correlation can be described mathematically by a shared wave function. Clearly, Gandhi and Mandela ‘shared a metaphoric wave function.
Separated by time and distance, both lawyers were enjoined by the force of Satyagrapha, (Truth-Force) and the principle of nonviolence in pursuit of the lifting of the chains of oppression, whether they were dubbed British imperialism or South African apartheid. Both men fed on the nourishment of both history and mythology, were empowered by the inheritances of both their fellow patriots and the epic figures of mythology. They also shared a profound and insightful imagination in their capacity to make ‘connecting the dots’ not merely an exercise of the reason, but of the whole mind, especially of both intuition and imagination. Gandhi rejected the epithet Mahatma, an adaptation of the Sanskrit word ‘mahatman, which literally meant, ‘great-souled’ and when he was speaking on the occasion of Mandela’ death, then Secretary General of the United Nations, BanKi-moon, uttered some memorable words:

When I praised him for his lifelong contribution to end apartheid he said, ‘It is not only me, but hundreds and hundreds of known and unknown people that contributed.’ That has stuck with me ever since.(news.un.org)