Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, May 3, 1994 TAG: 9405030146
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BOB DROGIN and SCOTT KRAFT LOS ANGELES TIMES Note: above
DATELINE: JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA LENGTH: Medium
Perhaps the most remarkable and perplexing transformation of 75-year-old Nelson Mandela has been a more personal one. Despite 27 years in prison, most of it cut off from his family and the world in a dank 7-foot cell, he is not angry, bitter or vengeful.
``I would like to be angry, and choke somebody for all the wrong things he has done,'' Mandela said in an interview as ballots were being counted. ``But to be able to be angry, you must have the opportunity to be angry.''
He never had that luxury when, as a young black lawyer in the 1950s, he fought the brutal indignities of apartheid. His most difficult cases involved the insidious and now-abandoned system of pass laws, which severely restricted where blacks could live and work in the white-run society.
``An ordinary clerk in a pass office could change the life of a [black] man by saying he had no right to live in Johannesburg,'' Mandela explained. ``That man loses his job, his house. His children who are at school, their future is blighted. You can't go to court, because the law is clear. That little clerk, at a desk in a pass office, has got the power to change the life and the future of that man.''
So each time, rather than fighting the system head on, Mandela would go to the clerk's supervisor, and say, ``'Look, here is the situation, it's a tragedy for this family.'...Invariably, these leading officials, when you approach them, are touched by human considerations and reverse the decision of the clerk.''
The lesson, Mandela said, was ``people respond in relation to how you treat them. If you treat them with respect, and ignore the negative aspects, you get a positive reaction. So even before I went to jail for 27 years, I could not afford to be bitter.''
Mandela carries that lesson into the halls of power in South Africa, where he will oversee a country in desperate need of reconciliation and reconstruction after more than three centuries of white rule and four decades of apartheid.
Unseen and unheard while in jail, Mandela still became a figure of mythic proportions, an inspiration and rallying cry for the black masses. Since he was released from prison in February 1990, he has earned the respect, if not necessarily the vote, of everyone from conservative whites to once-wary business leaders to President F.W. de Klerk.
That, in fact, is Mandela's most important asset. Probably more than any leader in the nation's history, he has won the confidence and trust of millions of people.
Even now, his time in jail remains the defining period in Mandela's life and a large source of his worldwide support.
While in prison, the lesson - to treat people with respect - was even more important.
Mandela decided it was smarter to understand his enemies than to curse them. So while in prison, he learned Afrikaans, the white rulers' language. Soon after his release, Mandela won the hearts of many Afrikaners by speaking their language when making speeches to them.
``If you speak a man's language,'' Mandela explained, ``it goes straight to his heart and his blood.''
To this day, Mandela regularly talks by phone with his former prison guards, and he has invited two of the guards he knew best to the inauguration on May 10.
Once in office, Mandela said he will resume the popular ``people's forums'' he used in his campaign. In dozens of public sessions, voters brought their troubles and questions to him. Each time, he listened patiently, and then responded with advice or admonitions. It is similar to how traditional chiefs operated where he grew up as the eldest son of a chief of the Xhosa-speaking Thembu people in Transkei.
``The chief would call a meeting of the tribe,'' he explained. ``Everybody would participate in the meeting. And the chief would keep quiet throughout. And when everybody had made his contribution, and the chief had seen the trend, he would then come and sum up and say, `From the discussion, this is the view of my tribe.' And that was accepted. He was the mouthpiece of the tribe. And then he would go to the paramount chiefs and say this is the view of my tribe. Absolutely democratic.''
by CNB