Nelson Mandela Legacy Research Paper

Great leaders in history often leave behind a legacy. This legacy takes the values that they held dearest and is usually compacted into a couple words or a phrase that the public will forever associate with that leader’s name. For example, Mohandas Gandhi and ‘civil disobedience’ have become synonymous over the years. Whenever someone refers to the act of nonviolent protest, civil disobedience - sometimes even called the ‘Gandhian principle’ – one would think of Gandhi. Another example is Martin Luther King Jr.’s fight for civil rights in the 1960s. His renowned ‘I Have a Dream’ speech changed the lives of millions of Americans as King preached equality in Washington, D.C. Like these great leaders, Nelson Mandela, too, left behind a legacy.
Now, as an American, I am somewhat ashamed to admit that I did not know as much about Mandela as I should’ve.
After reading about his accomplishments and the sacrifices he made to ensure the prosperity of his people, Mandela should be studied in primary schools in far more depth than he is today. I, as an average American, was ignorant to the fact that Mandela is still alive! I’d like to say that this was simply my ignorance, but when I asked around, I found that not many people knew this, and many of them could not define what it is exactly that Nelson Mandela achieved. After asking several people, all I got was a few people vaguely associating his name with the principle of ‘apartheid’. Mandela is an international hero and possibly one of the greatest leaders to emerge from a tiny town in South Africa, yet American college students barely know who he is. After reading Mandela’s biography, there were three things in particular that intrigued me about him. The first was his decision to resign from the Student Representative Council (SRC) at Fort Hare University. The second was his decision to execute sabotage to end the apartheid, and the third was continuing to fight after being locked up for 27
years.
Mandela’s long dedication to the fight against racial oppression was dramatic and arduous. He came from a small village in South Africa from a branch of the Thembu dynasty. He was the youngest of thirteen and the only one to attend school, where his birth name Rolihlala was replaced by Nelson. For Mandela, leadership was already somewhat ingrained in him as his father started out as the chief of the town Mvezo. After his father died, Mandela was sent to live with a guardian, the regent, who became a primary and important influence in his life. He then learned the skills and practices of leadership from the regent at the tribal meetings, which Mandela mentions were “the purest form of democracy” (Mandela, 14). Like Preskill, Mandela held the role of listening to people’s stories and letting everyone have their own chance to talk at high importance. He learned from different experiences and learned how to better execute his own ideas when collaborating with others.
Mandela’s first real role of leadership came in his second year at Fort Hare University, which was like “the Oxford and Cambridge; Harvard, and Yale” of African scholars.
Mandela was nominated to be on the SRC (Student Representative Council) after the student body decided that they were not satisfied with their diet and that the SRC should have more power, in general. A majority of the students voted to boycott the elections until their demands were met but one-sixth of the student body showed up and voted in six representatives. They decided to support the boycott and resigned. However, when elections were held again, the same six representatives were voted in again. They had come full circle. Mandela, unlike the other 5, would once again resign in order to stick to his decision and hold his ground. The principal told him that if he did not take back his resignation for the second time, he would be expelled. One of the most interesting quotes in Mandela’s book is when he says, “Was I sabotaging my academic career over an abstract moral principle that mattered very little?” (Mandela, 19) I find this curious because this was the first time that Mandela was making a decision important enough to alter his life. After all, he was accepted into a school that not many were fortunate enough to get into – was he truly giving it all up to have better food in the cafeteria? Mandela says that, “when I needed to compromise, something inside would not let me” (Mandela, 20). He left
Fort Hare by the end of the year, even though it had clearly upset his guardian, the man who housed him and made it possible for him to have an education after his father passed away. This was a decision was Mandela made and stuck by, even though the other five representatives immediately accepted ‘defeat’ in their battle. This is one of the qualities of Mandela that I find so admirable because it takes a lot to stand up and speak for something, but it takes something different to stand and speak alone.
According to the dictionary, apartheid is “a policy or system of segregation or discrimination on grounds of race”. It seems like when we open a textbook and read about global history in the 1940s, every nation was attempting to establish and create an identity for themselves in their respective homelands. South Africans in the 1940s consisted of many different races, which were classified by the labels Black, White, Colored, and Indian. In a land ruled by white supremacy, Africans and Colored people were not given the same civil rights as Whites. Mandela’s fight for equality started with his first active role in the ANC (African National Congress). The ANC was a well-developed organization in South Africa that fought for African rights. Mandela became a member of ANC and in August of 1943, Mandela marched with 10,000 others in support of the Alexandra bus boycott, a protest against the raising of bus fares from four pence to five. Mandela said he was “no longer an observer but now a participant” (Mandela 32). He began to realize that his mission was to serve his people as a whole, not specific divisions or branches. By the 1960s, the ANC has become a more radical and revolutionary organization. For years, they relied of the Gandhian principles of nonviolence and civil disobedience. However, after the Sharpeville massacre in 1960 (protestors boycotted the passes that all non-whites were required to carry, police shot into the crowd and injured over 400 people), the ANC leadership concluded that these methods of non-violence were not suitable against the Apartheid system. Mandela mentions in his autobiography that the path the ANC was about to take would be “a dangerous path, a path of organized violence.” A separate military wing was formed in 1961, called Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), meaning the “Spear of the Nation," with Mandela as its first leader (Mendela, 89). MK operations during the 1960s primarily involved targeting and sabotaging government facilities. Mandela says that there were four types of violent activities that were considered and they chose sabotage because “since the ANC had been reluctant to embrace violence at all, it made sense to start with the form of violence that inflicted the least harm against individuals”. He also stated in his autobiography that he was not mad at racism, but at the white man in particular who had, for so long oppressed the coloreds. Mandela was arrested in 1962, convicted of sabotage in 1964 (which he agreed to) and sentenced to life imprisonment on Robben Island.
Preskill’s Learning as a Way of Leading talks about how Mandela, the face of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, was once labeled a wanted criminal and terrorist. The last decision that Mandela made which I find the most admirable, perhaps, is his decision to alter his movement and lifestyle according to the changing environment and circumstance. For instance, Mandela won the Nobel Peace Prize after being jailed for twenty-seven years for inciting violence. When asked why he did what he did, Mandela responded,
“I do not deny that I planned sabotage. I did not plan it in a spirit of recklessness nor because I have any love of violence. I planned it as a result of a calm and sober assessment of the political situation that had arisen after many years of tyranny, exploitation and oppression of my people by the whites" (BBC).
Mandela’s leadership quality of critical reflection shows how he kept an open mind and remained flexible when the movement required him to be. Mandela went from using nonviolence to violence, and then back to nonviolence. Perhaps, at the time of coordinating his efforts, violence seemed to be the only route that left an impression.
As I mentioned before, Mandela not only stood and spoke for his countrymen, he initially stood alone. He says, “There are times when a leader must move out ahead of the flock, go off in a new direction, confident that he is leading people the right way.” I find this quote so powerful, because it is true and hits close to home. There have been many times, as a first generation Pakistani Muslim, that I’ve felt I’ve had to make decisions not only for me, but as a statement for family and friends younger than me who look up to me. On one hand, there’s typical teenage rebellion, but on the other hand, I’ve been faced with situations where I’ve been condemned and told that I am blatantly wrong. In times like this, it’s empowering to read about leaders like Mandela who could stand alone in the face of adversity.