A Reason Not to Celebrate Mandela Day

In November 2009, the United Nations declared July 18 as “The Nelson Mandela International Day,” a day to be celebrated in his honour. This makes today, Mandela’s 93rd birthday, to be the second official UN Mandela day. The day is intended as a day to honour Mandela’s legacy and his values, partly by encouraging sixty-seven minutes of community service. The sixty-seven minutes are symbolic of Mandela’s sixty-seven-year fight (1943-present) for “social justice.”¹

Nelson Mandela was born in 1918 and joined the ANC in 1943. After forming Umkhonto we Sizwe – the militant wing of the ANC – in 1961, he was sentenced to life imprisonment for terrorist activities. After being released in 1990, Mandela received a Nobel Peace Prize (along with FW de Klerk) and was elected South Africa’s first black president in 1994. He stepped down after one term in office in 1999 and retired in 2004.²

Something about the short biography in the above paragraph seems a bit odd. How does a terrorist receive a Nobel Peace Prize, get elected president of the very country he terrorized just thirty years before, and get a UN-sanctioned international day in his honour? These are truly legitimate and haunting questions.

In a world where the media actually thinks for the average person and forms the general opinion on just about everything, it is often necessary to stop for a moment and consider things for what they really are. On this day, where so many people around the world celebrate this popular political figure, it would be most appropriate to take a brief look at his political career.

After founding Umkhonto we Sizwe in 1961, Mandela was convicted and imprisoned for life at the Rivonia trial. Most journalists and even some historians would state that the reason for his life sentence was his opposition to apartheid.³ But this is a blatant lie. Mandela was not imprisoned for his opposition towards apartheid; he was imprisoned for the following reasons:

• One count under the South African Suppression of Communism Act No. 44 of 1950, charging that the accused committed acts calculated to further the achievement of the objective of communism;

• One count of contravening the South African Criminal Law Act (1953), which prohibits any person from soliciting or receiving any money or articles for the purpose of achieving organized defiance of laws and country; and

• Two counts of sabotage, committing or aiding or procuring the commission of the following acts:

1) The further recruitment of persons for instruction and training, both within and outside the Republic of South Africa, in:

(a) the preparation, manufacture and use of explosives—for the purpose of committing acts of violence and destruction in the aforesaid Republic, (the preparation and manufacture of explosives, according to evidence submitted, included 210,000 hand grenades, 48,000 anti-personnel mines, 1,500 time devices, 144 tons of ammonium nitrate, 21.6 tons of aluminum powder and a ton of black powder);
(b) the art of warfare, including guerrilla warfare, and military training generally for the purpose in the aforesaid Republic;

(ii) Further acts of violence and destruction, (this includes 193 counts of terrorism committed between 1961 and 1963);

(iii) Acts of guerrilla warfare in the aforesaid Republic;

(iv) Acts of assistance to military units of foreign countries when involving the aforesaid Republic;

(v) Acts of participation in a violent revolution in the aforesaid Republic, whereby the accused, injured, damaged, destroyed, rendered useless or unserviceable, put out of action, obstructed, with or endangered:

(a) the health or safety of the public;
(b) the maintenance of law and order;
(c) the supply and distribution of light, power or fuel;
(d) postal, telephone or telegraph installations;
(e) the free movement of traffic on land; and
(f) the property, movable or immovable, of other persons or of the state.⁴

Mandela has also always been an enthusiastic supporter of Ugandan Muslim dictator Idi Amin and dictators like Saddam Hussein of Iraq, Hafez el-Assad of Syria, and Moammar Ghadafi of Libya.⁵ He wasn’t removed from the US terrorist list until 2008 – to the embarrassment of the US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice.⁶ To top it all off, Mandela was actually offered to be released from prison on the grounds that he would renounce all violent methods of anti-apartheid protests, but he refused, until he was eventually released from prison unconditionally by FW De Klerk in 1990.⁷

When one confuses the liberal agenda of the mass media with the facts, one is forced to come to the conclusion that Nelson Mandela is in fact not a freedom fighter, but a communist terrorist. Even he himself once admitted that the struggle’s primary ideal was socialism and not democracy.⁸ The UN calls on people worldwide to celebrate today in honour of Mandela’s legacy and values. His values, however, are Marxist, and his legacy is terrorism. I suppose that the most appropriate way of “celebrating” this would be by bombing a church or crèche, or maybe nationalizing your pets, rather than doing charity work. Yet, because Mandela contributed to the fall of the National Party regime, he is virtually deified by the mass media and their minions. Considering all the violent crime, thousands of murders and rapes annually, high unemployment rates, and corruption in the South Africa that Mandela always dreamed of, he couldn’t even be considered a liberator by his own people.

Psalm 15:1 asks the following question: “LORD, who may abide in Your tabernacle? Who may dwell in Your holy hill?” And the question is answered in verse 4: “[He] in whose eyes a vile person is despised, But he honors those who fear the LORD.” Nelson Mandela is certainly a man to be despised. Besides all his other wicked activities, he became famous for reciting the poem “Invictus” to his fellow political prisoners, in order to inspire them in prison. He had special affection for the last two lines of the poem and based his entire philosophy of life on it. It reads, “I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.”⁹ It is unnecessary to analyze the anti-Christian secular humanism of this philosophy; it is clear that honouring Mandela is a grave matter. A true Bible-believing Christian, who loves the truth of Jesus Christ more than the lies of the world, cannot and should not take part in Mandela day.

 

Above: “Fighter for Liberation of South Africa Nelson Mandela” on a 1988 USSR Commemorative Stamp.

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