Don't Sugar-Coat Mandela Legacy

‘Go safely Umkhonto. Umkhonto we Sizwe. We the members of the Umkhonto have pledged ourselves to kill them — kill the whites.” These are lyrics from the anthem of Umkhonto we Sizwe, or “Spear of the Nation.” The organization is better known as the MK, the military wing of the Marxist African National Congress (ANC). The MK was established by its commander, Nelson Mandela, to prosecute a terrorist war against South Africa's racist apartheid regime.

 

Mandela had been out of prison for about two years in September 1992 when, fist clenched in the “black power” salute, he was filmed singing the anthem with a number of his comrades. Interestingly, but not ironically, as Mandela and others repeated the refrain about killing Boer farmers, it was a white man who stood next to him, similarly clench-fisted and singing. The man's name is Ronnie Kasrils. A Soviet-trained terrorist who helped Mandela found the MK, Kasrils was a member of the Central Committee of the South African Communist Party.

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