Nelson Mandela lived several lives: Communist militant, pacifist prisoner, and charismatic president. He was also the only recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize to receive both the USSR’s International Lenin Peace Prize and the American Presidential Medal of Freedom. What was the thread linking these successive and somewhat contradictory lives? Let me propose a hypothesis that his prison guards would certainly confirm, as would the Afrikaners who negotiated the end of apartheid with him: Mandela’s Christian faith led him from violence to redemption.
Mandela was a Christian, as I learned during a long conversation with him at a 1992 meeting in Durban of the South African Foundation, a business-backed anti-apartheid organization. The aura surrounding him then, felt by all who spoke with Mandela, was more mystical than political. Most South Africans, whatever their skin color, are Christians. The country’s ruling Afrikaners saw themselves as a tribe of Israel in exile. They adhered to an assiduous reading of the Old Testament, and an understanding of Christianity that they spread throughout South Africa. The reconciliation between the African National Congress (ANC) and the apartheid government of F.W. de Klerk (president until 1991) was an act of shared faith between two men who belonged to the same syncretic Christian tradition. The West’s economic blockade contributed to ending apartheid but did not bring Mandela and de Klerk together. It was not only the boycott of South African oranges by European and American consumers that overcame apartheid, but also belief in Christ.
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