Every Thursday at one point during Nelson Mandela's long incarceration on Robben Island he and a group of other black prisoners would be taken outside and told to dig a trench six feet deep. When it was complete, they were told to get down into it, whereupon their white warders would urinate on them. Then they were told to fill in the trench and go back to their solitary cells.
Years later, when Nelson Mandela was about to be inaugurated as the first president of South Africa elected by all its people, he was asked who he would like to invite to his first dinner as president. The warders from Robben Island, he said. "You don't have to do that," his advisers told him. "I don't have to be president either," he replied. The first time he sat down to break bread as head of state those same warders were his guests.
When Nelson Mandela arrived in London last week for the unveiling of his statue in Parliament Square, most of those who turned out to offer him adulatory applause were, like me, middle-aged and upwards. Mandela's epic life was the political soundtrack to our formative years.
In the politics of the 1960s, the apartheid system in South Africa stood as a totem of all that remained of the entrenched privilege and evil repression of the imperialism of the past. Apartheid was the last bastion of the arrogant notion of the superiority of the white man.
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