Nelson Mandela: Africa's Noblest Son; No. 4; Mandela's Release and the Future

But they still are going to be a tumble by. I think that's OK, because they are a little sad about the Great War and quite frankly, also some. You have no real power in this country, though, there's a sense that the struggle has produced some wonderful man and woman. I have in mind people like Alan Jones, the young lawyer yourself, Dr. wanted, like Moses Godard, G.B. Marx, Nelson Mandela has a great sense of humor, extremely intelligent person, very, very clever, somewhat resented this.

And he is not a violent man. We could never make him angry. He wants to understand another man's view. They only tend to do it this way when the government wouldn't listen. That's really what's on the back of his mind. But let's do something that will eventually force them to talk down to education or group areas act or on this law or on that law. Up to now, there's too many things that Mr. Mandela has said that have not been applied particularly, and they never talked. Instead, they became more and more repressive had these deals been applied. Practically many things. We didn't have colonial times, one franchise or any man, one vote and multiple, multiple, multiple, multiple, multiple, multiple Nelson Mandela. That Goodman is one of the noblest sons of Africa. You know, he was a small room to help everybody,

school children, before they go to school. Don't line up the students from that corner up to Mandela's house. If Mandela gets out of his car, they will all play on the car. I say I've Africa my boo yah. I figure until we see that corner, the main road, then the car will stop there. Get off in the evening. Same way too easy comes from where you'll always meet a group of youngsters on the car. The car must go slow. Until this Mandela south. Yo, yo, yo, yo, yo, Nelson

Mandela, one of Africa's noblest sons, has inspired both young and old in South Africa and around the world, his greatness has been attributed to his commitment, his intelligence, his generosity and sacrifice. He has held in such high esteem because of these qualities and his knack for having his finger on the pulse of the true feelings and aspirations of the majority black population of South Africa who follow our oral histories, venerated legends and cherished indelible memories of Nelson Mandela, the man. Because there is a state of emergency in South Africa and many of the people you were about to hear are banned or restricted. Their names are being withheld for their protection. Their reminiscences about Nelson Mandela before his detention for life in 1962 are many each story revealing a different facet of the man. As a political organizer and public speaker, the passionate

and articulate Mandela inspired and informed as a lawyer. He was the people's champion and he was our lawyer. He was the people's lawyer. We even heard a song during the time of the protest against the palace. That was a popular song. We used to say Mandela, Nokia and Tambo. They are going to reduce us. The government cannot do anything. We are protected because we have the people slave to put their lives on the line. So in 1952, Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo and Doomer Noch, we set up a law practice. Mandela and his partners were in great demand.

Their office on the second floor of Chancelor House near the courts, was always packed to capacity with the overflow streaming out onto the street as a sign. Of course, he was probably the most popular lawyer in Johannesburg and throughout the country. I'm not talking not of black lawyers. I'm told of lawyers in general. We have seen a couple of clients in my office. It's nothing compared with what the ones from all levels of society, many offices move on. Sometimes they just could not work. This is the day when I first came to see them. And on a day like that, general office is packed almost wholly and seventy five percent of them would all want to see Mandela. Their practice was unconventional and not for profit.

Advocacy, providing defense for the victims of apartheid, amending laws and law practice. Along the way, Oliver Tambo and Nelson Mandela got used to rendering free legal advice. I remember Oliver Tambo narrating a story of how he was always pumping out money, you know, to give to his clients because after consulting and he didn't even have money to catch busses and go back home, what they rented was an unconventional practice. It was so unconventional that when one of the Ku Klux qualified, you know, they had offered him a post as a partner, but he would not work with them because they were not in the money making game. Mandela, by then, a banned person could not engage in any open political activity because it was increasingly difficult to hold public meetings. Mandela devised a new organizing strategy called the Air Plan. It called for grassroots door to door recruiting so people

could still become members of the African National Congress. But often it was Mandela's legal work that inspired people to join the ANC. When I got arrested 1958 now I was locked up with three young chefs. Then Mandela announced this. Police came in open and Mandela said, I'm coming back. Hope they came in to the police station. This group of police opened up the most Monday. Early in the morning, Mandela brought me to this young daddy. Why are you arrested since you are yet you still with us? This all gets opened only if Mandela doesn't come alone. You come to the station commander and the chief sergeant. And what what was. Then I said, no, I was arrested for African National Congress activities, you know, the whole jail said to me when we got out from this jail. All of us are going to join the African National Congress.

And they did. So the Afrikaner government was becoming more aggressive in its arrest of activists. For example, 20000 women protesting passbooks were arrested in 1956, and Mandela took on the job of bailing them all out. He tried to defend every necessary arrest before and at some time waited in court. The foreign currency, Krugersdorp, so many arrested you would have in to arrange the bail, did while was in court with his own money coming into the house. He was being called in the middle of the night. He would go out. He never had his own time for his own house, so much so that he and his wife Evelyn separated. In 1955, she took their children, two boys and a girl, first to her brother's house and then home to the Transcom Mandela and Oliver Tambo, or from the Transcom as his timbales wife, then girlfriend, Adelaide.

Adelaide was big sister to a beautiful social work student and friend, also from the Transcon. One day when we were driving home, this tall, towering, imposing man came to speak to Mr Turnbull just at the driver's window. And that is how I met Mr Mandela. Nelson Mandela married Ngonyama Winnie Madikizela in 1958. There hadn't been much time for courtship. Mandela was on trial for treason with 155 other prominent South Africans and was busy working on their defense in South Africa today, whites, Negroes, Indians and some of mixed blood were arrested on charges ranging up to high treason. Among them was a member of parliament, a Methodist minister, university professor, a lawyer, trade union officials and African, Indian and youth leaders. Charges include treason, sedition, riotous assembly and communism. There was a defense team and constant consultation between the defendants, but the accused looked very much as the leader.

Mandela cut a striking figure in court. I think this was very, very, very handsome and magnificently built, very athletic, attentive when it comes to this. He was very particular about the way he appeared even in those days when most blacks bought regulate suits. But it was him. But he didn't. I didn't tell you when you when you met him and his gestures were very impressive, knocking on the table or under the undulations of his performance really captured his audience. His defense arguments were so powerful and relevance and timeless emotional impact. South Africans have compared them to historic oratory like Martin Luther King Jr.'s I Have a Dream speech or John F. Kennedy's inaugural address. He spoke very authoritative. He is a very magnetic way of coming across to

his audience. When he gave evidence in the books, he was wonderful. He had the whole court in his hand. The visitor's gallery was standing room only to watch him walk into court and get registered to sit up because somebody has come into this court, the prosecutor in the whole public gallery sitting in expectation, and that's everywhere. I went to see a black man for a change, questioned more widespread, and he delighted and cross-examined at length. And this made it even more popular with blacks. And they didn't have ever heard an angry one for the judge. Judge Robert said to him about the franchise, he said, isn't giving the vote to everybody like you mean the children who can't read? I was. And he said the question of education has nothing to do with the question on the books. On numerous occasions, it

has been told in history that people can enjoy the vote even if they have no education, which is education. And I think it's a good thing that you don't have to have education in order to know that you want certain fundamental rights. So you have got aspirations or claims it has nothing to do with education. What should the trial, the longest and most expensive in South African history, lasted four and a half years. All 156 defendants were acquitted. Well, Nelson Mandela was preoccupied with the treason trial. Trouble was brewing within the ANC in 1955, the ANC organized what was called the Congress Alliance, a multiracial coalition of Indian white colored and trade union organizations. A Congress of the People was convened, and for the first time, all races in South Africa came together to draw up a blueprint for a democratic nation

called the Freedom Charter, a kind of People's Bill of Rights which Mandela helped to write shortly after the Congress of the people. Some of the old ANC youth leaders began reviving complaints about doing political work with white South Africans and Indians. From 1957, they started to have no complaints about, you know, seeing mcadory of black and white colored Indians. That's where we said, no, gentlemen, we disagree with you. Your policy is no different from you and the nationalist government because the nationalist government said pure Afrikaners youth is pure black. You are the same. We want to be quite different from that. We face everyone who wants to stay here in the country is welcome as long as he will work hand-in-hand with blacks who Pan Africanist broke away from the ANC and started

a new organization called the Pan African Congress, or PACY. The year 1960 was proclaimed Africa year by the United Nations. Alexander argued that because I had to see that the French took a decision on the Fourth of July the 16th to do that with the passage, ANC members approached the TSA to work together on a countrywide demonstration to bring an end to the use of passbooks. The data mentioned to us that destroy the places on the 21st of March that we always have to remind you not to organize. And then the U.S. agreed. But unfortunately, in under two months, 10 days earlier than agreed, the PRC launched its first and only protest in Sharpeville, a township south of Johannesburg. Ten thousand protesters gathered at a police station without their passbooks and waited to be arrested. A police lieutenant said there wasn't enough jail

space. Hours passed and the crowd didn't disperse. Suddenly, without warning, police panned the crowd with automatic weapons, firing hundreds of rounds of ammunition. Sixty nine were killed and over 200 wounded, mostly women and children shot in the back. Latest reports from South Africa indicate that at least 62 Negroes died in yesterday's anti segregation demonstrations. More than 200 others were injured. The trouble began on the first day of the campaign against the compulsory carrying of identity papers by Negroes. The two major clashes appear to have occurred at Sharpeville, near Johannesburg and at Langa, near Cape Town. The government called in armored cars and jet planes and efforts to disperse the crowds.

It says it has the situation under control. The Anglican bishop of Johannesburg says that police fired without warning on Negroes at Trouville on Monday. About 80 men, women and children were killed. The Reverend Ambrose Reeves' told newsmen that the ending segregation committee, of which he is a chairman, has sworn affidavit taken from hospitalized Africans to show that the white policeman made no attempt to warn the Africans who were marching on the police station to hand in their identity books. And overwhelming proportion of the wounded, he said, had been shot in the back at the United Nations. The Security Council debates the problem. And for the story. Here's Stanley Byrd, the South African minister, Bernard Asgeir, hardest for. He said that people outside South Africa don't understand the situation lying behind the Sharpeville incident. While it is easy when 10000 miles removed to criticize the authorities for having used firearms on this occasion, it is indeed asking too much of a small group of policemen to commit

suicide, to stand by idly awaiting their turn to be stoned to death as the news flashed around the world. The international community reacted with shock and protest. Blacks walked off their jobs and demonstrations erupted everywhere. Sub-Zero shocked our people into greater determination to fight for the people of South Africa. Our cause of action is very clear. The price of surrender and subservience is not open to us. There is only one place and one path only. It is the path of relentless struggle. It is the path of sacrifice. What is today happening in South Africa has been happening throughout the years. We have been murdered in cold blood by pretorians police thugs. Our children have died of malnutrition in the Bantustans while food was being destroyed. To maintain high prices, the wealth of our country has gone to make a minority white population as well as foreigners,

to regard our country as one of milk and honey. While we starved and died, the white minority governments respond with more brutality, declaring a state of emergency and arresting 20000 without charge and house to house arrest. The ANC and Passi were banned. Nelson Mandela went underground to organize a three day strike to try to shut the country down the day before the stay away. The South African army, with support and training from U.S. Marines, invaded the black townships with machine guns and flamethrowers. The South African regime brought out the army to stamp out this stay at home and were going from house to house. Driving the people out to go to work at townships are filled with tanks throughout the country. The army was mobilized and the reports at the time said that the last time South African Defense Force had been mobilized on that scale

was during the Second World War. White citizens were ordered to arm themselves. Many people fear that the reaction of the government to stay at home. Ordering a general mobilization among the white community, arresting 10000 of African shellfish throughout the country, notwithstanding our clear declaration that this campaign is being done and peaceful and no one lives there was attacked, as far as I'm concerned, that many people feel that it is useless in order for us to continue talking. Peace and violence against the government is only savage attacks on and on the defense to speak. And I think the time has come for us to consider in the light of our experiences in the stay at home, where methods which we

have applied so far, adequate nonviolence has been a staple of the anti-apartheid pro-democracy movement in South Africa. Mahatma Gandhi, the father of passive resistance, had in fact developed that strategy in South Africa. Gandhi and the Indians actually initiated the very first militant resistance against racism in this country. It was in South Africa that he developed this idea of passive resistance, so she called it all. Our sort of formal resistance has always taken the form of passive resistance of breaking loose deliberately and then deliberately inviting arrests. But 60 years of peaceful protest, polite letters and request for meetings had only resulted in more and more bloodshed and repression. We had people like John Foster and others that were followers of Hitler.

And, you know, this background of this type of leadership, what could they really give us in the way of freedom and democracy in terms of what it meant that you are dealing with a police state, professor state and whenever they were violent forms of activity, they would put that down on you and really clamp down on the ANC, canvass the country, sending its representatives to talk with tribal kings and chiefs and community leaders to discuss a possible change in strategy. Nonviolence had not worked. The people were frustrated and ready to take matters into their own hands. On December 16th, 1961, fliers posted everywhere announced the formation of them can't always this way or sphere of the nation. Nelson Mandela was its first volunteer. La la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la

la. Could if it's popularly called with name for the short spear designed by Shaka Zulu that revolutionized hand-to-hand combat, EMK would engage only in sabotage. The fliers specified no actions would be taken to result in loss of life. The means and materials were initially amateurish. Three phone lines and electricity wires were cut and real signal boxes, government installations and then two affairs offices bombed with test batteries and household flammables. If one looks back at the type of things we did, it was rather amateurish. It was merely a token demonstration. As you know, it was a protest. January 5th, 1962, Nelson Mandela was spirited out of the country to attend the Pan African Freedom Conference in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. He also traveled to other independent African states to seek financial support and

training for EMK January 62. That was given the task of taking him out of the country. And he had a chef's uniform with a gap. Every any unknown person sitting with a magazine reading a book is invited to Botswana and some way out of the country. I mean, he went out legally. He could have stayed out and he came back. And that is why he's sitting where he is now, because he came back and said, well, I want to be with my people. After a brief training in guerrilla warfare in Algeria. Nelson Mandela returned home reporting to ANC and MKE members on his trip. What influenced many of us a great deal. Nelson Mandela paid a visit to some of the African states, came back and had talks with little groups of people gathering in houses and conveyed to us how tremendously impressed he was with the forms, the struggles that took place in these

areas in Africa. I, for one, was convinced that if the Algerian struggle could fight the mighty French Empire, certainly we in South Africa, who had already had 50 years of experience in political struggles, could make further headway by resorting to other forms of struggle. Reports of Mandela in Ethiopia and newspaper photos of him in London so incensed the white minority government that a wide dragnet was launched to try to hunt him down because of his many disguises and close brushes with the law. The press dubbed Mandela the Black Pimpernel after a daring fictional character who evaded capture during the French Revolution. And he spent about a week hiding out here. He would have to move, you know, not keep in any particular place for long,

given the task to confess, had to go through first of 57 stuff that got them out of the shadows. He's Kawauchi. They would know how to get hold of me. That was not the end of for the agency. And I was just told on this what we've come to fruition. And I would like to go back, find my children wherever they were and bring them together and go. I never even knew the houses where we were in most of the time. I went to the blindfolded and I would like to take off the diving in these crocodile different uniforms. It only took a couple had this to be a very brave person to one day he was going to surrender and then they came across what is a busy it because they were actually looking for him. And I feel like they just started talking and

I'm going. On August 5th, 1962, Mandela went to Durban to meet with the ANC president and Nobel Peace Prize winner Chief Albert, literally on his way back to Johannesburg. He was stopped by three carloads of police will take him out. They used to be a playwright and so on. So they have been podcasting, having falsely arrested information leaked in the desert in Durban that Nelson Mandela, Nelson Mandela had maneuvered underground for 17 months before his arrest. He was captured because of a tip to police since going underground. The ANC has been plagued by infiltrators and there were more betrayals to come. So.

Oh, yeah, oh. Nelson Mandela, Africa's noblest son, before part documentary on the life and influence of Nelson Mandela, was produced, written and narrated by Sandra Rattley with engineering by Rene Pringle. Production material was provided by the CBC, BBC and Peter Davis from his film Remembering Mandela. The programing was made possible by a grant from the Pacifica Foundation, though Wax is executive producer.