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To the People of the Republic of South Africa

The Unfinished Mission of Nelson Mandela

December 6, 2013

by Ramasimong Phillip Tsokolibane

Ramasimong Phillip Tsokolibane leads LaRouche SA, the LaRouche movement in South Africa.

i4-1Mandela_Nelson_90th_birthday.tif
Fotopedia/Paul Williams
Nelson Mandela at his 90th birthday celebration, June 20, 2008. The number 46664 on the podium was his prisoner number at Robbens Island (he was the 466th prisoner in 1964). He was released from prison in 1990.

When a great man passes—and Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela was a great man—there is a natural tendency to assess his accomplishments and to wonder what might have been. This often produces a romanticised version of history, where the real person becomes something he or she was not. And then, of course, there are the efforts of those with evil intent, who attempt an edit of history for their own ends, seeking to tarnish the legacy of he who has passed.

We would rather tell the truth, because if nothing else, Mandela dedicated his life to that end, to the truth. And his greatness can be found in how he sought to serve that vision of a future, lived not for himself, but for generations of South Africans and others yet unborn, but whose lives were yet quite real and palpable to this leader of the present and future South Africa.

To set the record straight, and to say it loud and clear, Nelson Mandela defeated the clear intent of the evil British Empire to drown our nation in the blood of race war. He accomplished this by recognising that he was the leader of all South Africans, not just of black South Africans, in their shared desire to preserve our nation, not merely for themselves, but for the role that this nation might play in constructing a new Africa, free from slavery and racism and colonialism, and also free from the economic slavery of a neo-colonialism that enforced a permanent underdevelopment of South Africa and all of Africa. It is the power of the globalised financial empire that enforces this underdevelopment, and no matter what niceties might come from the mouths of its servants in London, Wall Street, and elsewhere, the truth of its intent is demonstrated in deprivation and death.

Make no mistake, the City of London financiers and the global Empire they run hate South Africa. They hate us, because we, like our brothers in the United States, actually defeated them. They hate us, because we are the only nation on the African continent capable of producing the machines that make possible economic development and implementing and discovering new technologies, and, with proper leadership, could lead all of Africa to a new age of freedom and real prosperity.

That Mandela understood this potential is clear from his public record. It was his intent to make this the mission of a South Africa finally freed of the evil of apartheid. Inside the country, he had many potential allies among the Afrikaner elite, people who realised that they had to change, not merely to prevent unnecessary bloodshed, but to allow the nation to realise its full future economic potential. These were South African patriots, not “race patriots” encouraged and manipulated by imperial masters in London.

Mandela needed such partners, like F.W. De Klerk—patriots who placed country above race, to make his envisioned peaceful transition work. And it did work.

Where Was the International Support?

i4-2-Mandela_Nelson_Frederik_de_Klerik.tif
Creative Commons/World Economic Forum
Mandela with South African President Frederik de Klerk in January 1992. The two of them received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993 for their work in ending apartheid; in 1994 Mandela replaced de Klerk as President of South Africa. 

But as great as Mandela was, there was no possibility that he could free South Africa from continued slavery to the global financial empire with domestic partners alone. For this great task, and for the future development of Africa, he needed a sovereign national partner, and that partner had to be the USA. And to this day, the USA, under its mis-leadership and with its ass-kissing support for the global financial Empire, has failed South Africa and all of Africa.

There are those who will say that Mandela and later leaders of the ANC and the government have failed to make the kind of improvements that give hope in the townships, where unemployment, especially among young people, is so high. They will blame Mandela for turning a blind eye to corruption within the ANC and the government, which today threatens to create bloodshed between the “haves” and the “have-nots.”

But such assessments and assignments of blame ignore reality. Who gave South Africa the billions in credit it would need to develop its domestic economy? No one—on order of the City of London and its Wall Street satrap. Who sponsored regional and Africa-wide development projects to bring water where it is needed and to create rail-based development and transportation projects? No one—on orders from Her Majesty, the shriveled Brutish Queen. Where were the partners-in-development outside of South Africa, who could have realised Mandela’s dream and vision? Nowhere to be found.

Blame them for our current problems, not a great man who sought that possibility, which we, as a people, would not otherwise by ourselves have known to battle for. What of those citizens of South Africa who now raise orations in praise of Mandela’s memory, but who refuse to fight for their own economic freedom, who care more about picking out just the right pair of Nikes in the mall, than whether their nation will survive a coming global financial holocaust that they would prefer to believe might never reach the “Island of South Africa,” who prefer to ignore a terrible reality, than to fight to change it?

Mandela labored mightily to change that reality. But he lacked the sovereign partner that an enlightened USA could have been. And he lacked the support of our own people for his vision of a future South Africa. Speaking of the French people in the failure of the French Revolution, the great German poet Friedrich Schiller once said, “A great moment has found a little people.”

Bring Africa Out of Darkness

Rather than debate Mandela’s legacy, let us give him his true immortality, by taking up that fight for the future that he was not able to realise in his lifetime. We shall do this by bringing down the global power of the City of London and Wall Street, or face not only the death of Africa, but the likely extinction of the human race in a general thermonuclear war. We shall do this by rejecting monetarism for the higher principle of the dignity of human life, which measures our real wealth, not in monetary terms, but in what we do to improve the productive potential of mankind. We shall do this by supporting development projects for Africa which will bring the continent out of the darkness and into the light of economic development and prosperity.

Despite what the Empire tells us, our only source of wealth is not to be found in the ground, but in our people. Mandela once said he knew that all of his sufferings and tribulations had been worth it when he could look into the eyes of children and see their hope for the future. Let us remove the blinders from our eyes, and move forward with a renewed confidence in the future. This is how we must honour Nelson Mandela.

ramasimongt@hotmail.com