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Peace & reconciliation Mandela’s theory can be briefly summarized as: if you have a disagreement, talk with each other about it. It seems such an obvious truth, but it is one that even under the world’s most powerful people has not achieved a mass following.
While examples speak for themselves, South Africa is naturally one of the most convincing. After centuries of white supremacy and oppression, the nation transformed into a democratic society in a largely peaceful manner. That was the work of Mandela, of a team of armoured workers that, when there was nothing left to discuss, did not hesitate to apply violent methods in support of the above credo and of their movement, the ANC.
Since that time, there are countless examples added by Mandela, who will be 85 in July 2003, and by soldiers in arms such as Cyril Ramaphosa. The Lockerbie matter was resolved, in Burundi the fighting parties were successfully brought to the negotiating table and in the Democratic Republic of Congo it seems that a peaceful future is in sight. Even in the negotiations over an independent East-Timor and those over the future of Northern Ireland, South Africans have played and continue to play a role.
In his own country Mandela applied this principle when he, as first president of the democratic South Africa, composed a “government of national unity”. For instance, even Mangosuthu Buthelezi was given a role because he “has proven himself as a politician by conducting a war against the ANC over a number of years. It was not possible to simply go around such a man”, said Mandela recently in an interview.
In the South Africa of his successor, Thabo Mbeki, Mandela remains active as an advocate of the right to criticize. In this manner, he sympathizes with the Treatment Action Campaign, one of the movements that has emerged from the ANC, and which advocates zealously for the distribution of anti-retroviral drugs to HIV-positive people and people with AIDS and for the resignation of the Minister of Health Msimang-Tshabalala.
While Mandela is a passionate supporter of multi-party democracy and the necessity of opposition, it seems that his own actions are driven by a desire for consensus. His attraction to consensus is recognizable through a readiness for reconciliation, even though it may not be seen as independent from an equally passionate drive to keep the memories of the past in tact along with striving towards equality and respect for those that were repressed for so long. These principles are not mutually exclusive.
In a nation such as ours, where negotiations generally break down due to fractions of percentages, there are hidden lessons in to be found in Southern Africa that are worthwhile to learn.
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