The Search for Mandela's Gun
By Simon J Black
Published: 12/09/2006
Recently, I was speaking to high school students about the role of social movements in the political system. One movement I spoke of was the Black freedom struggle in South Africa. The kids knew little about apartheid but they all recognized the name of Nelson Mandela. Sensing their interest, I embarked on a slight digression, relating the story of Mandela’s handgun. The gun was a gift given to him by an Ethiopian army officer while Mandela undertook military training in Addis Abba. Prior to his arrest and subsequent 27 year imprisonment, Mandela buried the gun behind his farmhouse hideout situated just north of Johannesburg. This year, historians and activists from the ruling African National Congress party – of which Mandela was leader – went on a mission to dig up the long lost gun and put it in a museum. Upon hearing the story, the class was astonished: “Mandela had a gun?” “Why did he have a gun?” “Not the Nelson Mandela, right?” I told them that Mandela had been active in forming the Umkhonto we Sizwe (or MK for short), an armed resistance group which sabotaged (i.e. bombed) key sites of white South African rule. The students couldn’t believe that the Mandela they knew – the grandfatherly elder statesman, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, the friend of Bill Clinton – had organized “terrorism”.
I understood their confusion. In these times of omnipresent “terrorist” threats, it seems natural for us to understand terrorism as a cut and dry issue, a matter of good versus evil – as George Bush would have us believe. We’re told that the cliché of “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” is horribly out of date in our post 9-11 world. Yet the discussion around what constitutes the legitimate use of violence for political ends is as relevant as ever. Who would dare compare Al-Qaeda’s nihilistic program to the sabotage campaign carried out by Mandela’s MK? The British Empire arrogantly supposed that anyone who didn’t like living under the thumb of colonial rule was a “terrorist”, from the Mau Mau’s in Kenya to the Indian resistance. The U.S. government labeled the Black Panther Party “terrorists”, when much of the terror of American politics was being carried out by the CIA at home and the U.S. military abroad (Vietnam, Cambodia, Chile, Nicaragua etc.). It goes on: The Israeli government denounces Palestinian “terrorism” whether it is speaking of suicide bombings in busy town centers or the gunning down of Israeli soldiers who are illegally occupying the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Even within so-called terrorist movements, political violence eschews black or white distinctions. The Irish Republican Army’s (IRA) bombing of British shoppers in Manchester was not only heinous, but a horrible strategic mistake for those concerned with the civil rights struggle of Northern Irish Catholics. Yet that same IRA’s defense of Catholic communities under British army bombardment in Belfast must be seen in a different light. This nuanced approach to political violence should be applied to all social struggles that opt for the bullet when the ballot is not available (to paraphrase Malcolm X). When people are denied political participation, violence becomes a justifiable means to assert their rights and the line that separates “terrorism” from “resistance” becomes blurred.
The term terrorism has become all things to all people, so amorphous that it does little to explain complex conflicts which desperately require solutions and not heated political rhetoric. More often than not, it is the people with power who define what “terrorism” is and who the “terrorists” are. For those of us who forget the murky ethical dilemma’s that surround the use of political violence, a history lesson is in order. Maybe the search for Mandela’s gun can teach us something about the nature of political violence in this age of the “global war on terror”.
Published in POUND Issue 36 Dec 2006