Nelson Mandela was a great human being, but I wouldn’t have voted for him in South African elections or the ANC. The ANC’s role was closer in an American context to that of Martin Luther King, although unlike King the ANC and Mandela did use violent revolutionary activities to promote their political aims.
Closer to the position of the Black Panthers and icons like Malcolm X was the Pan Africanist Congress which broke off from the ANC. While the ANC called for “one person one vote,” the PAC called for “one settler, one bullet.”
South African Prime Minister Balthazar Johannes Vorster who had Nelson Mandela jailed, was himself jailed from 1942-44 for pro-Nazi activities in the Ossewabrandwag trying to overthrow the British administration in support of Hitler
Following the end of formal Apartheid, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission approach to rectifying the Nazi like horrific crimes perpetrated against non-white minorities in South Africa was a dismal failure as most whites refused to fess up or cooperate with it. Consequently, South Africa’s equivalent of Nazi war criminals (actually, some of them ARE/WERE NAZIs; look at former South African prime ministers Verwoerd, who was a member of the pro-German Nazi Broederbond Society and his successor, Vorster, a member of the pro-German Nazi Ossewa Brandwag) have never been made to account for their crimes. If the PAC had come to power, there would have been a reckoning, just as Jews have made Nazis account for their crimes whenever and wherever we hunt them down.
People may justifiably argue that lives were spared by the peaceful transition of power from whites to the ANC, but I ask, how many lives have been lost due to the institutional continuance of the oppressive South African economy which has recently resulted in the murders of striking mine workers as just the latest outrage?
