Wikipedia describes Mandela’s legacy as instrumental in “dismantling apartheid, attacking institutionalized racism, fighting poverty, and fostering racial reconciliation.” His terrorist activities that resulted in a life sentence were dismissed with a cursory journalistic wave of the hand: “In 1962 [Mandela] was arrested [and] convicted of sabotage and conspiracy to overthrow the government [by] leading a bombing campaign against government targets.” Any complaints by journalists who have done their homework on Mandela are equally dissed by the entry at Wiki:

Controversial for much of his life, right-wing critics denounced Mandela as a terrorist and communist sympathizer. He nevertheless gained international acclaim for his anti-colonial and anti-apartheid stance, having received over 250 awards, including the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize, the US Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the Soviet Order of Lenin. He is held in deep respect within South Africa, where he is often referred to by his Xhosa clan name of Madiba, or as Tata meaning Father; he is often described as “the father of the nation.”

The whitewash at Biography.com is even more egregious: it skipped over any mention of his terrorist activities entirely:

For 20 years, he directed a campaign of peaceful, non-violent defiance against the South African government and its racist policies. In 1993, Mandela and South African President F.W. de Klerk were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts to dismantle the country’s apartheid system….

Biography.com waxed positively eloquent and effusive when describing Mandela’s conversion into a revolutionary:

Mandela took classes in a one-room school next to the palace, studying English, Xhosa, history, and geography. It was during this period that Mandela developed his interest in African history from elder chiefs who came to the Great Palace on official business.

He learned how the African people had lived in relative peace until the coming of the white people. According to the elders, the children of South Africa had lived as brothers, but the white man shattered this fellowship. While the black man shared his land, air, and water with the white man, the white man took all of these things for himself.

What’s missing from these fawning and sympathetic summaries is mention of Mandela’s membership in the South African Communist Party (SACP) and his support of terrorist activities by the African National Congress (ANC). As Bill Jasper pointed out in his excellent, well-researched, and long overdue review of Mandela’s life in The New American magazine,

For the past three decades, Nelson Mandela has been swathed in global media adulation unlike any other human being in history. No pope, president, king, war hero, movie star, or rock star can boast of having been the beneficiary of such undiluted, unalloyed, and unbroken acclaim….

Mandela has not had to worry about dirty laundry; he is the first individual to achieve a near-universal cult of personality on the global level, thanks entirely to the unparalleled glorification campaign bestowed upon him by the major media in the United States and Europe.

Jasper’s research includes analyses by pro-Mandela journalists who were nevertheless unable to cover up Mandela’s intimate involvement with terrorist atrocities (all in the name of peace), including historian Stephen Ellis’ External Mission: The ANC in Exile, 1960-1990 and Soviet agent Vladimir Shubin’s ANC:  View from Moscow.  Notes Jasper: “If Mandela was not only a Communist Party member but also a top SACP member … then he is not only a colossal and persistent liar, but he is all the more culpable in the innumerable acts of terror, torture, and murder committed by ANC mobs and … cadres over the past several decades.

Just one of those acts of terror consisted of the barbaric act of “necklacing” developed by the ANC and used against blacks who resisted the “message of freedom” offered by it. As Jasper reminded his readers:

Hundreds of victims, the vast majority of whom were black, were killed this way by ANC-led lynch mobs. Nelson Mandela’s second wife, Winnie Mandela, was caught on video infamously shouting to a huge mob: “With our boxes of matches and our necklaces we shall liberate this country!” Despite this and the fact that she was convicted in court in the torture/murder of 14-year-old Stompie Moeketsi and found by the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission to be guilty in the kidnapping, torture, and murder of numerous men, women, and children, Winnie Mandela is free as a bird and still sits on the ANC’s Executive Committee.

If Nelson Mandela and [South Africa’s current president] Jacob Zuma have any “moral authority,” it has not evidenced itself in the form of condemning and removing this murderess from the ANC’s highest body.

Jasper’s article includes video clips of Mandela singing an ANC song about killing whites and Zuma singing “kill the Boer [the white farmer]” just for good measure.

In 1998, Mandela married his third wife, one Graca Machel, the widow of Samora Machel, the notorious thug who headed up Mozambique until his death in an airplane crash in 1986. As Jasper noted: “for more than a decade, [Graca] was a partner in Samora Machel’s vicious reign of murder and torture of men, women, and children, including even many of his FRELIMO comrades whom he turned against.”

None of this will show up in the orchestrated whitewash of Mandela when he goes to meet his Maker. Instead, the world will mourn the passing of a “saint” who spent 27 years in jail for protesting injustice, and then spent the rest of his days promoting freedom and racial harmony.

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Sources:

Bio of Nelson Mandela from Wikipedia

Bio of Nelson Mandela from Biography.com

Bill Jasper’s article in The New American: “Saint” Mandela? Not so fast!

Description of necklacing by the ANC

Stephen Ellis’s book External Mission: The ANC in Exile, 1960-1990

Soviet Agent Vladimir Shubin’s book ANC: A View from Moscow

President of South Africa Jacob Zuma

Samora Machel

FRELIMO