The conjunction of indignation and sadness over the decision
in the Martin case in Florida, Where I live and the celebrations of Mandela’s
95 birthday in South Africa in my home for many years brought me back to a
story from time in Mandela’s life when he was runaway.
It was 1961, when Mandela and other members of the South
African National Congress had just professed war on the unfair system of
apartheid. He had systematic the African National Congress’s underground annex
Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation) resorting to fierce force after he maintained
all peaceful means of trying to achieve freedom and first-class nationality for
the black common in South Africa had unsuccessful. He was being required by the
police, moving from place to place. On this circumstance, he had taken shelter
in the home of a white supporter.
One day, Kodesh got up at 5 A.M. to find that Mandela a
fitness informal from his early days, was dressed in a tracksuit and getting
ready to go running. Mandela wrote about it later simply saying that Him “irritated
Wolfie every morning for I would wake at five, change into my running clothes
and run on the advert for more than an hour”. But there was more to it. When
Kodesh got up for the first time and saw Mandela preparing to run according to
the South African reporter Max du Preez, “He told him that a black man running about
a white conurbation would look very doubtful and declined to give him the key
to the door.”
Mandela might give his grandchildren the same guidance today
even 52 years future and even under different political situations in the most
of the country’s environs, which remain largely white. In an article from South
Africa permitted, “From Trayvon Martin to Andries Tatane, Reasoning discord and
the Black male body,” the writer Gillian Schutte reports what I have heard from
many other
South Africans that the Trayvon Martin case has timbre there and that there is “shock and anger” over the not embarrassed judgment. “We sympathize about our own black sons and how insecure they would be in the United States” Schutte writes. But then she goes to quote examples when black men and boys in South Africa have recently met destinies parallel to Trayvon Martin’s including the case of Andries Tatane, who was “beaten by police and shot in the trunk at close variety with rubber shots.” Ongoing Schutte writes, “And someway in all of this we fail to make the joining with the sustained ferocity towards the black male body in South Africa.”
Schutte asks the question that “many people in the United
States black and white are also asking. Once is this going to change? How much
longer must we watch young black boys and men die?”
And the questions come as the world nearly as one requests
for the man who was once advised not to go running in a conurbation, Nelson
Mandela. Reports from his African National Congress party ask everyone to reproduce
on his life and say that this day most highly delivers a chance to rival this
life well lived.”
These are suitable words for the South African nation
including the A.N.C. Which many trust occasionally sends mixed signals about
its promise to those ideals. But they also reverberate for those living in the
United States in anxious times like these. In a few days another case will be
heard in Wisconsin involving a white man killing a weaponless black 13 year-old
in which three of four black people in the panel group have been detached by
the protection.
One of my nieces wrote to me proverb that she was so angry
about the decision in the Trayvon Martin case and asking me, “Auntie, what can
I do?” She is of the age that South Africans call “born frees” those instinctive
long after Nelson Mandela went to custodial. I will tell her to honor his
birthday today and channel her anger by studying his history and that of the
people in this country who clashed and made expenses for freedom and maybe she
and her generation will come away sympathetic that it takes more than a few
days of complaint and fleeting virtuous anger to compensation sins. I will
write and ask my niece, how long are you ready to fight for right?
I will also propose if she plans to marker a birthday acknowledgment
to Nelson Mandela on her FB page or anywhere. She might do so with the words
that he and his parallel liberty battalions often used when they spoke about
freedom and those who fought for it hither and thither, Long live……………………!
For more interesting info. visit: http://www.thesanews.co.za
