White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

The Mandela Doctrine and McCain’s Heresy

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What does one do about John McCain? Why can he not play the senior statesman? He is a veteran who has endured more than anyone should endure during his imprisonment in North Vietnam. He is a Churchill scholar. He has been a distinguished senator, a worthy presidential aspirant and a powerful voice for many causes.
 
But he cannot help himself: the ill-considered statement is his trademark. Without knowing anything about the situation on the ground in Syria, McCain was foursquare for American intervention. Now he said President Obama shaking hands with Cuban President Raul Castro was akin to Neville Chamberlain's shaking hands with Adolf Hitler.
 
McCain knows much more about the events of 1938 than this cheap shot suggests – I have heard him hold forth in front of the Churchill Society on the unfolding of the Third Reich's European strategy. So he knows better than to compare Obama's handshake with Castro to Chamberlain's grasp of Hitler's contaminated paw.
 
It is little understood these days in the United States how few were Chamberlain options, and how he owed it to the British people to forestall war until they were somewhat more ready to fight it. That is why Churchill joined the cabinet — and why, at the time, he accepted Chamberlain's action.
 
But that is not the point. In his way, McCain's remark trashes the Mandela doctrine, laid out in “Long Walk to Freedom,” Mandela's 1995 autobiography: “If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner.”
 
Mandela's stature grew as his personal serenity and sense of high moral purpose began to be known not only outside Robben Island, but also inside the prison as he began to affect his jailers.
 
Mandela was schooled by the Methodist missionaries, who educated him to persevere and to seek peace; to turn the other cheek. This was one part of his inner strength. The other came from his birth as a nobleman of his tribe; someone in line to be its king if the wider struggle had not been paramount.
 
From Mahatma Gandhi, who had led a civil rights campaign for Indians in South Africa in the first decade of the 20th century, from the missionaries and from his birth, Mandela knew who he was. He also had a selflessness. He could have been released from prison a decade earlier, if he had been prepared to renounce violence. He was not.
 
Unlike Gandhi, Mandela thought violence was a necessary tool in the struggle. Many otherwise good white South Africans thought he should have been put to death – much in the same way we feel about terrorists today.
 
Yet when apartheid fell, not least thanks to Mandela's great partner in the making of the new South Africa, former President F.W. de Klerk, Mandela insisted on peace and reconciliation, saving a troubled, beautiful land from more bloodshed.
 
Mandela shook the hands of his enemies; those who had imprisoned him for 27 long years. He shook their hands just as McCain had gone back to Vietnam and shook hands there.
 
In that atmosphere of celebrating the life a man who had the genius to shake the hands of those who wanted him dead, and then to have reconciled with them, it would have been a travesty of Mandela's legacy for Obama not to have shaken the bloodstained hand of Castro. That is what Mandela would have wanted and would have done himself.
 
It is probably what McCain would have done, too, had he won the presidency. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

The Forces that Made Mandela, Africa’s Greatest Son

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It has been said that Nelson Mandela, when he was young, aspired to be an English gentleman, and that is very likely. Mandela was a nobleman from Thembu royal family of the Xhosa people. In understanding Africa's greatest son, this is important. Mandela derived his fortitude from knowing who he was. That sense of place never left him in 27 years of prison or in the years of adulation that followed.
 
I believe that Mandela was sustained by three forces: his British Methodist education, his ancestry and his Christian faith, also given him in the Eastern Cape Province by Methodist missionaries and teachers.
 
Throughout his life, Mandela conducted himself as that mythical English gentleman with an innate sense of justice, knowing his place in the scheme of things — even a lifelong love of gardening. Just being was mission to Mandela. It won over jailers and eventually enemies.
 
Even when it seemed he would never know a day in the sunlight of freedom, that inner dignity remained intact. He said: “We must use time wisely and forever realize that the time is always ripe to do right.”
 
He was magnanimous in victory and conservative in battle. He opposed excesses in the African National Congress (ANC), which he headed before and after his imprisonment and which he inspired during his 27 years of captivity. He was especially critical of the incipient racism in the ANC and of its disinclination to recognize the efforts of white liberals, particularly South African Jews, in the struggle against apartheid, first in the courts, then through civil disobedience and finally through violence.
 
Mandela was born to social position. He could have been the king of the Thembu. if it had not be for a lineage issue with his mother. He was brought up after his father's death by the the tribal regent and Methodist missionaries.
 
The youthful belief in Britishness as a fount of social justice and decency, evaporated when he got to the gold-boom city of Johannesburg. Yet, like Gandhi, he treasured some of the British values all his life. Also, they were in competition with Afrikaans values which were more extreme with regard to race.
 
I know something about English education in Africa during the days of empire because I was lectured with the same theories by British teachers in the neighboring country of Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. Albeit two decades later than Mandela's schooling, the creed was the same. It went like this: We were a chosen people, kind but paternal, fair and enlightened and we are the gold standard for gentlemen. It was the glorious myth of those times, as heady as it was false.
 
There was no place for a black gentleman in that scheme of things.
 
Mandela studied law but was drawn into politics, always tempered by his Christianity and that sense of noblesse oblige that his heritage and schooling had imbued him with. He was a restrained revolutionary; but when he saw that legal maneuvering and civil disobedience were not going to succeed, he was bravely the public defender of the anti-apartheid cause. Mandela admired Gandhi and would have done it without violence if he had thought there was a chance. He advocated sabotage not murder. His terrorism was against property rather than people.
 
As Mandela was growing into a revolutionary, agreeing to political violence to overthrow the regime only as a last resort, apartheid was growing. Racial segregation was not a new idea, but its rigid enforcement with the massive relocation of people into “homelands,” or Bantustans, was. About 3.5 million people were moved to what the government said were their traditional homelands. Cities were cut up without regard to property rights, family ties or tradition. Whites got the good parts, Coloreds (mixed-race people) a sliver and blacks got the slums with some state improvements. It was as rigid as it was diabolical. Blacks had to carry “passes” when out of their designated area for work or other reasons.
 
In and out of prison, Mandela was a brave light in a dark place. The miraculous thing is that he never grew bitter; he sought reconciliation not revenge. He said: “If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner.”
 
“Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrica” is the anthem of the ANC and much of Africa. It means “God Bless Africa.” South Africa has been blessed with Mandela. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
 

Mugabe in Winter—Still Powerful and Comfortable

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The devil looks after his own. Or so it would seem in the case of Robert Mugabe, the de facto dictator of Zimbabwe.

Under Zimbabwe’s unity government established last year, President Mugabe, who took Africa’s garden and trashed it, has retained enough power to reverse the optimistic direction the country is taking. He and his ZANU-PF party still control the discredited central bank; the military; the police; the Central Intelligence Organization, which is Zimbabwe’s version of the KGB; and the Ministry of Information.

Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai who, until the formation of the unity government was Mugabe’s great enemy and rival, has control of the Ministry of Finance. His ally, Finance Minister Tendai Biki, has done the impossible: He has brought the worst inflation the world has ever known to a halt.

The remedy was simple, though extreme. Biki substituted the U.S. dollar for the worthless Zimbabwe dollar. How worthless was it? Would you believe a currency that once had rough parity with the U.S. dollar was trading–if you could find a buyer–for 1 billion (sic) Zimbabwe dollars to 1 U.S. dollar? Incredibly, the Mugabe faction of the government and ZANU-PF party members want to bring back the Zim dollar, as it was known.

Under the new setup, the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange has reopened and is prospering. And again, shops have goods on the shelves for those who can afford them. While U.S. dollars have circulated illegally in Zimbabwe for some time, it is unclear where they are now coming from, and what is the plight of those who have no access to them and no employment, which is most of the population.

In fact, many Zimbabweans live in a barter economy without cash. Rural people lead a desperate subsistence life, relying on perhaps a few chickens, sometimes a goat or, if relatively well off, some cattle. Most depend on growing enough corn to feed their families and on the generosity of relief agencies, although these are often the targets of Mugabe’s thugs. Food is power and Mugabe has used his troops, police and secret operatives to control food, starving the opposition and feeding only his political loyalists.

In the face of Zimbabwe’s tenuous recovery, there are many questions about Mugabe and his acolytes, and about Tsvangirai and his Movement for Democratic Change.Will Mugabe use his control of the military and the courts to destroy Tsvangirai’s reforms?

Mugabe likes to be the top man, even the reviled top man. His unhinging can be traced back to Nelson Mandela’s release from long imprisonment in South Africa and the deserved global acclaim he was welcomed with. Until then, Mugabe had been the golden African leader. Also he and Mandela were courting Graca, the widow of former Mozambiquan leader Samora Machel. Mugabe lost out and Mandela married her.

Too much praise for the reformers in Zimbabwe might set Mugabe off on another spree of destruction. His favorite charge–if he bothers with charges as opposed to random beatings—is treason, which is a hanging offense in Zimbabwe.

There are also question about Tsvangirai: Some of his early supporters are very critical of his conduct as prime minister. One critic, who does not want to be identified but who played a big role in establishing the unity government, told me: “He has become Mugabe’s bagman. That’s about it.”

This was a reference to Tsvangirai’s recent world fund-raising trip. He did secure minor commitments from doubting donor nations, but most want to see what happens. The money that was raised will go to humanitarian efforts, not the Zimbabwe government.


The success or failure of financial reforms may rest on the diamond fields of eastern Zimbabwe. These were only discovered in 2006 and should have been a valuable source of hard currency for Zimbabwe. But Mugabe had another idea: He allowed the military to massacre itinerant miners (in one case, 80) and seize the mines for their own profit. This has solved a pay problem among soldiers and kept the military faithful to Mugabe. Another gift from the devil for his protégé, Robert Mugabe.