Saturday 30 May 2020

Forgiveness is Divine


     Since the dawn of mankind, the documentation of atrocities perpetrated by one culture on another shall echo throughout the labyrinth halls of Time. Yearly, there is a call to remember the Holocaust without forgiveness, while the victims of mankind’s most horrendous, brutal and barbaric behaviours are the People of Africa. Indentured servitude, enslavement, kidnapping and imprisonment are cherished subjects noted among the pages in History Textbooks, but there are no details of Apartheid. The forgiving and peaceful People of Colour, victims of barbarism in the name of Civilization.
     In her article, “He fought, then forgave,” Stephanie Nolen scratches the surface of a barbaric period in History that, to this day, remains a psychological scar to the bodies, hearts and minds of South Africans anywhere. Erringly, he is called Madiba, which is clan to which he was born, Rohilahla Mandela was given the name Nelson by a Teacher, because she didn’t want to learn his African name.
     His arrival on Robben Island in 1964; interred there for 18 years, the respect he commanded saw him attract the attention of the Afrikaans Prison officials. Nolen is quotes, “Other prisoners later described how, a few years into his incarceration, guards ordered him to dig and then climb into a grave-shaped trench. He must have wondered whether this was the end. Then, as he lay in the dirt, they unzipped their trousers and urinated on him.”
     Mandela’s spoke often of his ideals. Ideals echoing those spoken by other men of Forgiveness, like Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi, who, like Mandela was a Lawyer. Orators, whose words stir hearts and minds on both sides of a conflict. “Mr. Mandela seemed possessed of an uncanny understanding of what it would take to maintain peace. In the first days of his presidency, he took pains to stress that the power of the massive majority he suddenly controlled would be used rarely, if at all. He promised that non-black South Africans would retain their jobs in government, that apartheid-era agents would be pardoned, and F.W. de Klerk, the last apartheid leader, would have an active role in the cabinet” (Nolen, 2013).
     In closing, Nolen misuses Madiba often, here she states, “Madiba went into jail an angry, militant young man, quite rightly upset at the travesty of justice that he had experienced with his comrades, and the 27 years were quite crucial in helping him to mellow.” It was Mandela, who went to jail; Madiba is a clan of Kings, the Thembu People of Central Africa, immigrants to South Africa. “To err is human, to forgive is divine,” Alexander Pope.

February 12th. 2020, by R. Anthony H. Rock.

© copyright R Anthony H. Rock

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