Mandela’s good work

December 18, 2013 · 0 Comments

Dear editor:

Nelson Mandela must have been heart broken to witness his efforts, his works, his accomplishments thrown right back at him as he witnessed South Africa’s rapid decline into chaos. He must have known it was not by accident that his people were, in some ways, taken back to where they once were, with strife makers at work setting people against people. He must have wondered if colonialism ever dies a permanent death.

Margaret Thatcher had made it clear that British interests in South Africa come first. Apartheid was a price she was prepared to live with to meet her goals. Today it is clear that nations around the world are looking after their interests in South Africa. Propping up despicable “leaders” in foreign lands has only one explanation.

Today citizens around the globe have faster visuals of how humans are divided into worthy and the not worthy; the latter living with no rights, in squalor and destitution to facilitate the affluence and luxury of the former. The myth of Africa, Asia, South and Central America and Eastern Europe are well propagated.

World “leaders” are flocking to South Africa to sing the same song of praise for Mandela’s morals, statesmanship, humanity, greatness, etc. Some will find it baffling that these “leaders” never let these kinds of qualities rub off on them although they like to see themselves as great people pronouncing great titles on themselves and each other, conducting themselves as far above and beyond mortal men and women who keep them living in great style to match the way they see themselves – so unlike Mandela, the man of the moment.

Mandela may have loved it if our PM had stuffed a few “ordinary” Canadians, maybe some school children of humble backgrounds, or the homeless, in his princely private craft that will be flying him to and from with all those others who see themselves and each other as worthy to be on that costly excursion. Mandela though, did not see anybody as being beneath him.

Sadly, it looks like barbaric injustice and grave inequality are here to stay, Mandela or no Mandela; one set of people is silenced by oppression, one set silenced by everyday affluence and generally good living; credit to them for dropping a donation in a bucket a few times a year, although not too mindful where it ends up.

How many Mandela’s, or Gandhi’s, or Martin Luther King’s, or Mother Teresa’s, or Princess Diana’s, or Lennon’s, or JFK’s and Bobby K.’s would the world need to end the misery so willfully inflicted upon too many of the world’s most helpless people for the benefit of those who have their fists tightly folded around the wealth and power?

Maybe for now we should just be thankful that Nelson Mandela was not mowed down in the prime of his life in the same way as some of those mentioned above, albeit he was in that very inhuman way.

Gloria Ramnath,

Shelburne