“People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in
them,” James Baldwin wrote. Few men have had as much history trapped in them as
Nelson Mandela.
To those outside South Africa, the country has been
reduced to Nelson Mandela just as it was once reduced to apartheid. Mandela was
the ending to a story that everyone thought they knew. With his death, the
story comes perilously close to losing its meaning…….Everyone knows the history
of South Africa and no one knows it. The dynamics of a troubled past that were
reduced to a happy ending built around one man are still playing out in South
Africa. Even as the mourning for Mandela goes on, one child is
raped every three minutes in South Africa and three children
are murdered every day. If
there is anything that the world ought to mourn, not only today, but every day,
it is a horrifying reality in which a South African woman is more likely
to be raped than to learn to read, a quarter of the
men admit to
having raped and men with AIDS believe that they can find a
cure by raping a baby….. The Mandela era gave way to the Mbeki era
and the Zuma era. Mbeki had been trained in the USSR and Zuma, like Mandela,
had been a member of the Communist Party…..To Read More…..
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