Lost Prison Manuscript Reveals - Nelson Mandela

New light is shed on the president's politics, smoothed over in 'Long Walk to Freedom'

This is a story about Nelson Mandela, and it begins on Robben Island in 1974. Prisoner number 466/64 is writing up his life story, working all night and sleeping all day.  Finished pages go to trusted comrades who write comments and queries in the margins. The text is then passed to one Laloo Chiba, who transcribes it in ‘microscopic’ letters on to sheets of paper which are later inserted into the binding of notebooks and carried off the island by Mac Maharaj when he is released in 1976.

Outside, the intrepid Mac turns the microscopic text into a typescript and sends it to London, where it becomes the Higgs boson of literary properties, known to exist but not seen since it passed into the hands of the South African Communist Party, or SACP, in 1977. Years pass; the mystery deepens. Mandela goes from being an obscure South African prisoner to possibly the most famous living human, subject of global adulation and a ghostwritten autobiography that sells 15 million. His cult is such that prints of his hands are sold for thousands, and yet the prison manuscript stays missing. Until last week, when Professor Stephen Ellis of the University of Leiden sent out an email saying: ‘You’ll never guess what I’ve just found in the online archive of the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory.’

So yes, the lost manuscript has come back to us and, with it, a range of fascinating questions. Why was it not published earlier? Why did it surface now? And above all, what light does it shed on Mandela’s Awkward Secret, first reported by Professor Ellis in 2011?

Everyone thought Mandela was a known entity, but he turns out to have led a double life, at least for a time. By day, he was or pretended to be a moderate democrat, fighting to free his people in the name of values all humans held sacred. But by night he donned the cloak and dagger and became a leader of a fanatical sect known for its attachment to the totalitarian Soviet ideal.

When Ellis first aired this theory, it read like a Cold War thriller, but when Mandela died last month, the African National Congress and the SACP both issued statements confirming that it was true: at the time of his arrest in 1962, Nelson Mandela was a member of the SACP’s innermost central committee.

This, then, is why Ellis and I were dizzy with excitement when the prison manuscript turned up last week: here was a rich new source of virgin material to be scanned for the smoking gun, the inside and untold story of Mandela’s secret life as a communist plotter. Alas, the smoking gun was not there. But the prison manuscript does offer insights into the manner in which Mandela’s image has been manipulated over the decades.

It is common cause that the ANC decided in the 1960s to use Mandela as the anti-apartheid movement’s official poster boy. He was the obvious choice, a tall, clean-limbed tribal prince, luminously charismatic, married to the telegenic Winnie, and reduced by cruel circumstance to living martyrdom on a prison island. All you had to do was cleanse him of the communist taint and Bob’s your uncle: four decades down the road, you have the president of the USA getting weepy as he describes Mandela’s lifelong struggle for ‘your freedom, your democracy’. There’s no accounting for taste, but one wonders if Barack Obama would have said that if he’d known his hero batted for the opposition during the Cold War.

‘I hate all forms of imperialism, and I consider the US brand to be the most loathsome and contemptible.’

‘To a nationalist fighting oppression, dialectical materialism is like a rifle, bomb or missile. Once I understood the principle of dialectical materialism, I embraced it without hesitation.’

Unquestionably, my sympathies lay with Cuba [during the 1962 missile crisis]. The ability of a small state to defend its independence demonstrates in no uncertain terms the superiority of socialism over capitalism.’

Whoa! That’s not Mandela, is it? Well, yes. These quotes come from the prison manuscript, which turns out to be the first draft of Long Walk to Freedom, Mandela’s famous 1994 autobiography. Much of the first draft is carried forth into the finished book, but these problematic quotes have vanished, along with several other outbreaks of what can only be described as pro-communist harangue. What happened?

Our search for an answer must begin with Rick Stengel, a New York journalist who is now President Obama’s undersecretary for public diplomacy. In the 1980s, Stengel did a tour of duty in South Africa, where he exhibited sensitivity to the hardships of black people and enthusiasm for their ANC liberators, surely one of the factors that led to his eventual appointment as Mandela’s ghostwriter.

Among the raw materials he was given to work with was the prison manuscript, a sprawling 637-page affair with many uneven passages and no clear ending. Stengel proceeded to turn this sow’s ear into Long Walk to Freedom, a blockbuster that considerably boosted the Mandela legend and formed the basis for a movie of the same title, now doing boffo box office around the planet.

In what follows, there is an element of conjecture. Since Mr Stengel is the ghostwriter of record, it seems logical to infer that he made the changes, even if we have no other basis for saying so. Pending clarification, let’s note that Stengel was a New York liberal who would instantly have realised that stridency was undesirable, especially if it sounded a bit Russian. Clearly those lines about the Cuban missile crisis and the evils of Yankee imperialism had to go. Beyond that, the changes are usually quite subtle — a quote dropped here, a shift in emphasis there. Having read both manuscripts several times, I think it’s fair to say that Stengel appears to have cleaned up Mandela’s act in three critical areas.

Rick Stengal 

The first was his premature conversion to violence. Officially, Mandela was a moderate black nationalist, clinging to hope of peaceful change until it was extinguished by the Sharpeville massacre of 1960. But in the prison memoir we find him plotting war as early as 1953, when he sent a comrade on a secret mission to beg guns and money from Red China, in flagrant violation of the ANC’s non-aligned and non-violent stance.

‘I was bitter and felt ever more strongly that SA whites need another Isandlwana,’ he explains. Driving around the country, Mandela constantly imagines rural landscapes as battlefields and cities as places where one day soon ‘the sweet air will smell of gunfire, elegant buildings will crash down and streets will be splashed with blood’. These vivid quotes did not make it into the bestseller.

The second area is his endorsement of force against opponents. In April 1958, the ANC called a three-day national strike which drew little or no support and had to be called off in humiliating circumstances. In Long Walk, Mandela notes that the strike was completely effective in towns where it was enforced by violence or pickets. ‘I have always resisted such methods,’ he says, but goes on to reason that coercion is acceptable in cases where a dissident minority is blocking a majority. ‘A minority should not be able to frustrate the will of the majority,’ he concludes.

But in the prison manuscript, he says the opposite. ‘This is not a question of principle or wishful thinking,’ he says. ‘If force will advance [the struggle],then it must be used whether or not the majority agrees with us.’ Pardon my italics, but it’s important to understand what you’re looking at here: the rewrite makes Mandela sound reasonable. The original is Stalinism. Who determines the course of struggle? It is the communist vanguard, imbued with higher wisdoms derived from the gospel of dialectical materialism. And if the majority talks back, they must be smashed. As they were in the final bloody phase of the struggle here. And everywhere else in Planet Soviet.

The third area of amendment involved errors of even-handedness. I thought I knew South African history, but one section of the prison manuscript surprised me. (The section beginning on page 304, if you must know. The entire book is available at http://specc.ie/longwalkms). I’d heard of the Alexandra bus boycott of 1957, in which a determined display of people power forced capitalists to withdraw a fare increase. But I was totally ignorant of ANC-led boycotts against Langeberg, a giant food-canning operation, and United Tobacco; both corporations were forced to deal with African unions and grant wage increases.

Emboldened, the ANC tackled cruel potato farmers, and brought them down too. Soon it was organising consumer boycotts all over the country, and often winning. At the same time, it was behind the ceaseless protests against the pass laws for women while winning stunning victories in the Treason Trial and elsewhere. The cost in ANC lives: zero. ‘To the best of my knowledge,’ writes Mandela, ‘no individuals [meaning political detainees] were isolated, forced to give information, beaten up, tortured, crippled or killed’ prior to December 1961, when the communists started their bombing campaign (see page 302).

Clearly, this could not be allowed to stand. It spoils the plot completely! So Stengel cut it, allowing Long Walk to soar towards to its moral epiphany. Provoked beyond endurance by oppression, Mandela convinces the ANC’s timid old guard that it is time to fight back. With their blessing, he goes on to form MK, ‘military wing of the ANC’, which launches a bombing campaign against non-human targets.

If we are to believe Stephen Ellis and Irina Filatova, a Russian historian who has also published on the subject, all of this is doubtful or fabricated. The decision to go to war was actually taken by the Communist party, meeting in a prosperous white suburb, in a marquee where black Africans were outnumbered around two to one by white and Indian intellectuals. ANC president Albert Luthuli did not endorse the move to violence and MK was not the military wing of the ANC at all — it was the sole creation of the Communist party, and everyone involved in its high command was openly or secretly a communist.

You will find nothing of this in Long Walk, of course. Is that Stengel’s fault? I think not. Mandela’s secret was still a secret in the early 1990s, and Stengel was a hired hand, taking instructions from God knows who. I attempted to elicit a comment, but Mr Stengel failed to get back to me. Another man who might be able to shed light on the mystery is Mac Maharaj, the man who smuggled the original out of prison, now a spokesman and adviser in the office of President Zuma. But he didn’t return my calls either.

We will therefore have to turn to Hollywood to complete this story. I went to see the movie version of Long Walk to Freedom armed with a pen and ready to fight yet another rearguard action for Afrikaner honour, only to find myself disarmed by the director Justin Chadwick’s take on the Mandela story. No one really expects movies to be true, and this one certainly isn’t. It’s a fable about a brave man who sticks up for what he believes in and, against all odds, wins in the end. Music swells, titles roll and I must hide the fact that I am moved. (Yes, I am a sucker.)

Then I borrow an electronic copy of the script and run a search for the word ‘communist’. Two scenes come up. In one, a white policeman jostles Mandela while saying, ‘Ag, everyone knows you’re a bloody communist!’ In another, a white police general appears at the scene of a bombing and says, ‘This is the work of communist terrorists….’ Both cops are clearly intended to be taken as racist buffoons. This is a perfect distillation of the traditional left-liberal position on Mandela. For decades it was gospel. Now, it’s inadvertently funny.

Rian Malan is affiliated to the Foundation for African Investigative Reporters.http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9116391/the-mandela-files/

Margaret Thatcher Never Officially Called for Release of Mandela

Nelson Mandela's name was not raised once in an official meeting between Margaret Thatcher and South Africa's prime minister in 1984, records showed, re-opening the debate into how much she pushed for his release from prison.

P. W. Botha was invited to talks with the Thatcher at the British prime minister's Chequers country residence to discuss South Africa's policy towards its black population, as the apartheid regime sought to emerge from its international isolation.

The record of that meeting, released 30 years later under secrecy rules, showed that Thatcher pressed Botha on the issue of apartheid but Mandela's name did not come up during the official talks.

Thatcher chose instead to raise the issue during a shorter private discussion the two leaders had beforehand, where no official note-takers were present.

The newly declassified official records show that the British government confirmed that Mandela's imprisonment was raised at a short "tete-a-tete", but that Thatcher made little progress with Botha.

In a note about the 40-minute private meeting sent to the Foreign Office on June 2, 1984, Thatcher's advisor John Coles wrote: "The prime minister said afterwards that Mr Botha had stated that it was never possible for South Africa to satisfy international opinion.

"She took the opportunity to raise the case of Nelson Mandela.

"Mr Botha said he noted the prime minister's remarks, but that he was not able to interfere with the South African judicial process."

But in the broader, four-hour meeting where official minutes were taken, Thatcher omitted the leaders' disagreement over anti-apartheid hero Mandela -- despite prior guidance from the Foreign Office to make the point.

In a briefing paper written by the Foreign Office for the prime minister's office ahead of the meeting, it was suggested that Thatcher include Mandela's release from prison as a "point to make".

In a statement to the House of Commons, the lower house of parliament, after the meeting, Thatcher said: "On the internal situation in South Africa, I expressed our strongly held views on apartheid.

"I told Mr Botha of my particular concern at the practice of forced removals (of the black population) and raised the question of the continued detention of Mr Nelson Mandela."

In her 1993 memoir, "The Downing Street Years", Thatcher said that in the meeting with Botha, she raised the case of Mandela, "whose freedom we had persistently sought".

He was finally released "after all the years of pressure, not least from me", she wrote.

The revelations come after the historical approach of the Conservatives -- the party of Thatcher and current Prime Minister David Cameron -- to Mandela's African National Congress party came under scrutiny after the peace icon's death last month.

Reminded that Thatcher branded the ANC a "typical terrorist organisation" during a press conference in 1987, a senior Conservative former minister, Norman Tebbit, said: "He was the leader of a political movement which had begun to resort to terrorism."

Cameron has in the past apologised for his party's approach to apartheid-era South Africa.

In 2006, he flew to South Africa to seek forgiveness from Mandela for "the mistakes my party made with the ANC and sanctions in South Africa".

Cameron said at the time that Thatcher had been wrong to brand the ANC "terrorists".

http://www.timeslive.co.za/local/2014/01/03/thatcher-never-officially-called-for-release-of-mandela

10 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Nelson Mandela

1. Mandela’s tribal nickname is “Rolihlahla,” meaning “Troublemaker.”

Other accounts translate Rolihlalhla to mean “to pull a branch from a tree,” which, of course, is something only a troublemaker would do. It was his teacher, Miss Mdingane, who gave him the English name “Nelson,” much to the relief of journalists everywhere when he became famous.

2. Mandela was expelled from university after less than a year.

After finishing boarding school, Mandela headed to Fort Hare Missionary College. Less than 12 months later, he was expelled from college for helping to organize a strike against the white colonial rule of the institution. One might call this foreshadowing.

3. The United Nations decreed his birthday as Mandela Day.

In 2009, the U.N. declared Mandela’s birthday, July 18, as Mandela Day to mark his contribution to world freedom. The holiday calls on individuals to donate 67 minutes to doing something for others, reflecting the 67 years that Mandela had been a part of the anti-apartheid movement.

4.  Mandela is often referred to as Madiba, his Xhosa clan name.

Mandela was a member of the Thembu, a Xhosa clan, and was often referred to by his clan name, Madiba. It is a sign of the incredible diversity of people and languages in South Africa. The country has 11 different official languages.

5. Mandela’s father had four wives, and Nelson is one of 13 children.

Mandela’s father, a local chief and councellor to the Thembu king, died from tuberculosis when his son was 9. Before that, he fathered 13 children by four wives, four boys and nine  girls. After his father’s death, Mandela was put under the guardianship of Jongintaba, the Thembu regent.

6. Mandela has received more than 250 awards for his accomplishments.

Among these awards is the shared 1993 Nobel Peace Prize with F.W. de Klerk, the last president of the apartheid government of South Africa (he too is widely credited as an instrumental force in ending apartheid). Additionally, Mandela had received more than 50 honorary degrees from international universities worldwide, became the first honorary Canadian citizen in 2001, and received the last Lenin Peace Prize from the Soviet Union.

7. Stevie Wonder dedicated his 1985 Oscar for “I Just Called to Say I Love You” to Mandela.

After Stevie accepted his award in honor of Nelson Mandela, the government-owned South African Broadcasting Corporation banned Stevie’s music from the airways. It wasn’t until Mandela was elected in 1994 that Stevie was finally allowed back in South Africa.

8. Mandela outlived his two oldest sons.

Mandela had six children, but tragically lost his two oldest sons. Thembi died in a car crash at age 25. Mandela was in prison at the time of the death and was unable to attend the funeral. Another son died of AIDS in 2005 at age 54. While Mandela’s administration was criticized for not doing enough to fight the AIDS epidemic in South Africa, he established the Nelson Mandela Foundation in 1999 following his retirement to help fight the spread of AIDS.

9. Mandela ran away from home at age of 19.

When his guardian tried to arrange a marriage, Mandela ran away from home in 1941 and headed to Johannesburg. He began to work as a night watchman at Crown Mines, but was fired after it was discovered that he was the Thembu regent’s runaway.

10. Mandela spent his first night after being freed from prison in Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu’s home.

Tutu had his helpers prepare his own favorite meal of chicken curry, rice and green salad, followed by rum raisin ice cream and custard.

One thing we need to know about Nelson Mandela is that he had the key in his pocket to get out of jail any time during his sentence. All he needed to do was to renounce terrorism as an instrument of political action. He refused.

afkinsider.com/1772/10-things-you-probably-didnt-know-about-nelson-mandela/

Mandela and the Mossad

How Israel courted Black Africa

The unknown story of how Israel secretly trained anti-apartheid activists in 'judo, sabotage and weaponry,' including Nelson Mandela himself.

In all the exhaustive coverage of Nelson Mandela’s death and his equivocal attitude towards the Jewish State, one episode that sheds new light on this relationship has been waiting in Israel's National Archive to be told.

We need to go back to the early 1960s. Israel was keen to court the recently decolonized African states and so went out of its way to show solidarity with the latter by consistently voting in UN resolutions condemning the apartheid state and the regime behind it.

This was not without consequence for the South African Jewish community, who found themselves the recipients of the wrath of Prime Minister Verwoerd and his Foreign Minister Eric Louw, yet it did endear Israel to the anti-apartheid movements. The ANC itself, then led by Oliver Tambo, penned a letter from London to Israel’s President Yitzhak Ben Zvi thanking him for Israel’s actions at the United Nations.

Roughly three months before Tambo dispatched this letter, on 11 October, 1962, a letter was sent from what is likely to be a Mossad operative, Y. Ben Ari at Israel’s embassy in Ethiopia to the Israeli Foreign Office Africa desk containing the following information:

As you may recall, three months ago we discussed the case of a trainee who arrived at the [Israeli] embassy in] Ethiopia by the name of David Mobsari who came from Rhodesia. The aforementioned received training from the Ethiopian [Israeli embassy staff, almost certainly Mossad agents] in judo, sabotage and weaponry.

He greeted our men with “Shalom”, was familiar with the problems of Jewry and of Israel and gave the impression of being an intellectual. The staff tried to make him into a Zionist.

It now emerges from photographs that have been published in the press about the arrest in South Africa of the “Black Pimpernel” that the trainee from Rhodesia used an alias, and the two men are one and the same.

Before coming to Ethiopia he was in Accra (where he met Nkrumah and his advisors), Lagos and Tanganyika. In Ethiopia he was trained in various kinds of light weaponry (including Israeli). In conversations with him he expressed socialist worldviews, and at times created the impression that he leaned towards communism.

He showed an interest in the methods of the Haganah and other Israeli underground movements.

In response, 13 days later, the Foreign Ministry confirmed that the 'Black Pimpernel' was in fact Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, who the year before had arranged a nationwide strike and thereafter went into hiding. 'Black Pimpernel' was the code name for Nelson Mandela used by the South African authorities who were hunting him. Curiously they also mention that he was considered by ANC supporters and many others as the most important person in his movement, despite the fact that Albert Luthuli was still the elected president-general of the ANC.

So, Nelson Mandela, under an alias, learnt weapons and sabotage techniques from embassy staff who were likely Mossad agents, whilst being gently prompted to become a supporter of the Jewish state.

This episode is remarkable for a number of reasons. First of all, Mandela was in no way a lone participant in a covert Israeli training program: Israel had established ties with various movements considered subversive by the South African government. A number of Israeli embassies stationed in Africa provided training, advice and transport vehicles to members of the Pan Africanist Congress, including Potlkako Leballo, the head of its militant Poqo wing. Since the PAC was considered anti-Communist and not aligned with the Soviet Union, they were more attractive for a prospect for Israel to deal with than the ANC. Yet what makes this tentative contact with the pre-incarcerated Mandela so fascinating is his willingness to engage with these Israelis in the first place.

The golden era of cooperation between Israel and African liberation movements continued through the 1960s. Golda Meir, as Foreign Minister and ardent admirer of black Africa, called for leniency in the Rivonia trial and for the commutation of any death sentence.

The Israeli National Archives' public relations office, and the Israeli press in its wake, have been careful to point out Golda Meir's actions and the public face of Israel's support for anti-apartheid activists. While this is an admirable instance of humanitarian activism, however, it hardly tells the whole story. Israel's history with South Africa is marked not only by cultivating relationships with those opposed to apartheid, but also by exacerbating tensions with these very same groups and individuals after the Israel: liberation movements' honeymoon came to an end.

A historian should not hypothesize as to what would have happened had Mandela not been caught and tried by the South African authorities. Nor what would have been the consequences had Israel, following its abandonment by Black Africa in the 1970s, not fostered such warm ties with the Apartheid regime. Yet this episode does go some way in showing that the tensions that now exist were not inescapable.

Mandela’s release from prison in 1990 placed Israel in a quandary. After almost two decades of actively supporting the apartheid regime it had to come to terms with the fact that South Africa was reversing course and was undergoing a transitional phase which would inevitably lead to the end of white rule in the Republic.

Yet Israel's ambassador to South Africa at the time, Zvi Gov-Ari, appeared to be ill-equipped to adjust himself to the new situation. Thus instead of trying to cultivate ties with the recently unbanned ANC, Israel’s representative in Pretoria made the double faux pas of criticizing Mandela, the movement’s de facto leader, while at the same time expressing a preference for Mangosuthu Buthelezi, widely perceived as a black puppet for the Nationalist Government. It is perhaps no wonder that Israel Maisels, a major Jewish and Zionist leader and one of the lead defense attorneys in the Rivonia trial, did not think highly of the ambassador, referring to him as that “bloody stupid fellow” (quoted in Cutting through the Mountain: Interviews with South African Jewish Activists [1997], edited by Immanuel Sutner).

Back in Israel, the venerable English-language Jerusalem Post, which at that time was doing its best to show how loyal it was to the Likud government, was probably reflecting the government's opinion when it predicted on June 25, 1991 that “if ANC leader Nelson Mandela assumes power in South Africa it will certainly not be a democracy…If he or his like rule South Africa, the country will be an unmitigated totalitarian disaster and an economic basket case." Further underlining its dire predictions, the newspaper declared:

“If full, non-segregated political equality is achieved in South Africa, it will not be the violent ANC, whose membership is 300,000, that will rule. The Zulus and their followers, numbering six million; the three million coloreds (people of mixed blood) who have been alienated by the ANC's Communist ideas; the million Indians, and the five million whites will probably form the ruling coalition one day. Only then is there a chance that South Africa will be both free and prosperous”.

No one knows whether Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and his cabinet honestly thought that Mandela had no political future in South Africa, but its persistent backing of the old regime only came to an end with the ascension to power of Yitzhak Rabin and his Labor Party. With the appointment of Dr. Alon Liel, a seasoned diplomat and close ally of Yossi Beilin, one of Israel’s most vociferous critics of the white regime, Israel managed to salvage some of the damage by cultivating ties with the ANC.

Indeed the Israeli-Palestinian peace process of 1993 provided Israel with an even greater opportunity to reconcile itself with an ANC now in government which was both supportive and thankful for the prospects of a peaceful resolution between the Jewish State and its Palestinian counterpart. Sadly, as the Oslo process fell apart, relations between Israel and the Republic continued to be strained, as they do to this day.

With Mandela’s death, Israel once again had the opportunity of mending at least some of the damage it had caused in the past, by sending a top-level delegation which would include at least the head of government or the head of state. It failed, opting instead to send the Knesset's speaker. Unfortunately Israel has shown, more from folly than malice, that it serially misunderstands the new South Africa, and the repercussions will be felt not only in the international diplomatic arena but also by the Jewish community of South Africa itself.

http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.564411

"THE BLACK PIMPERNEL"

Archive reveals Israel's Mossad trained Mandela

Israeli Mossad agents operating in Ethiopia in 1962 unwittingly trained Nelson Mandela in hand-to-hand combat, weaponry and sabotage, according to a document released by Israel's state archives.

A letter from a Mossad official to the foreign ministry, dated October 11, 1962 titled "THE BLACK PIMPERNEL" and released to the public on Sunday, recalls a conversation in which "we discussed a trainee in Ethiopia named David Mobasari, from Rhodesia".

"The aforementioned was trained by the Ethiopians in Judo, sabotage and weapons," the letter read.

"The Black Pimpernel" was the nickname given at the time to Mandela, the revered anti-apartheid hero and former ANC leader who died this month, while he was on the run from white South Africa during the liberation struggle.

According to Haaretz newspaper, which first reported the story, the term "Ethiopians" was probably a code name for Israeli Mossad agents working in Ethiopia.

"He greeted our men with (Hebrew salutation) 'Shalom', was familiar with the problems of (Jewish diaspora) and Israel and created the impression of an educated man," the letter read.

"The Ethiopians tried to make him a Zionist."

"It now emerges from photographs in newspapers on the arrest of the Black Pimpernel in South Africa that the trainee from Rhodesia was using a pseudonym, and the two are actually the same person," the letter read.

According to the letter, Mandela took an interest in the methods of the Hagana and Jewish militias that existed before Israel's creation in 1948.

The Nelson Mandela Foundation, however, said in a statement that "it has not located any evidence in Nelson Mandela's private archive (which includes his 1962 diary and notebook) that he interacted with an Israeli operative during his tour of African countries in that year".

Mandela "received military training from Algerian freedom fighters in Morocco and from the Ethiopian Riot Battalion at Kolfe outside Addis Ababa, before returning to South Africa in July 1962," the foundation said.

"In 2009 the Nelson Mandela Foundation's senior researcher travelled to Ethiopia and interviewed the surviving men who assisted in Mandela's training -- no evidence emerged of an Israeli connection," it added.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was chastised at home for not going to Mandela's funeral because of "high costs", with a parliamentary delegation attending instead.

Israel was one of South Africa's closest allies when Pretoria, which had imprisoned Mandela, was facing UN-led sanctions in the late 1970s.

http://www.timeslive.co.za/local/2013/12/23/archive-reveals-israel-s-mossad-trained-mandela

The True Legacy of the Terrorist Nelson Mandela

By Mike Smith
16th of December 2013

It was 1996, the ANC and Nelson Mandela was in power for two years already, when my 8 year old daughter came home from school one day and told me they learned about the “Hero and freedom fighter” Nelson Mandela… 

“Oh”, I said…”How interesting my dear. And what exactly did they teach you?” 

She proceeded to tell me what a wonderful man Nelson Mandela was. How he saved South Africa from a bloodbath, how forgiving he was towards the whites who imprisoned him “…for nothing, Daddy, for nothing!” she said with tears in her eyes. 

To me it was clear that the one-sided ANC Marxist agenda and propaganda was pushed in our schools to indoctrinate the minds of our youth. 

It was also around that time that I lost all hope for reconciliation in South Africa, because of the ANC introducing anti-white racist policies such as Affirmative Action, Black Economic Empowerment, Quotas in sport and university entrance, etc. 

Nevertheless, I sat my daughter down and explained the REAL Nelson Mandela and his demonic legacy to her and contrary to what the teachers tried to brainwash her with…I told her the truth…Mandela was no saint. 

Mandela’s death on the 5th of December 2013 

On his death bed Mandela had 22 doctors looking after him around the clock , keeping the life support systems going. He finally officially died @ 20h50 on the 5th of December 2013, St. Niklaus Eve, known in The Netherlands and Belgium as “Patjesavond” (gift evening) when children put their shoes next to the fire place and receive gifts. 

The date is quite significant seeing that St. Niklaus (official day 6th of Dec) apart from being the patron saint of honorable professions such as pharmacists and seafarers, was also the patron saint of the Lumpen Proletariat, namely thieves, prostitutes, prisoners, beggars, etc. 

His burial 10 days after his death on the 15th of December is the day before an official holiday in South Africa. The 16th of December is currently known as “Reconciliation Day”. During the Apartheid years it was known as “The Day of the Vow” in commemoration of the 470 pioneer Voortrekkers who defeated a 10,000 strong Zulu army on the banks of the Ncome River (Blood River) in 1838. 

The pioneer Voortrekkers took a Vow onto the Almighty that if He would save them that day that they would celebrate the day as a Sabbath and teach their children for generations to come to do the same. 

The day was never celebrated as a day of victory, rather as a day thankful for survival. Till this day I honour that vow, teach my daughter and celebrate it as a sacred day. Whenever I am in Pretoria, I make it a point of visiting the Voortrekker Monument. 

The Day of the Vow was hijacked by the ANC and renamed the Day of Reconciliation. Mandela’s Burial the day before will ensure that for years to come people in South Africa will “celebrate” “Mandela Day” and “Reconciliation Day” next to each other. 

Mandela the saint 

Over the years we have seen how Nelson Mandela was elevated to saintly status by the liberal media and politicians of the world. He hardly died or the chorus of liberal voices fawning and weeping over this Marxist terrorist rang out to the world. Many countries including the French flew their flags at half mast and in South Africa a national day of mourning was declared. But why? What did Mandela do that he deserved such recognition? 

Mandela the Nobel Peace Prize winner 

Liberals and Mandela supporters like to point out that Nelson Mandela won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993 for the supposed peace he brought to South Africa. 

Truth is that he SHARED the prize with then President F.W. de Klerk for a supposed negotiated settlement of which the outcome was already determined by the South African National Intelligence Agency, The British MI6 and the Anglo American Mining fraternity worrying about their gold and platinum mining interests. 

The Hollywood film “End Game” documents this quite clearly so does veteran author Allister Sparks in his book “Tommorrow is another country: The inside story of South Africa’s road to change”.

There you can read how Consolidated Gold Fields of London facilitated and sponsored the meetings between the Afrikaner Nationalists and the ANC to hand the country over to a band of Marxist Terrorist scum. 

The liberal legacy of Mandela 

When you put the above question (What did Mandela actually do?) to bleeding heart liberals you will hear them praise Mandela for being a wonderful man. A hero who prevented a civil war and a bloodbath. A forgiving man who forgave the evil whites their sins for putting him in prison for 27 years. They will often quote Mandela receiving the Nobel Peace Prize for that. 

The True legacy of Mandela 

David James Smith in his book “The Young Mandela” revealed Mandela as a wife beater and a womanizer. His first wife Evelyn divorced him because of it. 

As a law student at Wits University, Mandela failed his final exams three times and blamed it on racist whites. Instead of getting a degree he received only a diploma and set up an attorney office with his mate Oliver Tambo. 

Nelson Mandela, Terrorist or Freedom Fighter? 

Mandela was first arrested for high treason and sabotage in 1956, but acquitted in 1961. 

In 1961, Nelson Mandela, together with the South African Communist Party founded the military wing of the ANC uMkonto we Sizwe (Spear of the nation) , an extreme terrorist organisation inside a terrorist organisation and started a terrorist and sabotage campaign against South Africans. 

In the British “The Daily Mail” Peter Lewis wrote: “He instigated the military wing of the ANC and became its commander in chief, although he had never fired a shot. He organised military training and went to Ethiopia to be taught it himself. He became, in short, a terrorist.” 

Womaniser, terrorist, a portrait of the young Mandela 

Nelson Mandela enjoyed this terrorist status until 2008 when he was taken off the US terrorist watch list. Nelson Mandela Was On The U.S. Terrorist Watch List Until 2008 

The truth is that Mandela visited several Communist countries such as Russia, Cuba, Algeria, Ethiopia and East Germany where he received Marxist terrorist training and he later returned to visit these countries again to raise and obtain funds and organize terrorist paramilitary training and weapons to be smuggled into South Africa. 

It was all written down in much detail in his diary also found at Rivonia. 

In 1962, Mandela was arrested for leaving and entering the country without a passport. On 11 July 1963, police raided Liliesleaf Farm and uncovered the diabolical plot Mandela had installed for South Africa and its people called “Operation Mayibuye” (A Zulu word meaning, let it return, as in let the country return to the blacks). 

Mandela was then put on trial in what became known as the “Rivonia trial.” At the time, Nelson Mandela, was already in prison serving a five year sentence for incitement of strikes and leaving the country without a passport. 

He used to live at Lilliesleaf Farm disguised as a gardener and going by a false name of David Motsamayi (meaning "the walker"). 

Operation Mayibuye 

The shocking details of this evil plot the brainchild of Arthur Goldreich, came out during the trial and are extremely well documented in the book “Rivonia Unmasked” – Lauritz Strydom. 

The goal of Operation Mayibuye was to unleash 7000 armed and trained Marxist terrorist onto the country, who would then recruit more members and launch sabotage and terror campaigns murdering millions of South Africans including blacks suspected of being collaborators or informers to the white government. 

The country would then be plunged into chaos and under these conditions several communist countries would invade South Africa. 

The Rivonia Trial 

During the Rivonia trial Mandela was tried together with the other conspirators for acts of sabotage.

The specifics of the charges to which Mandela admitted complicity involved conspiring with the African National Congress and South African Communist Party to the use of explosives to destroy water, electrical, and gas utilities in the Republic of South Africa. 

The charge sheet at the trail listed 193 acts of sabotage in total. 

They were charged with the preparation and manufacture of explosives, according to evidence submitted, it included 210,000 hand grenades, 48,000 anti-personnel mines, 1,500 time devices, 144 tons of ammonium nitrate, 21.6 tons of aluminum powder and a ton of black powder. 

The campaign of sabotage against the government was already in full swing and included attacks on government posts, machines, power facilities, crop burning in various places, setting off pipe bombs at the Bantu Advisory Council, the Bata shoe factory, an Indian businessman’s house and the offices of an Afrikaans Newspaper, die Nataller. (pg56) 

Mandela the Communist liar at the Rivonia trial 

When he was put in the dock, Mandela refused to take the oath. 

Mandela denied being a communist despite a handwritten document in his own writing that was submitted, “How to be a good Communist”. 

He claimed it was just notes written by “a friend” who tried to convert him to communism. Mandela couldn’t name the friend. 

Traitors and informers, said Mandela in this document, should be ruthlessly eliminated. He advocated cutting off their noses, pour encourager les autres, like the Marxist terrorists did in Algeria. 

Mandela repeatedly denied that he was a Communist. Yet recently the South African Communist Party (SACP) admitted that Mandela was indeed one of them and a high ranking one as well.South African Communist Party Admits Mandela’s Leadership Role 

In fact, Dr Anthea Jeffery in her book “People’s War: New light on the struggle for South Africa” states on page 509: 

“As Mark Gevisser has recorded in his biography of Thabo Mbeki, of the people elected on to the national executive committee of the ANC at its Morogoro conference in Tanzania in 1969, only one was a non-communist. Of the national executive committee members chosen at the ANC’s Kabwe conference in Zambia in 1985, only five were not members of the SACP. After the ANC’s Durban conference in 1991, of the 50 members elected to the national executive committee, at least 37 were believed to be members of the SACP, while of the 40 ex-officio representatives at least five were identified as SACP members.” 

“Later the same year, Chris Hani, General Secretary of the SACP (and simultaneously a prominent ANC leader), said, “We in the Communist Party have participated and built the ANC. We have made the ANC what it is today and the ANC is our organization.” 

Up until the burial of Nelson Mandela on the 15th of December 2013, the ANC was and still is a Marxist terrorist organization in a Troika or “Tripartite Alliance” with the SACP and the Marxist Trade Unionists COSATU. 

Was the Rivonia Trial a fair trial? 

The Rivonia trial (1963-1964) was open to the scrutiny and criticism of the media of the world and highly regarded as a fair trial…this could not be said of Communist countries such as Cuba, Russia or East Germany at the time where people who opposed the government would simply disappear or be shot in the back of the head without a trial. 

Mandela should have been tried for High Treason that carried the death penalty. 

On page 89 of “Rivonia Unmasked” it says “The State had elected, 'for reasons which need not be detailed here', to indict the accused on counts of sabotage; but in reality, Dr Yutar declared, the case was a classical instance of high treason.” 

Dr. Yutar, for some or other reason decided that high treason would have been too difficult to prove and rather pursued the lesser charges of sabotage, etc. 

In Rivonia unmasked, Dr. Yutar said himself that the documents seized and produced as evidence was enough to get a conviction. He also had more than 200 people he could call as witnesses. Yutar also said that the munitions and weapons found were enough to blow up a city the size of Johannesburg. 

Mandela and his co-conspirators were sent to life imprisonment by Judge Quartus de Wet, judge-president of the high court of the Transvaal. A judge, according to George Bizos on live television during the Mandela mourning period  who once sent someone to death and it later came out that the person was innocent, and was not a “hanging judge”. 

Nevertheless, the judge said that they were actually guilty of high treason for which the punishment would have been the death penalty (by hanging) , but because the state prosecutor, Percy Yutar did not prosecute them for high treason, rather the four lesser charges of sabotage, conspiracy to commit sabotage, recruiting and training terrorists and soliciting funds from communist countries for a terrorist onslaught against the country, they got life in prison. 

Was Mandela fairly opposing the government of the time? 

It has to be remembered that these Rivonia men were not sentenced for opposing the government policy of Apartheid. 

The official opposition, the United Party under the liberal Sir De Villiers Graaff and many other law abiding citizens bitterly opposed the policy of Apartheid. That was not illegal. 

What was illegal was the planting of bombs and indiscriminately blowing up innocent people and children. 

Sir De Villiers Graaff in parliament complimented the judge for his verdict and expressed his only regret that the terrorists at the Rivonia trial were not charged with treason and hanged. 

Was Nelson Mandela a “Political Prisoner”? 

Mandela spent 18 years on Robben Island, then Polsmoor prison and from 1988 in a comfortable house complete with swimming pool on the prison grounds of Victor Verster prison for acts of terrorism and planning to overthrow the government with a violent Communist Revolution that would have killed millions of people. 

All together he was in prison for 27 years. Many people saw Nelson Mandela as a “Political Prisoner”, but Amnesty International never recognized him as such because the group "rejects the proposal to recognize as prisoners of conscience people who use or advocate the use of force." 

Truth is, Mandela was a common criminal and terrorist, not a political prisoner. 

Mandela’s Release from prison 

President F.W. de Klerk lifted the ban on the ANC and the SACP on 2 February 1990 and Mandela was released unconditionally on 11th of February 1990. 

He could have been out five years earlier. In February 1985 President P.W. Botha offered Mandela his freedom on condition that he 'unconditionally rejected violence as a political weapon'. Mandela refused. 

The violence before and after Mandela’s release from his prison on Robben Island and later his house on the Victor Verster prison grounds, Mandela still orchestrated and conducted the terrorist campaign (Operation Vula) in South Africa. 

It has to be remembered that he could get free visits and his wife could sleep over at his prison house. In his Autobiography, “A long walk to freedom” he said that he “signed off” the 1983 Church street bombing in Pretoria. 

Nelson Mandela and his organization uMkhonto we Siswe were responsible for horrific bombs such as the one in 1985 at Amanzimtoti in Natal where they planted a bomb in a rubbish bin at a shopping centre indiscriminately killing 5 and injuring 40 people. 

In 1986 the ANC terrorist Robert Mcbride exploded a bomb at the McGoo’s Bar on the Durban beachfront, killing 3 civilians and injuring 69. 

They also exploded bombs at court building, the Ellis Park Rugby stadium and several Wimpy fast food outlets where more civilians were killed or injured. From 1985-1987 The ANC also placed 57 landmines on farm roads blowing up 25 people, many were black farm labourers. 

South African police statistics indicate that, in the period 1976 to 1986, approximately 130 deaths were attributed to the Umkhonto we Sizwe. Of these, about thirty were members of various security forces and one hundred were civilians. 

Of the civilians, 40 were white and 60 black. 

Volume Two of the TRC hearings 

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission found that at the ANC training camps in Angola and Tanzania torture of their own people was "routine" and was official policy – as were executions "without due process" particularly in the period of 1979–1989. 

The ANC also launched a virtual civil war against the Inkatha Freedom Party. 

Between 1985 and 1989, 5,000 civilians were killed in fighting between the two parties. 

In the book “People’s War” by Dr Anthea Jeffrey, it states that between 1984 and 1994, 20500 mostly black people died in the violence instigated and started by the ANC Communist agitators. 

It was a terror campaign of horific “necklace” murders and throwing people off moving trains or hacking them to death with pangas. 

Mandela the failed and useless politician 

The ANC became the ruling party in 1994 and Nelson Mandela the first apparent democratically elected president. 

In the book, “South Africa’s brave new world” by R.W. Johnson he states in Chapter Three how the ANC had high ideals to build a Communist “Eastern Germany in Africa” and how they would under the RDP programme build a million houses and create five million jobs. 

Not a single RDP target was achieved and the programme ditched two years later. A complete failure for Mandela. 

Mandela failed to deal with the ever increasing AIDS problem and failed to convince EU leaders about trade with South Africa. 

The country was in a grip of violence and a crime wave was sweeping through South Africa, but Mandela was seen posing with the Spice Girls or Rev. Jesse Jackson or telling the Israelis and Irish how they should copy the SA “miracle”. 

Mandela blocked an official inquiry to the Shell House Massacre where the ANC shot at peaceful Zulu demonstrators from the rooftop of their head quarters with AK 47’s killing 53 and 173 were injured. 

He told the public that he gave the order to “defend Shell House if attacked, even if you have to kill people.” 

Nelson Mandela basically told the public that if they wanted to explore that line of enquiry they would have to arrest him for mass murder. Who was going to arrest a living god? 

Meanwhile his wife Winnie was stealing large sums of money from the ANC Social Welfare Department and a $100,000 Pakistani donation to the ANC Women’s league. 

At political meetings, Deputy President Thabo Mbeki would chair the cabinet meetings, not Mandela and Mandela would often get up and leave the meeting before the end. 

On page 65 R.W. Johnson writes about why Mandela never resisted Mbeki. “Mandela was old, knew nothing of economics or government and respected Mbeki’s expertise”. 

On page 73 R.W. Johnson writes, “Mandela, after all, had admitted that he “hadn’t a clue about economics.” 

Mandela loved his telephone. He would get up early and start calling cabinet ministers at 05h00 in the morning or even foreign dignitaries. 

He made spur of the moment decisions like on his 100 Days Plan shortly after his inauguration…Mandela had declared that all children under 6, and their mothers, were to receive free medical care, though there was no advanced planning for this, no extra money, or even warning was given to clinics and hospitals. This resulted in chaos, as huge numbers of mothers and children swamped the available facilities. Due to the lack of medical staff the medical services in especially the rural areas collapsed and many people died…all thanks to Nelson Mandela. 

His scheme in 1995 that 4 million school children should receive free food led to massive widespread fraud and theft and the whole scheme collapsed…along with schooling in the Eastern Cape (his home province) in general. 

His solution to the violence in Kwazulu-Natal between the ANC and the IFP was that the IFP should all join the ANC. 

He made an unconstitutional threat that if the IFP continued to resist the ANC he would cut off all funding to the most populace province in the country. He had to retract it later. 

When he fired his wife Winnie from government, he failed to read the constitution and thus had to reappoint her and later dismiss her again. 

In 1998 on his 80th birthday Nelson Mandela decided to give a gift to South Africa and free 9000 criminals from prison . 

Most of them were back inside within three months after they stole, raped and murdered to their heart’s content. 

When he pulled a publicity stunt and had tea with Betsie Verwoerd, widow of H.F. Verwoerd, in Orania, he showed his tactlessness when he told her, “I feel like I am in Soweto”. 

Standing next to president Bill Clinton in 1998, Mandela the great statesman, denounced the USA over Iran and Cuba and told it “to go jump in the lake” if they wanted to criticize his friendship with dictator Ghadafi …and president Clinton was smiling and clapping… 

Mandela certainly knew how to choose his friends. Ghadafi, Castro, Yasser Arafat and the utterly corrupt president Suharto of Indonesia were only a few of his terrorist sponsoring buddies. 

Mandela also showed what a champion of free speech he was during the TRC hearings when Genl. Bantu Holomisa outed how several high ranking ANC leaders accepted bribes from Casino mogul Sol Kerzner. 

Mandela first lied and denied it, but eventually admitted to accepting a R2million bribe from Kerzner, but refused to apologise to Holomisa for calling him a liar. 

Mandela was furious at the ANC women’s league for supporting Holomisa and ordered that all its funds be cut off except for regional official’s salaries. It was a blatant unconstitutional suppression of free speech. 

The whole TRC became a farce after that. The ANC were shocked by Holomisa’s testimony and announced that ANC members could only tell the commission things which had already been cleared with the ANC. 

Astonishingly Desmond Tutu and Alex Boraine who were heading the TRC, accepted this. That is how committed the ANC was and is to free speech. 

Nevertheless, Mandela accepted further bribes from Kerzner to put pressure on and call off Christo Nel from prosecuting Kerzner. 

Mandela was a racist, not a reconciliatory saint 

When the New South Africa dawned in 1994 South Africans of all colours had high hopes about a truly non racial South Africa, burying hatchets and building a wonderful country and democracy together. 

It soon dawned within the next two years to be a pie in the sky dream and all hopes went out the porthole of a sinking ship when the ANC , under the presidency of Mandela, not only carried on with racial classification on official government forms, but also introduced racial policies such as Affirmative Action, Black Economic Empowerment and quotas in university entrance and sport. 

Today, twenty years after Mandela took the presidency of South Africa, these policies of AA and BEE are well and truly alive and being exacerbated. 

Did Mandela prevent a bloodbath? 

A few days ago I sat across the lunch table from a German businessman. I could not help but to notice his copper armband with the 46664 number stamped on it. Mandela’s prison number. 

I asked him how many times he has been to South Africa and what his business interest were. It turned out that he has a business in South Africa Working with ACSA (Airports Company of South Africa) wrapping suitcases in clingfoil to prevent theft at South African airports. 

I asked him why he wore the arm band and why he adored Mandela. He told me: “Because Mandela prevented a bloodbath and it could have turned out much differently…” 

“For whom?”, I asked 

“Does it matter?” he asked. “Main thing is that he prevented a bloodbath…” he continued. 

I told him that at the time, South Africa had one of the ten strongest armies in the world and certainly the strongest on the African continent. According to the official International Atomic Energy Agency South Africa had seven nuclear weapons. 

According to the Jewish author Sasha Polakow-Suransky, in his book “The unspoken alliance: Israel’s secret relationship with Apartheid South Africa”, South Africa had about 20 nuclear weapons. 

On top of that, South Africa had chemical and biological weapons. I asked him again…"For whom would it have turned out to be a bloodbath?" 

As could be expected…silence. 

I asked him what the worst thing for his business in SA could be…He just looked at me puzzled… I said when there was no theft at the airports he would be without business. Crime pays. It is in his own interest that crime in South Africa carries on. So he as a foreign businessman feels zero for the country and its people. Main thing is that he makes a profit. The same can be said from ADT or Chubb. 

The Future of South Africa 

The first question to ask is what happened to those nuclear weapons? Where are they today? The second question is to ask where are the minds that created the nuclear, biological and chemical weapons? They probably emigrated and are working as scientist and engineers all over the world. 

What is their allegiance to South Africa today? 

However, the weapons can be dismantled, but the knowledge cannot be undone. The third question is: “Did Mandela prevent a bloodbath or did he just postpone it?” 

Looking at the daily resentment towards the ANC not just from the whites but also from the blacks who booed Jacob Zuma off the stage at Mandela’s farewell party, one can see a general discontentment towards the corrupt ANC. 

A person like me who was born and have lived in South Africa for 40 years can see these things coming a mile away. A bloody, racial, civil war is inevitable. Mandela just postponed the date. 

“When Mandela dies we will kill you whites like flies” – Mzukizi Gaba (ANC)

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