Nelson Mandela – Man of the Century

Tributes and words of praise and honour poured into South Africa for Nelson Mandela. He was a lawyer turned freedom fighter, fighting simply for equality, to be treated like a man, for his people in his own country. The discrimination, victimisation and oppression of his people by the white colonial masters were inhuman, demeaning and painful. Many black South Africans who fought alongside Mandela were beaten up, shot and killed or jailed.

Mandela was lucky. They caught him and sentenced him to 27 years in jail, for a crime to demand to be treated as a man, for the simple dignity as a fellow human being. The white colonialists would have none of his nonsense. The whole white world kept quiet for a very long time while the black Africans continued to suffer the indignity as lesser men and children of a lesser God in their own country.

Today, all the white men are crying crocodile tears. Many of their forefathers have been on the same side of the apartheid leaders not just in South Africa but in the whole of Africa and in North and South America and other continents. Many of the natives, hundreds of millions, were brutally murdered, tortured, oppressed, and if they were lucky, survived as slaves for hundreds of years.

It is so sad that a man had to go through so much pain and suffering and humiliation and the lost of freedom in the best part of his life, and on his release, to be praised for not wanting to exact revenge on the criminals that put him behind bars for 27 years, for colonising his homeland and murdering millions of his people, and for treating his people as lesser people with lesser rights.

If Mandela and his people would have fought like the Red Indians and be massacred in the millions, he would not be around to be revered and acknowledged as a great freedom fighter. He had to survive the ordeal, to live through it in ignonimity, to earn this dubious honour as a great man. To the white supremacists, a colour man is only great when he can be kicked around, sentenced to life imprisonment, and on release at their mercy, willing not to pursue the matter further, not to redress the wrongs and injustice of the past committed against him and his people. He had to let the past be the past and pretended that nothing had happened.

Would the white hypocrites say all the good things about Mandela as a truly great man if he would to continue his fight for his people and country and to rid his country of white men? The crimes against humanity can only be committed by the white men. The coloured people must not attempt to seek revenge or justice and to put the wrong doers and criminals behind bars for crimes against them. Only then can the coloured people be respected, honoured and praised as good men, men deserving to be called great men.

RIP Mandela. Let’s hope he and his fellow victims of injustice would be the last to face such adversities and helplessness in the hands of evil men. The price for this honour is too high to pay.