Nelson Mandela

Lord Kinnock Excerpts

Monday 9th December 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kinnock (Lab)]

My Lords, for 50 years since I first campaigned against apartheid in the wake of the Sharpeville massacre, Nelson Mandela has been a supreme inspiration to me. He showed unsurpassed bravery and endurance in his fight against oppression and unequalled humanity in his guidance to South Africa and the world. He had the strength to be merciful, the wisdom to be gentle and generous. I salute those qualities of truly great leadership. It was a marvellous privilege to meet Mandela the hero, a delight to know Nelson the man. I cherish memories of times together, of his mischievous humour and of his dazzling smile. To be called “comrade” by such a man was an irreducible honour. I join with countless others, here and across the world, in offering my affection and deepest sympathy to Graça, his widow, and to their family.

Nelson Mandela never forgot the past of hatred and bigotry, of searing injustice and violence, but from the outset his political life was resolutely committed to plotting, planning and building for a different future with his people. It was that which drove him to take up arms. It was that which gave him the resilience to withstand captivity and its dreadful indignities and tragedies. It was his fixation with the future that could be created which, in the late 1980s, made him withstand the proffered comforts of compromise and instead gain the courageous agreement of FW de Klerk to release him unconditionally and to prepare for non-racial democracy. It was Mandela’s dedication to the future which, above all, made him exert his full authority as a warrior, a convict and a leader to compel reconciliation when vengeful reprisal could have brought remorseless racial civil war and desolated South Africa.

As we pay tribute to Mandela’s determined and valorous idealism, we must do him the justice of recognising his daring realism. In this House, evolved through centuries of conquest and preferment, I would not lecture the leadership of a 19 year-old democracy about its conscience or its duty. I do not need to. In the most explicit terms, Mandela himself charted the course that must be followed. At the Rivonia trial, at which my noble friend Lord Joffe played a brave and distinguished part, when Nelson and his comrades were faced with the lethal probability of execution, he said in plain, provocative words which have resonated through the decades, as we have already heard from my noble friend:

“I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons will live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and see realised. But, my Lord, if it need be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die”.

He did live for that ideal, but did not see it realised. But he dedicated his life to securing the conditions in which it could be fulfilled by free people, governed by mortals who apply a measure of the integrity, dignity, bravery and sagacity that were central to Nelson Mandela’s being.

That was his true legacy. Honouring it must now surely propel the current leadership of the ANC into embracing reform and transparency, strengthening accountability and combating the self-indulgence and corruption which so retard Mandela’s beloved country and its people. If that course is not taken, Nelson Mandela will be their brilliant, brave, but unrequited dead hero. If it is taken, as he would have wanted, he will have a fitting, enduring, living memorial of full freedom in South Africa. He deserves that and South Africa sorely needs it.