Tributes to Nelson Mandela

Gordon Brown Excerpts

Monday 9th December 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Gordon Brown (Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath) (Lab)]

Fifty-one years ago, directly across from this House in Parliament square, standing in front of the statues of Gladstone, Disraeli, Peel, Palmerston, Lincoln and General Smuts, and with his friend Oliver Tambo, Nelson Mandela asked the question when, if ever, a black man would be represented there. That day in June 1962 was an important one—his first visit to London and possibly his last. He was on the edge of being arrested, imprisoned, put on trial twice—once for his life—and then spending 27 years incarcerated.

It was, therefore, a great privilege, on behalf of the people of Britain, to unveil in 2007 a statue of the first black man to be represented on that square—Nelson Mandela himself, in the presence of Nelson Mandela and his wife. That statue of Nelson Mandela stands there now and forever. Yes, his hands are outstretched, as the Prime Minister said, but his finger points upwards—as it always did—to the heights. He was the man most responsible for the destruction of what people thought was indestructible—the apartheid system—and the man who taught us that no injustice can last for ever.

Nelson Mandela was the greatest man of his generation, yes, but across the generations he was one of the most courageous people you could ever hope to meet. Winston Churchill said that courage was the greatest human virtue of all, because everything else depended on it. Nelson Mandela had eloquence, determination, commitment, passion, wit and charm, but it was his courage that brought all those things to life. We sometimes think of courage as daring, bravado, risk-taking and recklessness, and Nelson Mandela had all those in admirable quantities, but he was the first to say that true courage depends not just on strength of willpower, but on strength of belief. What drove Mandela forward, and what made him the great architect of a free South Africa—the first great achievement of Nelson Mandela—was the burning belief that everyone, every man and woman, was equal: everyone born to be free, everyone created not with a destiny to be in poverty, but created to have dignity in life.

The intensity with which Nelson Mandela believed this and his determination that he would never be paralysed by fear is something that is recorded for ever in a battered book that was brought into—smuggled into—the prison on Robben island, “The Works of William Shakespeare”. Alongside his signature, “N Mandela”, he has marked the words from “Julius Caesar”:

“Cowards die many times before their deaths;

The valiant never taste of death but once…

It seems to me most strange that men should fear;

Seeing that death, a necessary end,

Will come when it will come.”

Remarkably, that amazing courage to stand up to evil stood with the lack of bitterness that has been described already today, forgiving his warders, his prosecutors, the would-be executioners.

The most amazing story he told me was that on the night before they left prison he called all the ANC prisoners together, saying, yes, they would be justified in acts of revenge, retaliation and retribution, but that there could never then be a strong, successful multiracial society, and that was his second great achievement: to achieve change through reconciliation.

But there was also a third achievement: in refusing to rest or relax when he gave up the presidency, he had a third great, historic, far less acknowledged, achievement to his name. He wrote that in the first part of his life he had climbed one great mountain, to end apartheid, but now in his later life he wanted to climb another great mountain: to rid the world of poverty, and especially the outrage of child poverty.

I need speak only of what I saw in the times that I worked with him: how quietly and without fanfare he went about his work. In 2005 I flew to South Africa to meet Nelson Mandela to persuade him to come to London so that he could then persuade the Finance Ministers of the need for debt relief to relieve poverty, and this he did. Then in 2006, he and his wife Graça Machel—a leader in her own right, who shared his ideals and will now carry his legacy into the future—launched the British programme for education for every child so that we could be the first generation in history where every child went to school. He warned us when we had that press conference in Mozambique that to get every child to school we would have to end child labour, child marriage and child trafficking, and that we would have to end the discrimination against girls, a campaign that he and his wife, Graça Machel, have been involved in ever since. Typically, Nelson Mandela said at the beginning of the conference that the cause was so urgent that he had now come out of retirement so that he could prosecute the cause, and at the end of the press conference he said that it was now up to the younger generation and he was returning to his retirement.

I visited him in South Africa in the week that his son died of AIDS. While in mourning and in grief and shocked by the events, he insisted on coming out to the waiting press with me. He said that AIDS was not to be treated as a moral judgment and censoriously; it was to be treated exactly like the tuberculosis he had suffered, as a disease in need of cure. His greatness as vast as the continent he loved, showing there that his greatness was a greatness of the human soul.

My good fortune was to meet Nelson Mandela not so long after he left prison, and I remember his first greeting: “Ah,” he said, “a representative of the British empire,” and then he flashed that same smile that could light up a room and then the world. Then 10 years ago, at the birth of my son John, I picked up the telephone and there was Nelson Mandela on the phone: he, too, had lost a child in infancy, and from that time on, on his birthday, the day before my second son’s, and on Graça’s birthday, the day of John’s, we exchanged telephone calls on the days of these birthdays and presents, letters and cards, the last only this October.

Raising money for children’s causes was the purpose of Nelson Mandela’s 90th birthday party in London, when President Clinton and I were proud to pay tribute to him, before an auction where he gave the original copy of his famous “Letter to a Child”. First, Oprah Winfrey bid for it, then Elton John. Both of them surpassed a £1 million. Oprah Winfrey then went beyond that million. She was then told that she would have to pay in pounds and not dollars. Nelson Mandela and I joked that it was time for another £1 million and that he should write another letter and sell it to Elton John.

Nelson Mandela’s last public event was in Hyde park, in London. Again, it was to raise funds for children. Sitting next to him, my task—something I was uniquely incapable of doing—was to explain who the celebrity acts were, what they were up to and what they were about. He was particularly intrigued by Amy Winehouse, who is sadly no longer with us. I remember him going down to meet her and her joking with him that her husband and Mandela had a great deal in common—both of them had spent a huge amount of time in prison. At that point, he wanted a drink, but Graça, his wife, had banned drink from the occasion, at least for him because of his fragile health. I can never forget this occasion: Mandela, with all these great achievements behind him, at the celebration party for his 90th birthday and surely entitled to a celebratory drink, hiding from his wife’s view the glass of champagne that I had produced for him.

Very few people know that Nelson Mandela loved not only to tell stories, but to gossip, about everybody, from the Spice Girls and celebrities in sport to political leaders—I will refrain from mentioning what he said about them, at least today. But he admired and respected Her Majesty the Queen, and he told me that he wanted the Queen to invite an African rain princess from his tribe to a reception at Buckingham palace. He had got nowhere with the diplomatic channels, so he decided to telephone her personally. The story goes of the conversation, in words that only Mandela could use—“Hello Elizabeth, how’s the Duke?” Although the official minute says that the Queen was non-committal, Mandela got his way.

Hung by Mandela on the bare walls of that bleak prison cell was a facsimile of the British painting by a famous artist, Frederic Watts. The haunting image he had in this prison cell was of a blinded girl sitting on top of a globe of the world. The painting, entitled “Hope”, is about the boldness of a girl to believe that, even when blinded and even with a broken harp and only one string, she could still play music. Her and Mandela’s belief was that even in the most difficult and bleak of times, even when things seem hopeless, there could still be hope. I believe that that explains why over these past few days we have both mourned the death of Mandela and celebrated his life with equal intensity. Who else could unite the whole world of sport unanimously, in every continent of the world, with applause? We are mourning because as long as Mandela was alive we knew that even in the worst of disasters, amidst the most terrible of tragedies and conflict, amidst the evil that existed in the world, there was someone there, standing between us and the elements, who represented goodness and nobility. And we are celebrating today because the lessons that we have learned from him will live on. He teaches us that indeed no injustice can last for ever. He teaches us that whenever good people of courage come together, there is infinite hope.