Tributes to Nelson Mandela

Malcolm Rifkind Excerpts

Monday 9th December 2013 Commons Chamber

[Sir Malcolm Rifkind (Kensington) (Con)]

On the day of Mandela’s release in 1990, I was waiting with many millions of people for him to emerge from prison. I remember a particular thought at that time: although he was a global figure—the whole world knew of Nelson Mandela—no one had the faintest idea what he looked like. No photograph of him had appeared since he went into prison 27 years earlier, as a relatively young man of 46—now he was emerging as a relatively old man of 73. I met him for the first time when he came to 10 Downing street when John Major was Prime Minister, and I recall that as he entered, the whole staff of No. 10—70 or 80 people—spontaneously drew themselves up into two lines to applaud him as he walked to the Cabinet room. John Major said that that was the first time that had ever happened since he had become Prime Minister.

Nelson Mandela was not a saint, as we have heard. He was a politician to his fingertips. He actually believed in the armed struggle in the earlier part of his career and perhaps to some degree for the rest of his career, but, unlike many in the African National Congress, he eventually decided that ways of peace were more likely to deliver than the armed struggle. I recall going to South Africa four years after 1990 when he was President and having dinner with the then deputy Defence Minister of South Africa, Ronnie Kasrils. Kasrils was a white South African communist and a founding member of Umkhonto we Sizwe. He had been educated at the London School of Economics and was a strong believer in the armed struggle. I said to him, “You are a member of the South African Communist party and it was often argued at the time by the South African Government that you and your colleagues were trained in the Soviet Union. Was that true?” He said, “Yes, it was true. We were trained in Odessa, in Ukraine.” Then I asked him why he believed in the armed struggle, particularly as Nelson Mandela eventually decided on a political solution. He said, “Well we believed that the white Afrikaners, the apartheid Government, would never give up power peacefully. It would only be the armed struggle that would get them out of power.” I said to him, “Is that what they taught you in the Soviet Union?” I remember he groaned and said, “No, no, that is what they taught me at the LSE.”

I lived and worked in southern Africa, mainly in southern Rhodesia, for two years in the 1960s. I got to know South Africa well, and I must confess that, at that time, I too assumed that there would be no peaceful resolution of the problems of apartheid and that, whether one liked it or not, it would only be by revolution or by armed struggle that they would change the political system. I was wrong, and I was wrong because there was not one hero in South Africa but two, and it is worth remembering this. It was not just Nelson Mandela, who undoubtedly deserves the vast bulk of the credit, but the South African President F.W. de Klerk. Without both of them, there would not have been a peaceful resolution. In some ways, it was more difficult for de Klerk than for Mandela. [Hon. Members: “Oh!”] Let me explain what I mean; it is a serious point. Mandela was receiving power at a stage when most of the struggle had already been won, and de Klerk was having to persuade his own people to give power up before they had been defeated. The world had not seen such a situation before. To his credit, de Klerk realised that he needed the legitimacy of the electorate of South Africa, who were, quite wrongly but in practice, all white at that time. He called the referendum and, by the sheer force of his leadership, persuaded more than 60% of white South Africans to accept that the days of apartheid were over. Even then, it required Mandela—and it is to his credit—to go through long months of negotiation, not always with the support of his colleagues in the ANC, in order to deliver a transfer of power that offered the prospect of peace for all the people of South Africa. Mandela once notably said, “This is not about moving from white domination to black domination. There must be no domination of either community.” He was an extraordinary man in not only believing that but practising it with every fibre of his being.

As we look today at the lessons of Mandela’s extraordinary life and incredible achievements, at his contribution not just to South Africa, which goes without saying, but to the wider world and at why he has become such an iconic figure, two factors stand out. First, he is perhaps the best example that we have had in the past 100 years of how political leaders, by force of personality, transform themselves from politicians into statesman, and can by their sheer personal effort change the world and make what was impossible possible and then deliver it. He is not the only one who has done so. We should not think of him as unique. Gorbachev, by the force of his personality, helped to end the cold war and deliver the liberation of eastern Europe without a shot being fired, and few would have believed that possible. Lech Walesa, an obscure trade unionist at first, built up the Solidarnosc organisation and toppled the once mighty Polish Communist party. Anwar Sadat, a controversial figure in many ways, was yet another example. The extraordinary decision that he took to fly from Egypt to Jerusalem and address the Israeli Knesset as Egyptian President led to peace between Israel and Egypt. In our own day, we have Aung San Suu Kyi, and we all know what she has done and how it is transforming Burma. Being a political, charismatic figure is necessary but it is not sufficient. It must be combined with political skills, and of course Mandela was a politician to his fingertips as well as being a man with all those other talents.

The second lesson is that although of course political leadership is needed, we should also recognise, as Mandela did, the strength of diplomacy as a way of getting political change. Even after Mandela had been released, it took months and months of negotiation that could have collapsed at any stage into internal civil war. In a year when we have seen how diplomacy, which is not always fashionable, has produced agreement on Syrian chemical weapons and an interim agreement on Iran’s nuclear programme, it is worth taking comfort from that and seeing how Mandela’s example can deliver in an extraordinary way.

I conclude by simply saying that when we pay tribute to Nelson Mandela, as we rightly do, we should pay tribute to him for what he stood for and we should acknowledge what he achieved in South Africa but we should also recognise what he taught the world about the resolution of what seemed like intractable political problems through patience, personality, courage and diplomacy. Military solutions and armed struggle are sometimes unavoidable, but often they are avoidable and he demonstrated that better than anyone in our time.