Sweetmore's EDTC 625 Blog!

FIRST and foremost I would want to express my sincere condolences to the Mandela family, the people of South Africa for their loss and may his kind and selfless soul rest in peace. The man was a revolutionary first and global statesman second no doubt about that. It is quite endearing to see how the man was loved by so many, a hero to South Africans he helped liberate, a celebrity to those who once referred to him as a terrorist and detained indefinitely and a global statesman to those who heard about him.

Let us respect and honor what Mandela stood for and not what he achieved or did not achieve and could not achieve. He was absent for 27 years and to be fair there was not enough time to achieve it all. The man has left a legacy for politically independent South Africa and for those who he forgave and indirectly or directly re-empowered. Africa has its heroes and legends and they are not worldwide political celebrities.

The Mandela legacy was hijacked by the same system that incarcerated and broke him. I sympathize with Mandela, a selfless man under siege from his own legacy due to the hypocrisy of a permanently irreversible racist system that continually manifests itself in duplicitous and disingenuous forms. One moment Mandela is a terrorist because of his pro-people policies, the next he is the world’s greatest statesman because his selflessness safeguarded the interests of white apartheid South Africa. It is quite insincere how the establishment wants the world to perceive this great son of Africa. He is portrayed as a man who forgave and forgot the evils of an unforgiving and relentless system that only serves its own interests and no one else; an unrepentant system that continues to deceive and misinform at the expense of the African continent.

Mandela was a fiery and uncompromising young black African revolutionary who challenged a racist and unjust system. A young man with the African ideology indelibly tattooed on his spirit. 27 years in penitentiary for that ideological tattoo he paid. That is the Mandela the western media circus will never celebrate. The Mandela the racist system broke down we respect for his resilience and humility. The man had a cause, a just cause for that matter. The worldwide media celebrity that got separated from the revolutionary we still respect and honor. The establishment that separated the revolutionary from the man Africa must forever guard against.

I always wonder why men of principle and uncompromising commitment to the African ideology such  as Patrice Lumumba, Robert Mugabe, Kwame Nkrumah,  Steve Biko, Amilcar Cabral, Thomas Sankara and Muammar Gadaffi just to name a few have been confined to the back pages of history books. The common defining feature about these Africans is their unswerving assiduity to the African cause, to upgrade and economically empower black African lives.

The selfless, humble and broken Mandela had no choice but to choose peace and political power over economic emancipation. On the other hand the forgotten and invisible visionary African leaders put emphasis on cascading real power down to the people, advocating for policies that focused on African self-sustenance and self-reliance and deconstructing that neo-colonial structure that continues to render Africans perennially indebted to those who subjugated and economically raped the African continent for centuries.