‘Free Nelson Mandela’: great visuals, poor history              

Secularist history “disappears” Christians, appearing embarrassed that Christians, and a society fundamentally shaped by Christianity, were responsible for significant social progress.  The growth of secularism in the last century has resulted in the role of the Christian Churches in television coverage of history often being written out of the script.  This is noticeable in otherwise well-made TV and radio documentaries, thankfully much less so in historical scholarship.  The three episodes of James Rogan’s  Free Nelson Mandela, screened on Channel 4 from mid-June provide a study of this failing in a TV documentary.

Crafted to engage an English-speaking and young audience the series has excellent South Africa library footage,  including Nelson and Winnie Mandela,  contemporary interviews with the 1980s Robben Island prisoner, James Mange, and Albie Sachs, badly damaged physically by car bomb in 1988, but spiritually more intact than most of us.  There are also plenty of chances to listen to decrepit musical stars with music from their great solidarity concerts, and Peter Hain about the sports’ boycotts.  President P.W. Botha, along with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, star as the villains.

Rogan’s chronicle of popular anti-apartheid action neglects key players in resistance; Communist Parties do not feature even as noises off, nor explored internally as a key part of the African National Congress (ANC), yet their role was crucial.  And zero on the role of the Churches.  Nothing even from — extensive — footage of Archbishop Tutu.

Most young people of Gen Z have barely heard of the 1948-1994 apartheid regime, few know what it was, or how the ANC finally came to power.  So the series should be welcomed.  But it shows what happens when a sequence of compelling images is substituted for history.  Because the history of the end of apartheid, like all good history, is a quest for understanding, how one event leads to another, what precipitates change and why.

Rev. Frank Chikane, for example, a pastor in the Apostolic Faith Mission (AFM), general-secretary of the South African Council of Churches (SACC),  1987-1994, trusted by Mandela, surviving poisoning by the regime in 1989, is captioned as “United Democratic Front”, at the time a huge coalition  of civil society organisations supportive of the ANC.   He was indeed Vice-President of the UDF Transvaal Branch for two  years whilst working in the radical Institute for Contextual Theology. But is his impact as a Christian leader irrelevant?

You might also conclude from the documentary that the only international interventions viewers need  know about were the American and British anti-apartheid movements.  Though both gathered large crowds promoting sanctions against South Africa for many years, it wasn’t until  August 1986, after the South African government initiated meetings with Mandela while in hospital in November 1985, that the US Senate passed a weak Bill implementing sanctions.

Either Rogen doesn’t know, or doesn’t think it important, that inside South Africa the Free Nelson Mandela Campaign was a front for funding ANC organisation within civil society.   In his first term as Social Democrat Prime Minister of Sweden from 1969-1976, Olaf Palme sent humanitarian funding for South African refugee camps.  He concluded that ending apartheid shouldn’t remain another proxy arena for the Cold War, with the ANC solely supported by the Communist Parties of the Soviet Union and East Germany.  So, in the 1980s, he began undercover funding to support the peaceful development of the ANC within South Africa. In the fourth year of his second term, 1982-1986, he was shot dead in a Stockholm street — very likely as a result of this intervention.

Swedish money passed into the country clandestinely through a number of channels: two of the most important were the trades unions and the churches. A small, clandestine group of Christian leaders gave advice on its use.  Thanks to wide consultations and deliberation, the group directed Swedish money to where it was most needed in the ANC internal movement.  It also set down conditions for accepting later EU funding.

For example, at the height of resistance, 1985-1986, the apartheid regime was decapitating by repeated arrests the Congress of South African Students, COSAS, the main ANC-front youth organization. Anarchy threatened: young people began “necklacing” individuals suspected of being government informants and collaborators, killing them with burning tyres around their necks.  The imperative was to fund training for youth leaders to instil discipline.   So COSAS became a Swedish funding priority.

At another level, Oliver Tambo, the exiled ANC leader (1967-1991), made it clear the ANC rejected such violence.  He had founded the ANC Youth League in 1944.  Tambo was a devout Anglican Christian.  He met Archbishop Denis Hurley of Durban in the then Paddington Railway Hotel in 1983.  Choreographed to enter the hotel by different doors, they met out of sight.    Old friends, big hugs, beer and sandwiches ordered from room service, much to talk about.  The ANC’s military wing undertook what they called “armed propaganda”, hitting prestigious targets, but trying to avoid civilian casualties.  Hurley would have raised the Bishops’ Conference concern that reactive violence should be curtailed.

The apartheid regime indicted Archbishop Hurley in 1984, not for his anti-apartheid stance in South Africa but under the Police Act for exposing — with the help of the Justice and Peace Commission — torture and atrocities committed by  “Koevoet”, the apartheid paramilitary police unit in Namibia.  They dropped the case in the upheavals of 1985, then, in October 1988, an arson attack badly burned Khanya House, the Bishops’ Conference headquarters. Two people, a nun and lay worker in the building narrowly escaped death.

As South Africa became ungovernable, with sanctions biting, the Rand plummeting, the Anglo-American corporation knocking on the door of  President P.W. Botha saying the game was up, Christians were playing a significant, if small, role in resistance.  Sports’ boycotts, the great solidarity concerts, black protest in the USA and by our UK anti-apartheid movement, built the impetus of the campaign for sanctions.  Sanctions were effective: they hurt those benefitting from apartheid.  Archbishop Hurley was never convinced it wouldn’t hurt ordinary Africans more.  When we visited Mama and Walter Sisulu (Deputy ANC President, 1991-1994, imprisoned for over 25 years with Mandela) in Soweto, just after his release, they both thanked him for all he had done. He, and Walter, were much loved.

James Rogan is right: the uprising of students in 1976 protesting against making Afrikaans the language of instruction in schools was a turning point.  The State’s brutal response drew many into exile and guerilla training while the ANC took off internally.  The underground Church focused on youth then – as Pope Leo does in today’s context.

Then there were all those living with fear and the likelihood of arrest and torture, knowing they qualified for a bullet or bomb, building up overwhelming civic resistance and mass organization inside South Africa. They ended a regime which most of the world had turned against.

History is a pandora’s box of stories  untold.  Rogan’s peg was the 50th anniversary of the Soweto 16 June massacre.  Our own schoolchildren should know why we commemorate this anniversary and, to that end, Rogan does a good job.  It’s a shame he “disappeared” the Christian churches and Communist parties. Compelling visuals.  Poor history.

A Message from TheArticle

We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to make, one that’s needed now more than ever, and we need your help to continue publishing throughout these hard economic times. So please, make a donation.