I suppose some Republican heads will explode when they learn that President Obama compared Nelson Mandela to George Washington. But there’s one big difference between them. They both stood up to an oppressive colonial regime. They both won in that struggle. They both helped found their countries. They both served as their country’s first presidents. They both stepped down voluntarily in the interest of promoting democracy.
But Nelson Mandela never owned any slaves.
And George Washington never sat in prison.
But he definitely risked that.
I’m a reflexive anti-authoritarian. Just can’t handle frail humans in positions of power. Mr. Mandela is the ultimate legitimate authority figure of my lifetime. I had the pleasure of visit the RSA as he lead them in transition towards becoming a ‘rainbow nation’, the necessary myth of national re-creation (a la the American Dream). What an amazing time and place that was. The RSA may never achieve his goals for the nation, but he showed them the noble path forward.
Sitting in his cell on Robin Island and listening to his fellow prisons tell stories of his courage, persistence, elegance, insight and leadership under the harshest conditions was a transforming experience that marked my return from a hand-tying cynicism to a head-space where I believe that the works of man can heal the world.
You would have to combine Emerson, Washington and Martin Luther King, Jr to come up with an American comparison that even came close. He is the Gandhi of his era and far more successful in managing the inevitable post-liberation chaos.
Honestly, the comparison to Washington diminishes the man.
As Naomi Klein details in The Shock Doctrine, Mandela also had to accept the onerous economic conditions that the prior government had set in stone. However, both fulfilled the primary duty of a leader of a new country which is to guide it through the establishment of a democratic governance and then let it happen.
Adams and Jefferson may not have been worthy successors — and for different reasons — but at least the structure (and perhaps the times) precluded them from looting the state as Mandela’s successors have.
George Washington also ordered smallpox inoculation for his soldiers and thus saved many lives. Nothing so proactive wrt AIDs was done in S. Africa.
That’s not really a reflection on Mandela. During his presidency he fought the US government and Big Pharma companies that were blocking more affordable AIDS drugs from being distributed in Africa. And his successor, Thabo Mbeki, turned out to be a conspiracy nut on the subject, denying that the HIV virus was the cause of AIDS at all – a stance that set back the RSA years in combating the disease and is estimated to have cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
Effective AIDS meds weren’t available early in Mandela’s term of office and once they came to market they were expensive everywhere.
What I detailed in The Folly of Faith Based Health Care is what Uganda and Brazil did before Mandela was elected and the cocktail meds were introduced. In 1990 the infection rate in S. Africa and Brazil was approximately the same at 1%. By 2006 S. Africa’s was at 12% and Brazil’s was 0.6%. Brazil instituted a proactive prevention policy and S. Africa didn’t. Mbeki’s stupidity would have been minimized, if not averted, had an AIDS prevention program had been in place before he took over.
Might he have, had he lived in an era where it was not only accepted, but expected? We can not know, which is one of the reasons why we shouldn’t judge people who lived in a completely different world.
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I’m not sure I know what you mean. I was hoping to convey the thought that we do not know how a person would be different if he was raised in a completely different environment. If Mandela had been raised in a slave owning culture, he might have had slaves. That wouldn’t necessarily have made him a bad person, by the standards of his time and place. Even if you assume that there is an objective standard of right and wrong, you have to consider the maturity of a culture. Mandela is an amazing man. Washington may also have been. Owning slaves doesn’t necessarily change that. We should be careful of judging others by standards that may have been impossible for them.
I’m puzzled because your comment doesn’t address Mandela. What about him indicates that he would ever have go along with a claim to “own” another human being. (I assume we’re discussing chattel slavery here). Mandela is remarkable in how he transcends his circumstances. Can you think of any instances in his life where he didn’t on such a serious matter?
He, as all men, is a result of his genetics mixed with his environment. Unless you believe in a god, that’s all there is. Somehow, in him those two things combined to create something amazing. But if you change the environment, you can not guess what differences might have occurred. For example, if he had been raised the only child of a rich tribal chieftain, he may have never even considered the idea that slavery was wrong.
Or consider this, he eats meat. If in five hundred years, vegetarianism is a religion, they will consider him a good but flawed man. Will that be fair?
I mean no disrespect. He is incredible. But it is arrogant of us to judge other times by our standards.
If he had been the son of a rich tribal chieftain, in a time and place where slavery was a given, is what I mean there.
it’s not a matter of judging, it’s a matter of coming to a deeper understanding of the greatness of both Washington and Mandela by looking at their differences, given their similarities. To get at your issue – what was circumstance [luck?] and what is his uniqueness as a person we can look at how did he deal with challenges?, can we see what circumstances he responded to? we look at the details of his life, decisions he made at critical points, and how he assesses his own actions later. It kind of helps us differentiate between the circumstances and the unique person.
OK, I see what you mean. But I think we get a better understanding of people by comparing them to others who lived in similar circumstances. Comparing Washington to John Adams, two men about the same age, doing the same job, can teach us a great deal about both. If we want to learn about Mandela, we should look at other African leaders of the twentieth century. What was in him, as a person, that made him so much more than others from a similar environment? Just like in science, you must control your variables in order to see what makes something unique. I only wish we had enough understanding of psychology to be able to create more men like him.
Post-colonial Africa has had other remarkable and heroic political leaders. Kenneth Kaunda and Julius Nyerere come to mind as two examples.
What do you mean by raised in a completely different environment? Who created the environment? You seem to be willing to go to great lengths to justify slavery. I don’t know your background but I’m used to hearing Whites use this particular justification for slavery and I find it troubling. The Europeans have a very distinct history of creating this “environment” of destruction and annihilation around the world when ever and where ever they encountered people of color. If Washington was a product of his environment it is an environment that he and those like him created. They viewed Black people as animals that could be owned, raped, abused, killed and anything else that they decided to do to us. He founded this country for White people and never envisioned a time when Blacks might be seen as equals.
Slavery is probably the most abhorrent concept I can imagine. But the human race is maturing, and we have engaged in many behaviors in the past that we hopefully will overcome. To judge people who lived in a completely different environment, without fully understanding that environment, is risky. For example, it is totally possible that in five hundred years, we will have found a way to communicate with animals. They will be considered people, and cultures like ours, that locked them in small boxes, cutting off their body parts and letting them suffer before killing them and eating them, will be seen as horrifying. Mr. Mandela eats meat. That culture would judge him as good, but flawed, because of that. Would that be fair? Or should we all be judged in comparison to the others around us?
The fact that he requested that his slaves be freed in his will should tell you that he knew that it was wrong all along. This idea that the evil doers just didn’t know what they were doing is insulting. Were Hitller and Musolini products of their environments as well?
EVERYONE is a product of their environment working on their genetics. That’s all there is. It’s not that they don’t know what they’re doing, it’s that what they are doing seems reasonable to them based on the lives they have lived. Hitler was clearly a broken man. But something happened to make him that way. We don’t have to accept the actions of broken men–we have every right to protect ourselves–but we don’t improve our understanding of them by just calling them evil.
I don’t have a clue why Washington waited to free his slaves. Do you? Perhaps he was making his wife happy. Perhaps letting them go would have destroyed his career. Perhaps he believed at some level that slavery was wrong, but wasn’t convinced enough to be inconvenienced by changing. Is that evil? Maybe. Maybe it’s just human. How many of us shop at Walmart even though we know that their products are made by endangered workers? Do you know anyone who does? Do you consider them evil?
I’m not saying Washington was right, merely that people are products of their time. Unless we are historians, we should be very careful about assuming that we understand why a man was the way he was.
Or maybe Washington didn’t release his slaves because he believed it was unsafe for them and was hoping things would get better in time. Maybe he was in love with one of them. Maybe he had a good reason that we can’t even guess. Doesn’t make his actions right objectively, but before we judge a man we should remember that there is much we don’t know.
You ARE judging him with all of these maybes. The difference is that your judgement is decidedly a positive one because you seek to just explain it all away.
Studying history closely, and fully we see there are lofty thinkers, great leaders, artists in all periods. It’s misleading to say the human race is maturing (how about human trafficking in 2013?). Philosophers in every culture explore[d] the question “what is it to be human?” and the like, and many condemned slavery [related to the question of what is human?].
“The Arc of the Moral Universe Is Long, but It Bends Toward Justice” –Martin Luther King, Jr.
Things are factually proven to be better for more people than ever before in history. I don’t know how anyone can bear to live without believing that we will continue to make things better yet.
There were black slave-owners in the US, but there were also men like John Adams that never owned slaves and considered it an abhorrent practice. We tend to underestimate the power of the socio-economic milieu each of us is born into and inheritance.
Wonder if George Washington and Martha had some fights about being slave owners. His land and slave holdings were small compared to hers.
Why would they fight over being slave holders? They both owned slaves?
Per his will, his slaves were to be freed at Martha’s death. (She either honored his bequest by freeing them a year after he died or feared being bumped off.) There was not a similar provision in her will. Her heirs inherited the slaves she owned or managed through a family trust. So, I’d say that George and Martha had somewhat different views of slavery at least later in their lives.
Should also note that some of George’s slaves married some of Martha’s and those families were split apart when his slaves were freed.
BOOM
I respect Washington’s contributions to the founding of this country, but the fetishing we do with our national creation myth blinds us to larger contexts. Mandela has had far greater reach and influence. During and after prison, Mandela became a symbol of nonviolence and moral authority that, outside the “I cannot tell a lie” fable and even setting aside the slavery issue, Washington never was, even in his own time. (Not that he wasn’t a moral authority – just that he was one figure among many moral figures in the US revolution, while Mandela is a global giant on that score.)
Both men risked death, of course, but Mandela exemplifies perseverance in the face of risk and hardship in a way Washington’s record can’t. And while the US revolution was influential among European intellectuals (particularly to the French, whose revolution a decade later was a much bigger deal in the Western world), that was mostly Jefferson and Franklin’s and Madison’s doing, not Washington’s. He was more a military man than a creator of the concepts of our revolution that inspired and endured. And even then, the US was a backwater not many people cared about at a time when the Western Hemisphere was an afterthought to most Europeans and Asians. Mandela inspired a continent, and, eventually, the world. Apples to oranges, different eras, and all that, George doesn’t come remotely close in global significance.
Mandela is, along with King and Gandhi, one of the three greatest moral authorities and inspirational leaders of the entire planet over the last century – and that puts him above an awful lot of great, inspiring people. There’s really no way to overstate his influence, even if the RSA and Sub-Saharan Africa have (like Gandhi’s and King’s successors before) mostly failed badly in fulfilling his vision at a societal level.
Mandela may have become “a symbol of nonviolence and moral authority”, but let’s be clear (as he was himself): Mandela’s commitment to nonviolence as a principle ended after Sharpesville.
Silly argument. Like trying to decide which Yankees team was the greatest. They didn’t play each other so we will never know. The only heads of state for Washington to model himself on we’re monarchs. Some Americans wanted that. Others wanted none of that. He defined for the world what a democratically elected head should be like. And he defined how to lead without absolute power, high stakes and strong dissent.
Mandela speaks for himself. And we witnessed his achievements first hand which helps and doesn’t help. In terms of lasting legacy it remains to be seen but his example will be a resource for generations if they choose to use it.
Washington freed his slaves at the end. Is it where a person starts or where they end? Of course, he had no children who would have depended on the labor of those slaves, so it made his decision easier.
Also, Washington represented the triumph of the republican ideal. Everyone – including many in his army – expected him to become King of America. It was within his grasp many times.
Without Washington’s constraint, the world’s first elective republic would have turned out very differently.
What Mandela represents, to me, is the idea of moving beyond the idea of punishment for past crimes (apartheid) in order to live in a more just society.
Mandela is the father of modern South Africa.
period.
Why is it necessary to shit on Washington? It’s easy enough to call him a hypocrite for owning slaves, but I think it’s fair to note that they were inherited, and he really never was comfortable with the situation. He kept the slaves he had, but he refused to buy and sell other humans, and he looked forward to the day when slavery would be abolished.
Hell, would Nelson Mandela complain about being compared to George Washington by the first black president of the United States? That’s just rude.
Yeah, poor George, he never wanted those Black slaves anyway. They were forced on him through inheritance. He fought owning them throughout his entire life and couldn’t wait to get rid of them. Treated them like family though! And all of those Black people running around today with the last name Washington? Must have been some of his kinfolk that tampered with some of the nigras at night. *wink.
Lots of talk in this thread about Washington’s owning (and freeing) of slaves. Those interested in exploring the topic further might want to read Henry Wiencek’s “An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves and the Creation of America”. http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780374529512
Here’s what Jefferson thought of Washington:
and what does this mean because Thomas Jefferson said it?
you don’t think a contemporary view of the man is relevant?
Jefferson also said this of Washington (in the infamous Mazzei letter). This was in 1796, during Washington’s second term.
It was a complicated relationship. On the slavery issue, though, there is much more to hold against Jefferson than Washington. The Federalists who dominated the government in the Washington and Adams administrations really were anti-slavery, and they at least kept it contained to where it already existed.
Then the Jeffersonians took over in 1801, with a little help from the 3/5 clause, and that’s when the slave power started to expand. Jefferson claimed to be against slavery, but he was the most influential man in the country during the period when the contagion started to spread, and he did nothing about it.