At a time when Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher still considered Nelson Mandela a justly-detained leader of a terrorist organization, our current president had a different opinion.
Entering his sophomore year at Occidental College, Barack Obama sought a political movement to match his personal awakening, which he signaled to friends and family at the time by reclaiming his African first name.
Barry became Barack that year. He had read Du Bois, Fanon, Malcolm X — an array of authors writing about the black struggle for liberation in his country and in others shaking off the legacy of colonial rule around the world.
That is where he looked for — and found — a figure and a cause to channel his rising political enthusiasm: Nelson Mandela, then imprisoned on a lonely island off Cape Town, and his outlawed African National Congress. Obama would help lead the student push for the Southern California college to divest from companies doing business in apartheid South Africa.
“As the months passed I found myself drawn into a larger role — contacting representatives of the African National Congress to speak on campus, drafting letters to the faculty, printing up flyers, arguing strategy — I noticed that people had begun to listen to my opinions,” Obama wrote in his memoir, “Dreams From My Father.”
Here in the United States, particularly among conservatives, the African National Congress was considered to be a communist organization. So, sophomore Barack Obama was inviting members of a communist terrorist organization to speak at his school. Despite this, he somehow became president of the United States about 25 years later. This is perplexing to people like Dinesh D’Souza who think an embrace of the ANC should be fatal to a political career. It’s maddening to people like Sarah Palin who thinks the president should never have palled around with terrorists. In her “real America,” a movement to raise black consciousness was racism in reverse, and the socialism espoused by most in the African independence movement (including Barack Obama Sr.) was morally suspect and un-American.
It should be noted that Nelson Mandela addressed these accusations at his trial in a speech that he made in his own defense. After the speech, the public did not hear from him again for more than 25 years. He explained that his organization embarked on a program of sabotage that explicitly ruled out terrorism, guerrilla warfare, or open revolution. He explained that the communists were useful allies but held some fundamentally irreconcilable beliefs.
I joined the ANC in 1944, and in 1952 I became Transvaal President and Deputy National President. In my younger days I held the view that the policy of admitting communists to the ANC, and the close co-operation which existed at times on specific issues between the ANC and the Communist Party, would lead to a watering down of the concept of African Nationalism. At that stage I was a member of the African National Congress Youth League, and was one of a group which moved for the expulsion of communists from the ANC. This proposal was heavily defeated, and amongst those who voted against the proposal were some of the most conservative sections of African political opinion. They defended the policy on the ground that from its inception the ANC was formed and built up, not as a political party with one school of political thought, but as a Parliament of the African people accommodating people of various political views –convictions, all united by the common goal of national liberation. I was eventually won over to this point of view and I have upheld it ever since.
It is perhaps difficult for white South Africans, with an ingrained prejudice against communism, to understand why experienced African politicians so readily accept communists as their friends. But to us the reason is obvious. Theoretical differences, amongst those fighting against oppression, is a luxury which cannot be afforded. What is more, for many decades communists were the only political group in South Africa who were prepared to treat Africans as human beings and as their equals; who were prepared to eat with us; talk with us, live with us, and work with us. They were the only political group which was prepared to work with the Africans for the attainment of political rights and a stake in society. Because of this, there are many Africans who today tend to equate freedom with communism. They are supported in this belief by a legislature which brands all exponents of democratic government and African freedom as communists and bannned many of them, who are not communists, under the Suppression of Communism Act. Although My Lord I am not a communist and I have never been a member of the Communist Party, I myself have been banned, have been named under that pernicious Act because of the role I played in the Defiance Campaign. I have also been banned and convicted under that Act.
It is not only in internal politics that we count communists as amongst those who support our cause. In the international field, communist countries have always come to our aid. In the United Nations and other Councils of the world the communist bloc has supported the Afro-Asian struggle against colonialism and often seems to be more sympathetic to our plight than some of the Western powers. Although there is a universal condemnation of apartheid, the communist bloc speaks out against it with a louder voice than most of the western world. In these circumstances, it would take a brash young politician, such as I was in 1949, to proclaim that the Communists are our enemies.
Another way of putting this is that white South Africans, as well as many white Brits and white Americans, did not fully appreciate how much the Soviets gained from the West’s institutional racism. Mandela explained the phenomenon very well. But he and his movement were not communists.
It is true, as I have already stated that I have been influenced by Marxist thought. But this is also true of many of the leaders of the new independent states. Such widely different persons as Gandhi, Nehru, Nkrumah, and Nasser all acknowledge this fact. We all accept the need for some form of socialism to enable our people to catch up with the advanced countries of the world and to overcome their legacy of extreme poverty. But this does not mean we are Marxists.
Indeed, My Lord, for my own part, I believe it is open to debate whether the Communist Party has any specific role to play at this particular stage of our political struggle. The basic task at the present moment is the removal of race discrimination and the attainment of democratic rights on the basis of the Freedom Charter, and a struggle which can best be led by a strong ANC. In so far, My Lord, as that Party furthers this task, I welcome its assistance. I realise that it is one of the main means by which people of all races can be drawn into our struggle.
But from my reading of Marxist literature and from conversations with Marxists, I have gained the impression that communists regard the parliamentary system of the work – of the West as undemocratic and reactionary. But, on the contrary, I am an admirer of such a system.
The oppression blacks experienced under Apartheid was different in kind from the oppression blacks experienced in America, but one obvious similarity was that both populations were systemically undereducated. Some degree of wealth redistribution was absolutely necessary in both countries if the blacks were going to be able to compete for jobs and become qualified for leadership positions within their respective societies. This was the case in all of Africa, including in Obama Sr.’s Kenya. Health and education were obvious areas that required socialistic solutions, but land reform was another. Wealth was concentrated in the colonialists’ hands to such a degree, that it is impossible to think of a political alternative to socialism for the anti-colonial movement. Yet, that did not mean, necessarily, an embrace of Marxism. Mandela wanted to take the best ideas from both the East and the West, and that is what he did.
Only in the simplistic, narrow-minded, dichotomous minds of conservative Cold Warriors were these allegations of communism and terrorism meaningful.
While young Barack Obama was embracing Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress, Bill de Blasio was embracing the Sandinista movement in Nicaragua. In the circles I grew up in, neither position was uncommon or particularly controversial. But in Ronald Reagan’s American, where he carried 49 states in 1984, including even Hawai’i, it was too much to hope that 30 years later one would be president and the other the mayor of New York City.
In a way, it is a triumph of progressive thinking that signals to me that we, as a country, have finally moved on from Era of Reagan.
