Nelson Mandela died on December 5, 2013, aged 95. Easily the most significant production heroic narratives in the three decades, Mandela’s story has become more a legend than a lesson.
This is because the man known as Madiba was not always the universal champion all the world hail today. He divided opinion.
Many countries and leaders did not find Mandela agreeable even if these entities said they were not in support of apartheid rule.
For most towering figures like Mandela, the story arc is usually from “good guy” to “bad guy” according to the West. An easy example is Robert Mugabe.
Here are five organisations and people who despised Mandela at one point and later changed their stories of him.
Margaret Thatcher
The former UK prime minister called Mandela’s African National Congress, a “terrorist organisation” at a 1987 Commonwealth summit in Vancouver, Canada.
Thatcher did not name Mandela as a terrorist but with the future South African president’s membership of the ANC, the conclusions were easy for people to draw.
These conclusions were supported in part, by the fact that Thatcher’s UK refused to put sanctions on apartheid South Africa.
Later, Thatcher would call for the release of Mandela from jail, saying it was important to any progress in South Africa.
Ronald Reagan
The former US president was no friend of self-styled freedom fighters who rode on populism. He and his administration called such people communists.
Mandela and his ANC were therefore easy targets for Ronald Reagan. So he had the ANC put on America’s list of terrorist organisations with Mandela described as among its “leadership”.
But Reagan would also later call for the release of Mandela after Madiba had spent about a quarter of a century in prison.
Shimon Peres
The former Israeli president and prime minister once praised Nelson Mandela as a model for global leadership. Indeed, Peres himself earned comparisons to Mandela by none other than Barack Obama.
But Peres had not always loved Mandela.
In the 1970s, while he was Israel’s defence minister, Peres oversaw the sale of arms to South Africa’s apartheid government, some of which were unleashed on black South Africans.
US Intelligence Agencies
The limbs of America’s defence and security establishment all thought Nelson Mandela was a terrorist even until after his presidency in 1999.
Apparently, being granted freedom, openly forgiving those who wanted you dead and winning a democratic election was not enough for the
American authorities to declassify Mandela as a threat.
It was only in 2008, some five years before his death, that Mandela was taken off the list.
Conservative Party UK
The Conservative Party, with its insistence on trade liberalisation with very little government interventionism, refused to back sanctions against South Africa’s racist government.
This feeling from the elders was shared by the younger ones in the Conservative Party in the 1970s and 80s.
