#new afrikan prison movement

[the-penandpaper]

The New Afrikan Prison Movement Book Club 📚

Free PDF: Frantz Fanon 'Voices of Liberation'

Link to audio reading from incarcerated individuals and comrades on the outside via Twitter

#FreeThemAll ✊🏿

Please share and support 🙏🏿

#pan african #black people #politics #history #resistance #capitalism #western imperialism #frantz fanon #algeria #colonialism #racism #psychology #audio books #pdf #books #new afrikan prison movement #free them all #prison abolition #police state

[trascapades]

🕊🙏🏿#ArtIsAWeapon

Fly Free Dr. Mutulu Shakur

Portrait by @iamwetpaint Sophia Victor

Acrylic & Mixed Media on Canvas 48” x 72”

2017

Reposted from @mxgmnational Baba Mutulu died free, surrounded by family and loved ones. We give thanks!

Mutulu Lives On In The Hearts of the People!

Transition Announcement of Dr. #MutuluShakur.

The New Afrikan People's Organization and the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement are deeply saddened to announce the transition of our beloved comrade and co-founder, Dr. Mutulu Shakur on Friday, July 7th, 2023.

Born Jeral Wayne Williams on August 8th, 1950, he was a loving father and grandfather, revolutionary acupuncturist, human rights organizer and former political prisoner of war. Mutulu's life was transformative to the many people he organized, healed, mentored and inspired. Dr. Mutulu Shakur taught us that “people struggle for liberation because they love [the] people.” He will always be remembered for his continued commitment to an independent and socialist New Afrika and for his battle cry, Straight Ahead!

Information regarding a public service will be forthcoming.

Further inquiries and questions email MXGM National Information Coordinator at [email protected]

#DrMutuluShakur #FreeEmAll #Revolutionary #PoliticalPrisoners #SophiaVictor #ArtistActivists

#Mutulu Shakur #Dr. Mutulu Shakur #political prisoners #Sophia Victor #ArtistActivists #Black Revolutionaries #FreeEmAll

[the-final-straw-blog]

Kazi Toure of Boston Jericho on Prisoner Support

This week on the show, you’ll hear Kazi Toure. Kazi is a former political prisoner from the Ohio 7 case and founding member of the Boston chapter of The National Jericho Movement. For the hour, Kazi and I talk about the history of Jericho Movement, supporting political prisoners and support for post-release and aging prisoners. You can find recent updates from the group at @OfficialJerichoBoston on Instagram.

https://traffic.libsyn.com/thefinalstrawradio/tfsrPodcast-20240114-KaziToureJerichoBoston.mp3

Kazi’s appearances here before:

2015 Former Political Prisoner Panel (pt 1 & pt 2)

2016 Former Political Prisoner Panel (pt 1 & pt 2)

Presentation at Burning Books in Buffalo New York

Other Interviews Referenced:

Dhoruba bin Wahad speaking about Police Unions on BPM / ImixWhatILike: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hskjd7MRN_E

Part of this episode was inspired by the call by Shaka Shakur in this episode of Millenials Are Killing Capitalism

Two interviews Kazi's former co-defendant, Ray Luc Levasseur (pt 1 / pt 2)

Then, Sean Swain’s segment begins the annual tradition of reading the names of people killed by the police in the USA during the prior year. Stay tuned mid-week for a release of a 10 year anniversary chat with Sean about his life since he began participating in TFSR [00:55:58]

Announcements

Post-Release Fundraiser for Mwalimu Shakur

Formerly incarcerated New Afrikan revolutionary activist Mwalimu Shakur has been released from prison after 20 years, Mwalimu was featured on this show twice talking about his organizing work. If you’d like to contribute to his post-release fund, consider donating to our paypal or  venmo linked at our website or via this cashapp with  Mwalimu support in the memo. You can find his former appearances on the show here.

Hunger Strikes Grow More Dire at Red Onion Prison

Several Virginia prisoners began a hunger strike on Tuesday, December 26 at Red Onion State Prison, protesting the continued use of long-term solitary confinement at the institution.

Despite critical concern, outcry from the public and prisoner populations in the state, incarcerated people are still subjected to this brutal practice which has been renamed “restorative housing” since July 1, 2023 when measures were passed to limit its use in the state.

Leading these prisoners in this effort is longtime prison activist, revolutionary writer and artist, Kevin “Rashid” Johnson. Rashid has stated that no one will take any food at all until demands are met. Some of the strike participants have underlying health concerns that make the undertaking of such a demonstration particularly risky.

Rashid, himself, is recovering from multiple rounds of radiation to treat prostate cancer as well as suffering from untreated heart disease/congestive heart failure. This is why the public’s support is especially needed.

We are asking that calls, emails, and letters be sent to the Virginia Department of Corrections (VADOC) officials as well as Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin’s office voicing support for the strikers and condemnation for the inhumane use of long-term solitary confinement/restorative housing.

PLEASE EVERY DAY THIS WEEK: call and email the following people demanding that the hunger strikers demands be met (end long term solitary confinement) and Rashid receive the medical care he has been denied for months, and that he be transferred immediately. If the latter is not an option, then demand an interstate compact transfer take place immediately.

[email protected]

804-674-3081

[email protected]

804-786-2211

** Demand that the Governor intervene on Rashid’s behalf and that an internal investigation be conducted immediately that would reveal why there were documents removed from his medical jacket and why his referrals to outside medical care were canceled.

Joka Jeupe Mkali, AKA Komrade Shine White, who put out this call to action, said "Death is inevitable, but it mustn't be at the hands of some racist dogs. Rashid walks in shoes that cannot be filled, thus we must keep him walking in them as long as possible."

Thank you for all you do to help prison rebels keep walking!

Red Onion Hunger Strike Participants:

Kevin “Rashid” Johnson – #1007485

Jason Barrett – #1092874

Rodney Lester – #1429887

Charles Cousino – #2213403

Eric Thompson – #1208012

Joe Thomas – 1193196

Nguyen Tuan – #1098070

Demetrius Walllace – #1705834

Gregory Binns – #1157265

P. Williams – #2103207

DeQuan Saunders – #1458253

J. Hilliard – #1988319

Ray Galloway – #1407902

Gregory Azeez – #1421616

Phone Zap for Aaron Isby-Israel at Plainfield CF in Indiana

Aaron Isby has been facing increased harassment Plainfield the last few weeks. Details and the support script are available at IDOCWatch. Here’s who to contact:

Please call Plainfield CF and IDOC HQ, and email the Ombusdan and the Governor and demand that the harassment against Mr. Isby cease immediately and that he be provided full access to the law library in accordance with law and policy!

Call IDOC HQ: [phone] ext. 0 ext. 1

Call Plainfield CF: [phone] ext. 7 ext. 9

Email the Ombudsman Bureau: [email protected]

Call & Email the Governor: https://www.in.gov/gov/ask-eric/

. ... . ..

Featured Track:

Water Got No Enemy by Fela Kuti from Expensive Shit

Check out this episode!

#anarchist #podcast #interview #feminist #antifa #anticapitalist

[deborahdeshoftim5779]

MYTH Human Rights Watch has proven Israel is an “apartheid” state. FACT In its longstanding campaign of demonization of Israel, Human Rights Watch (HRW) adopted a new tack in its latest report. Knowing the absurd and ineffective efforts of anti-Israel propagandists to compare Israel to Afrikaner South Africa, HRW decided to write a new definition of “apartheid” it could selectively apply to one state – the Jewish state. HRW relies on definitions that apply to the systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group. Neither Jews nor Palestinians are racial groups so HRW expands the definition to include groups – actually only Palestinians – that share descent, national or ethnic origin. As Professor Gerald Steinberg noted, “Beyond South Africa, no other regime or government has been deemed to meet the international definition of apartheid, not even murderous and oppressive regimes practicing separation based on race, religion, and gender such as Saudi Arabia and China” (Gerald Steinberg, “Human Rights Watch demonizes Israel via propaganda of apartheid,” Jerusalem Post, April 27, 2021). “The report mocks the history of apartheid by using its hateful memory to describe a grab bag of policies that HRW happens to disagree with, and in many cases are not in effect, or were never in effect. Apartheid is not just a term for policies one dislikes,” the Kohelet Policy Forum wrote in its response to the report (“HRW Crosses the Threshold into Falsehoods and Anti-Semitic Propaganda,” KPF, April 26, 2021). For its part, the Biden administration wasted no time rejecting HRW’s conclusion: “It is not the view of this administration that Israel’s actions constitute apartheid,” a State Department spokesperson said (“US disagrees that Israel carrying out ‘apartheid,’” France24,” April 28, 2021). Too often, however, truth does not matter. When a human rights organization, even one with a long history of anti-Israel bias, makes an inflammatory accusation it is assured of attracting media coverage, as was the case with HRW’s report. Journalists rarely factcheck the material before quoting the report and its authors in stories with incendiary headlines. By the time the information is evaluated by third parties, it is too late because the original, unverified story has been transmitted around the world to become fodder for Israel’s detractors. Graphic courtesy Elder of Zion Thus, you are unlikely to see any quotes about the report from Judge Richard Goldstone, who was appointed to the Constitutional Court of South Africa by Nelson Mandela, played an important role in that country’s transition to democracy, and was appointed by the UN Human Rights Council to investigate alleged crimes committed during Israel’s operation in Gaza in 2009. In a New York Times essay, “Israel and the Apartheid Slander,” Goldstone wrote, “In Israel there is no apartheid. Nothing there comes close to the definition of apartheid under the 1998 Rome Statute” used by HRW in an effort to get around the specious comparison to South Africa (New York Times, October 31, 2011). In a rebuke to the equally fallacious claims made in the recent B’Tselem report, Goldstone noted, “there is no intent to maintain ‘an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group.’ This is a critical distinction, even if Israel acts oppressively toward Palestinians there. South Africa’s enforced racial separation was intended to permanently benefit the white minority, to the detriment of other races. By contrast, Israel has agreed in concept to the existence of a Palestinian state in Gaza and almost all of the West Bank, and is calling for the Palestinians to negotiate the parameters.” Presciently anticipating the similarly misguided argument of John Brennan, Goldstone notes, “until there is a two-state peace, or at least as long as Israel’s citizens remain under threat of attacks from the West Bank and Gaza, Israel will see roadblocks and similar measures as necessary for self-defense, even as Palestinians feel oppressed.” Speaking to those who demonize Israel while claiming to be interested in peace, Goldstone concluded, “The charge that Israel is an apartheid state is a false and malicious one that precludes, rather than promotes, peace and harmony.” Hirsh Goodman, another native South African, said HRW “is blind to fact and reality.” He called the report, “a disgrace to the memory of the millions who suffered under that policy in South Africa” (Hirsh Goodman, “I left apartheid South Africa. Applying the term to Israel is disingenuous,” Forward, April 27, 2021). Goodman noted that HRW is an advocate of discrimination against Jews, supporting the anti-Semitic BDS movement, and that the report came out as an Israeli Arab, a member of an Arab party in the Knesset, and an Islamist no less, had the potential to determine who would be Israel’s next prime minister. In the previous election, a coalition of Arab parties was the third largest faction in the Knesset. This is discrimination? What about Palestinians who are not Israeli citizens? They have the opportunity to vote for their leaders in Palestinian elections, which were last held in 2006 (the one scheduled for May was just cancelled because the president, serving the 16th year of his four-year term, is afraid of losing). HRW apparently has no problem with the fact that a Jew cannot vote in a Palestinian election even though the outcome will affect Israel or that a Palestinian who has acquired Israeli citizenship also cannot vote in the Palestinian Authority (Elder of Ziyon, “Another Double Standard: Palestinian Law Excludes Israelis From Voting,” Algemeiner, March 26, 2021). HRW condemns Israel for treating Palestinians in the disputed territories and Israeli citizens differently, but Israel has no obligation to treat them the same. In the Oslo Accords, Israel agreed the Palestinians should be responsible for their own lives in virtually all areas except security; hence, about 98 percent of Palestinians are governed by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. The fact that both deny their own people civil and human rights goes unmentioned by HRW. HRW also ignores reality while applying a standard that would make nearly every country, including the United States, guilty of apartheid. Take, for example, the report’s criticism of the Law of Return. Yes, it grants automatic citizenship to Jews, but non-Jews are also eligible to become citizens under naturalization procedures similar to those in other countries. More than two million non-Jews are Israeli citizens and 21% of the population are Arabs who enjoy equal rights under the law with Jewish citizens. Meanwhile, Ireland has a law allowing immigrants of “Irish descent or Irish associations” to be exempt from ordinary naturalization rules while Bulgaria, Croatia, Germany and a number of other democratic states also have policies similar to Israel’s Law of Return and yet are not labeled by HRW as apartheid. HRW apparently has no problem with Arab nations that have laws that facilitate the naturalization of foreign Arabs, with the exception of Palestinians, or with Jordan’s “law of return that provides citizenship to all former residents of Palestine – except Jews. Graphic courtesy Elder of Zion For HRW it is a crime for Israelis to want a Jewish majority in the Jewish state. Are Muslim states equally guilty for not accepting a non-Muslim majority? The report castigates Israel for placing restrictions on the movement of Palestinians, ignoring that checkpoints and the security fence were created to protect Israeli citizens – Jews and non-Jews from terrorists. It accuses Israel of “Judaization” of Jerusalem, the Galilee and the Negev, implying that Jews should not be allowed to live in parts of Israel where there are “significant Palestinian populations” (which is not the case in the Negev), including its capital. Israel is also condemned for not agreeing to commit suicide by allowing the 5.7 million Palestinians UNRWA calls “refugees” to live in Israel. To refute the charge that Israel is therefore discriminating against Palestinians simply refer to the thousands of Palestinians who left the country and were allowed to return and become citizens (“Israel Claims 184,000 Palestinian Refugees have Returned since 1948,” Al Bawaba, January 1, 2001). Israel has also repeatedly offered to accept a limited number of Palestinians as part of a peace agreement (Gene Currivan, “ISRAEL TO ACCEPT 100,000 REFUGEES; Offer, to Go Into Effect When Peace Comes, Is Delivered to Arabs at Lausanne,” New York Times, July 30, 1949). Summarizing the absurdity of HRW’s argument, one writer tweeted: “Israel: The only country that’s shrinks when it colonizes, grows the population it’s genociding, fattens the people it starves and consistently increases quality of life and freedoms on every metric for the people it apartheids” (@TheMossadIL, April 29, 2021). Contrast Israel’s behavior with that of the Arab states which deny Palestinians living within their borders, sometimes for decades, the right to become citizens. The Lebanese government goes even further by denying Palestinians a host of rights and placing limits on where they can live and work (Lisa Khoury, “Palestinians in Lebanon: ‘It’s like living in a prison,’” Al Jazeera, December 16, 2017). If you want to talk about discrimination, consider that it is a crime for a Palestinian to sell land to a Jew and a fatwa was issued by the preacher of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, Sheikh Ikrimah Sabri, saying it is permitted to kill the seller (“Khatib Al-Aqsa issues a Sharia fatwa regarding the diversion or sale of real estate to settlement associations,” Sama News Agency, April 8, 2021). Ironically, the author of the HRW report, Omar Shakir, was happy to live in Israel (imagine a black person choosing to live under the Afrikaner regime) until the Supreme Court revoked his residency permit. He is an advocate of the BDS campaign, which raises the question, Why would HRW choose someone who objects to Israel’s existence as the arbiter of its behavior (Ben-Dror Yemini, “A most dangerous and mendacious report,” Ynet, April 27, 2021)? Highlighting HRW’s hypocrisy, the Jerusalem Post reported that one of the organization’s board members runs a venture-capital fund that invests in Israeli start-ups (Lahav Harkov, “Human Rights Watch chairman invests in Israel as he calls it ‘apartheid,’” Jerusalem Post, May 2, 2021). It is also worth remembering that HRW uses its anti-Israel record as a fundraising tool, as we learned when Sarah Leah Whitson, the director of HRW’s Middle East and North Africa division, went to Saudi Arabia to raise money by highlighting the group’s demonization of Israel (David Bernstein, “Human Rights Watch Goes to Saudi Arabia,” Wall Street Journal, July 15, 2009). The founder of HRW, Robert Bernstein, said in 2009 the organization had become devoted to “helping those who wish to turn Israel into a pariah state.” Contrasting Israel with the countries HRW once focused on, he noted it had “at least 80 human rights organizations, a vibrant free press, a democratically elected government, a judiciary that frequently rules against the government, a politically active academia, multiple political parties and, judging by the amount of news coverage, probably more journalists per capita than any other country in the world.” Writing in the context of a biased HRW investigation into Israeli actions in Gaza, Bernstein lamented that “Israel, the repeated victim of aggression, faces the brunt of Human Rights Watch’s criticism” (Robert L. Bernstein, “Rights Watchdog, Lost in the Mideast,” New York Times, (October 19, 2009). Israel’s government is not immune to criticism and many of its policies are subject to vigorous debate and, in some cases, harsh condemnation by Israelis. What distinguishes Israel from the countries HRW should be investigating is the internal democratic processes that lead to self-examination, more enlightened policies and, where legally warranted, punishment for criminal activity. Nevertheless, Israel’s detractors and anti-Semites will use the report to reinforce their existing prejudices and try to convince the uninformed of HRW’s alternative reality. It also feeds into the BDS narrative by arguing it is not just the “occupation” that is bad; Israel itself “is intrinsically racist and evil” and therefore should be dismantled (Herb Keinon, “The HRW apartheid report: Does it matter?” Jerusalem Post, April 27, 2021).

Jewish Virtual Library refutes the odious myths perpetrated by “Human Rights Watch” (except Jewish rights) in their latest edition of “Myths versus Facts”. 

#jewish virtual library #jewish #human rights watch #israel #israeli #stop bds #anti bds #jerusalem post #new york times #bias #pro israel #stand with israel #standwithus #i stand with israel #jumblr #zionism #zionist #palestinian #judea #samaria #jerusalem

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“Slaves of the State” Revolt: The Slavery and Convict Lease Discourse as Prisoner Mobilization

“Arise, arise, Strike! For your lives and liberties. . . . Let every SLAVE on the . . . SLAVE CAMP do this and the days of the Slave Holder are numbered. . . . You cannot be more oppressed than you are. You cannot suffer greater cruelties than you have already. Let OUR motto be: Resistance! Resistance! Resistance!”

Such words of resistance came not from antebellum abolitionists or a group of rebelling enslaved peoples but instead from a political pamphlet by the prisoner and Black Panther John Eduardo Swift, who was embroiled in the struggle over the U.S. prison regime during the mid-1970s. Swift was one of many prisoners who mobilized a grassroots movement to actively assist the legal campaigns against abusive Texas state prisons through self-defense, work strikes, and a system-wide letter-writing campaign to judges, state legislators, the governor, the media, and civil rights attorneys to bring visibility to the cause. Swift wrote the tract to call Texas prisoners to the movement, but he was not alone in his efforts. Other groups, including the Prisoners Solidarity Committee of Texas, Prisoners United, the First Inmate Reform Strike (first), the Jail-House Lawyers Association, and Allied Prisoners Platform for Legal Equity, joined the movement.

Outside the South, the discourse that prisons constituted slavery was a metaphorical organizing principle that condemned the entire prison system as a form of American apartheid challenged only by rallying African Americans to the prison abolitionist cause. In non-southern states—particularly California, Illinois, and New York—black prisoners formed organizations and printed underground newspapers, hoping that the slavery discourse might galvanize African Americans across the nation toward collective action. In Illinois, for instance, the New Afrikan Prisoner Organization was established in the aftermath of prison uprisings at Stateville Correctional Center and the state penitentiary in Joliet, while in California the San Quentin Six—those men charged with the deaths of three guards and two prisoner trustees on the day of George Jackson’s death—also employed the prisons-as-slavery discourse.

Across the American South, however, the charge that prisons constituted twentieth-century slavery had the added physical reality that southern prison farms forced unpaid prisoners to toil on former plantations in racially segregated groups to pick cotton under the supervision of white prison “bosses” and convict guards, and the prisoners faced routine corporal punishment and state-orchestrated sexual assault. While the black power movement outside the South lit fire to the charge that African Americans went from the “prison of slavery to the slavery of prison,” in Angela Davis’s words, prisoners in the South underwent a distinct geographical imprisonment that made their legal condition as slaves of the state a visceral indictment against southern prison practices. Southern prisoners’ rights campaigns, therefore, sought a strategy that drew upon metaphorical discourses and applied them to the physical geography of southern prison farms to frame contemporary incarceration as the living legacy of slavery bound by regional and historical practices that applied equally as well to the enslaved and the incarcerated.

Throughout Texas, a series of political prisoner organizations formed and adopted a similar language to construct a counter-narrative to the southern prison modernization success story; these organizations spoke of a “backwards” prison system tied to slave practices, racial brutality, and plantation labor. References to prison as a “slavocracy” littered prisoner letters, which explicitly called attention to unpaid prisoner work as slave labor. In one tract, “Ally or Die,” a proclamation was issued to fellow “members of a totally enslaved class” within which “we are total slaves inside and disenfranchised wage-slaves outside.” In another pamphlet, first issued a call to all prisoners, “Blacks, Browns, Yellows, Reds, Whites,” and “gays and straights,” to “rally the support of families, friends, sympathizers, legal and political groups” to initiate a system-wide prison work strike against “the slave plantation.” 

The Prison Solidarity Committee also sent out a handbill, “Texas Prisoners Resist Texas Slave System,” charging that the conditions of imprisonment in Texas “are the prison conditions of a century ago, of the pre–Civil War era. . . . It is scarcely what a reasonable person would expect to find in 1978 with a reputation for modern methods and proud structures.” The handbill mocked the southern prison claims of modernity, stating that “the distance from the prison farms of East Texas to the NASA Space Center is greater than the distance from the Earth to the Moon.”

As these passages suggest, the universality of prison abuse in the American South allowed prisoners of non–African American dissent, particularly Chicano prisoners, to share in the discourse that southern prisons created modern slavery. From 1973 to 1980 the number of Mexican Americans in Texas prisons more than doubled, from 2,442 to 5,168. In view of this shared criminalization of people of color, many Chicano prisoners drew on the Chicano movement—or, as George Mariscal termed it, “El Movimiento”— and understood that the conditions of southern prisons created a common experience with African Americans. Following his 1972 release from prison, Fred Cruz announced in the Chicano newspaper Papal Chicano the formation of the Texas Jail and Prison Coalition. 

Led by Cruz, the coalition aimed to unite those outside of prison and those still in prison for a statewide lobbying effort at prison reform. He hoped to link the black and brown coalition behind bars to the wider Chicano movement out on the streets. In his appeal to Chicano readers, Cruz promised to help launch a statewide effort “to bring about a humane prison system based on justice, tempered with mercy and compassion, that will give men hope for the future.” Salvador Gonzalez, Cruz’s childhood friend, fellow prisoner-activist, and leader of the Prison Solidarity Committee, spoke directly to Chicano prisoners’ common cause with the history of racial oppression against African Americans. Gonzalez charged: 

“What is really happening in this prison, society refuses to believe because they really believe in a humane world. . . . No one wants to be enslaved, to be powerless, to be subject to the arbitrary exercise of power, to not be recognized as a human being, is to be a slave . . . an object, a number, a thing, or worse a no-thing.”

For Alvaro Hernandez Jr., an organizer of the 1978 system-wide prison strike, the fact that black and brown prisoners collaborated and remained nonviolent in their cause showed that victory for the prisoners’ rights movement was finally within reach: 

“Remember one of the objectives was to show the public our humanity. To show the public that hey, we’re not animals. . . . Should we tear this place down? Should we try to take it over? . . . We’ll just sit—we’ll riot peacefully.” 

This black-brown coalition of prisoners defined themselves collectively as “slaves” and saw their incarceration on southern prison farms as a moment of literal and legal enslavement. By adopting a lens that views prisons as a legalized form of twentieth-century state enslavement, historians can reevaluate how black-brown coalitions formed around the shared predicament of criminalization and mass incarceration.

In other parts of the South, prisoner mobilization campaigns expanded the slave resistance discourse to include modern struggles over the history and collective memory of the convict lease. During the mid-1970s Tennessee prisoners filed a series of lawsuits against the Tennessee Department of Corrections based on claims of overcrowding, filthy and unsanitary living conditions, and physical abuse and rampant violence. Such deplorable conditions, the prisoners claimed, violated the Eighth Amendment’s protections against “cruel and unusual punishment.” Two years after the Ruiz v. Estelle decision the Tennessee trial court ruled against the Tennessee Department of Corrections in the prisoner civil rights suit Grubbs v. Bradley. Despite their victory, however, Tennessee prisoners experienced a period of intransigence as Gov. Lamar Alexander’s “Plan for the 80s” offered a “law-and-order” approach that passed tougher sentencing laws, sending more and more prisoners into a vastly overcrowded system. 

When the state legislature in 1985 decided to change its prisoners’ uniform from blue denim to a striped material that harkened back to the era of convict lease, the inmates revolted, gathered their retro-convict uniforms, burned them, and engaged in a system-wide prison uprising that resulted in a hostage situation similar to the one that Attica Prison inmates had created in 1971. The legislature and Governor Alexander insisted on these prison uniforms as a “law-and-order” fusion of the new “get-tough-on-crime” approach and the old public imagery of convict lease, even though the Tennessee Department of Corrections opposed the striped uniforms “because it is associated with the old Georgia chain gang.”

During the 1985 Tennessee state prison hostage crisis, however, prisoners avoided the bloodbath that Attica prisoners had experienced. The Tennessee prisoners offered to return their hostages peacefully in exchange for the opportunity to have a live television news conference so that prisoners could make the public aware that the state was ignoring federal court orders. As the prisoner Mike Garrard repeatedly reminded the press:

“Do you remember when this court situation began? 1975. . . . Yet it’s the same rhetoric, and the prison system hasn’t improved despite winning the 1982 lawsuit.” 

“It wouldn’t blow up all over the state unless something was drastically wrong,” the inmate Mike Phillips agreed. One sign in particular connected the southern prisoners’ rights movement to northern resistance, while also reminding the prisoners and their keepers to learn from the tragedies of the past. The hand-painted sign, done in sharp yet dripping red letters on a large cloth spread over the front of the prison, offered a simple but poignant admonition: 

“Remember Attica!!”

Even when some prisons erupted in seemingly nihilistic riots, the causes of prisoner violence centered on two countervailing forces bound up in the struggle over prisoners’ rights. Perhaps the most disquieting example is the February 1980 uprising at the New Mexico State Penitentiary in Santa Fe. During that tumultuous riot, prisoners took twelve officers hostage and engaged in a sadistic frenzy of rape, murder, and torture of fellow inmates that resulted in the death of thirty-three prisoners. While the riot is a disturbing example of prison violence, historians must contextualize it as a response to the legal struggle over prisoners’ rights, on the one hand, and the worsening of prison conditions, on the other.

Following a 1976 collective prison work strike, officials at the New Mexico State Penitentiary initiated a divisive and dangerous surveillance program known as “snitching,” which rewarded inmate informants with better housing, improved classification, furlough and parole, and sometimes cash and drugs. When a prisoner refused to be an informer, however, prison officials threatened punishment by giving them a “snitch jacket,” which endangered their lives in falsely marking them as an informant to the general prison population.

By looking for political debate over mass incarceration through a top-down national lens political and social scientists have concluded that the rise of the carceral state faced very little political opposition. When the historical lens shifts from national political debate over prisons to consider instead regional, state, and local resistance by prisoners— specifically their legal activism and prison protests between 1965 and 1995—historians will need to rethink the claim that the carceral state went unchallenged. These histories of multiple prisoners’ rights movements reveal that there was a great legal, political, and social struggle that sought to check and challenge the construction of carceral states. 

This branch of the prisoners’ rights movement was ultimately stifled by political calculations made by reactionary conservatives who used the power of the national legislature to return the control of prisons to state legislatures and thereby weaken federal judicial intervention for prisoners’ rights in individual states. Nonetheless, a full accounting of the rise of the carceral state must look at how prisoners sought to counter the rising tide of mass incarceration. Continuing this research and excavating multiple histories of prisoner resistance might well offer a path to confront the ways a variety of carceral states have taken such deep root across American politics and society.”

- Robert T. Chase, “We Are Not Slaves: Rethinking the Rise of Carceral States through the Lens of the Prisoners’ Rights Movement.” The Journal of American History, June 2015.  pp. 79-85.

#prisoners' movement #prisoner rights #prison abolition #prison slavery #prison labor #enslavement #american prison system #american south #carceral state #civil rights movement #prison riots #prisoner resistance #prison strike #racism in america #african americans #black power #el movimiento #abolitionism #black liberation movement #texas department of corrections #tennessee department of corrections #penitentiary of new mexico #tennessee state prison #crime and punishment #history of crime and punishment

[dinoacademia]

Jalil A. Muntaqim is one of the longest held political prisoners in the world, having been incarcerated since 1971. A former member of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army, he has been a critical influence in the development of revolutionary consciousness in the United States.

This book contains more than thirty-six years of Jalil Muntaqim's prison writings and represents some of the significant contributions he has made to the Black Liberation and New Afrikan Independence Movements.

CLICK THE BOOK COVER TO ACCESS THE BOOK.

#free library #we are our own liberators #jalil muntaqim

[ga1n3s]

#Repost @rickiryan • • • • • • Happy #BlackAugust, Black People!!⁣⁣⁣⁣ ⁣⁣⁣⁣ Now celebrated globally, traditionally, Black August is a time to study Black radical history, particularly the Black radical history formed within the US Empire. ⁣ ⁣ Black radical history is rooted in REBELLION and RESISTANCE to oppression so it should come as no surprise that Black August orginited through New Afrikan political prisoners and prison led movements as a response to the death of the dragon himself, George Jackson. ⁣⁣⁣⁣ ⁣⁣⁣⁣ With all that is occurring, Black August is also a time for Black Radical HEALING, which should include centering abolition in all forms, a dedication to killing the cop in your head, and dismantling all cages! ⁣⁣⁣⁣ ⁣⁣⁣⁣ (at Phoenix, Arizona) https://www.instagram.com/p/CDaISuupVyI/?igshid=197m65y6gmonc

#repost #blackaugust

[milkboydotnet]

Originally posted on The People’s Voice

Saturday morning saw an escalation in the proletarian revolutionary housing struggle in California. Homeless families, inspired by the success of Moms4Housing in Oakland after a sharp struggle, reproduced the tactic and seized control of a house in El Sureno. The LA Times reports that they seek to spread the tactic to new properties in the future. This development comes on the heels of orders to self quarantine. Naturally, homeless people cannot self-quarantine, because they have no homes.

“I am a mother of two daughters. I need a home,” said Martha Escudero, 42, who has spent the last 18 months living on couches with friends and family members in neighborhoods across East Los Angeles. “There’s these homes that are vacant and they belong to the community.” Escudero and her family moved into the house with Ruby Gordillo, 33, and Gordillo’s three children. The Gordillos had been living in a small studio in Pico-Union. Joining the two families in the El Sereno home is Benito Flores, 64, a welder who had been living in his van.

Like the Moms 4 Housing group in Oakland, the protesters in L.A. are receiving assistance from the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, an organizing group that’s advocated for state measures to expand rent control and other tenant protections.

As the interview shows, the homeless are, by and large, working class people and semi-proletarians who have been priced out of their historic neighborhoods across the country by so called “urban removal”, but what can more accurately be called “prole removal”. In many cases the neighborhoods are bulldozed and cleared for gentrification and “redevelopment purposes”. This process has been going on for decades, targeting and clearing Black and Brown working class neighborhoods as “slums” and destroying them. Naturally, this leads to large numbers of housing insecure or outright houseless people. In the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, this becomes even more a matter of literal life or death.

The property that was rightfully seized by the masses is owned by the State of California. State and local governments routinely buy up or take over large amounts of property and allow them to remain vacant when “redevelopment” plans fall through, which is often. The City of Saint Louis wiped the Black city of Kinloch off the map in this manner:

Neoliberalism had its day in Kinloch in the 1980s. The City of Saint Louis, which owns Lambert-Saint Louis International Airport, literally bought most of the city’s land and razed it to the ground. Generations of work put in by New Afrikan hands were wiped out by bulldozers and wrecking balls for a proposed airport expansion that never came, displacing thousands of people. The vast majority of them ended up in neighboring, formerly colonizer dominated towns such as Florissant, Ferguson, and Berkeley.

This occupation is an example of the Maoist dictum that the masses are fully capable of taking steps for their own well being. They did not ask permission or seek to go through the courts in the beginning – they saw an empty house, and they took it for their well-being. This is the demonstration of what Mao said regarding “the masses being the true heroes, we are often childish and foolish”. While the “Left” engages in positional wrecking warfare against itself, repeats the same old tired arguments, or engages in electoral cretinism, the masses are displaying heroism and courage. This shows from where the revolution comes. In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, mutual aid networks are mobilizing or being formed, securing needed hygiene and food supplies, and delivering them to individuals in quarantine. Revolutionary organizations are conducting political education around the causes of this pandemic, the response in countries such as Cuba and Venezuela compared to the United States, and mobilizing the masses around revolutionary proletarian demands that originate from the concrete conditions of the masses themselves. The demands of the FTP movement led by the MCP-OC during this epidemic are:

1.) Eviction and Rent Freeze 2.) Public utility shutoff freeze 3.) Universal paid sick leave 4.) Free testing and treatment 5.) Free food and other necessities for all in quarantine 6.) Immediate release of those being held in jail on cash bond and closing of all courts for the duration of the emergency. Immediate compassionate release for immunocompromised and elderly prisoners in light of their increased risk for contraction and death from COVID-19

We support all direct actions of a housing and material nature and encourage their spread, along with the development of revolutionary coalitions and people’s councils which administer the provision of material support for occupiers, the involvement of people’s self defense organizations such as Coalition of Armed Labor, working in conjunction with legal collectives such as the National Lawyers’ Guild to ensure the legal and physical defense of space seized by the masses, and the development of tactical unity between revolutionary organizations around the slogan “Housing is a Human Right – Don’t Ask For It, Take It!” This is not just the demonstration of proletarian revolutionary principles in practice but the learning of warfare through warfare – these struggles will escalate and spread in the future and it is essential to struggle for revolutionary Communist leadership. These are the struggles that build cadre and we must immerse ourselves in them.

#maoism #maoist communist party #mcp-oc #housing

[pumthewaterbug]

hey i copied this from r/bad_cop_no_donut, i’m planning on using it later so i’ll put it here

Fuck the entire US justice system.

What does it mean when people say that all cops are bastards (ACAB)?

If it were an individual thing, you'd give them the benefit of the doubt, but it isn't; it's an institutional thing. the job itself is a bastard, therefore by carrying out the job, they are bastards. To take it to an extreme: there were no good members of the gestapo because there was no way to carry out the directives of the gestapo and to be a good person. it is the same with the american police state. Police do not exist to protect and serve, according to the US supreme court itself, but to dominate, control, and terrorize in order to maintain the interests of state and capital.

I also imagine most members of the gestapo also thought they were serving their country and doing good.

Who are the good cops then? The ones who either quit or are fired for refusing to do the job.

While the following list focuses on the US as a model police state, ALL cops in ALL countries are derivative from very similar violent traditions of modern policing, rooted in old totalitarian regimes, genocides, and slavery, if not the mere maintenance of authoritarian power structures through terrorism.

police shoot people twice as often as previously thought. Keep in mind that this was self-reported, so we have no way of knowing if these numbers speak to the actual number of shootings in the US. Many of these people are completely unarmed. Police kill far, far more people than terrorists in the US and have killed over a hundred people more than mass shooters did in 2019 that we are aware of. Mass shooters are easily tracked. Police killings are not. 1 2

They also shoot one dog every hour, every day. At the absolute least.

Once you're in jail, be prepared to sit there for weeks -or months or years. It's so bad that people constantly plead guilty just so they can get out. It's so bad and so common, in fact, that over a third of all exonerations come after an individual has pleaded guilty. So much for the right to a speedy trial, huh?

And getting arrested is easy - tens of thousands of people yearly, in fact, thanks to lowest bidder garbage that police departments use in order to test for illicit substances. Field drug tests are about as reliable as lie detector tests or horoscopes. They just don't work. They just don't.

Think you're safe if you just follow directions? Yeah, no. And if they don't just outright kill you, they could make their instructions so arcane and hard to follow that they'll kill you for not following them, and they'll usually get away with it. He got away with it, by the way. Surprise!

They'll prosecute you for even knowing about crimes cops have committed.

cops across the nation constantly engage in violent, hateful rhetoric on facebook, illustrating the curation of a culture of violence. luckily for us, it was tracked and collated

Being a taxi driver is literally more dangerous than being a cop.

cops are more of a danger to themselves than anyone else is to them

they've admitted to stealing as much -or recently more- than burglars through "asset forfeiture," and the rate of their thefts has been climbing yearly. Keep in mind, these numbers only articulate what's been reported. It's probable that they've stolen far more than just this.

police are literally allowed to rape people on the job in 35 states, as they have the power to determine whether or not you consented to sex with them while in their custody.

up to 50% of the people police murder are disabled

the police are being trained to kill as if they're an occupying army and we're an insurgency. this is an inevitability, as the military-industrial complex needs to keep expanding into new markets.

Eugenics was still alive and well in the prison-industrial complex up until very recently, and could very well be continuing for all we know, as it was forcibly sterilizing inmates as late as 2010. I honestly don't see a reason to believe it's stopped.

The US surveillance state is massive (and while this post primarily focuses on the US, other countries are just as bad), though much of our surveillance is privatized. This doesn't stop the police from partnering with private companies, however. This will only get worse as time goes on. Also, we can't forget about the Patriot Act and [Snowden's PRISM leaks.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)

the police, as an institution, are so completely steeped in violence, that up to 40% of them commit acts of domestic violence and other forms of domestic abuse. Most citizens are not even allowed to own firearms if found guilty of domestic violence, and these guys are expected to handle military-grade equipment.

you can't even really defend yourself from a cop, and if a cop murders you for no reason, he's almost certainly going to get away with it

Police exist to control and terrorize us, not serve and protect us. That's only their function if you happen to be rich and powerful.

the police as they are now haven't even existed for 200 years as an institution, and the modern police force was founded to control crowds and catch slaves, not to "serve and protect" -- unless you mean serving and protecting what people call "the 1%." They have a long history of controlling the working class by intimidating, harassing, assaulting, and even murdering strikers during labor disputes. This isn't a bug; it's a feature.

The justice system also loves to intimidate and outright assassinate civil rights leaders.

The police do not serve justice. The police serve the ruling classes, whether or not they themselves are aware of it. They make our communities far more dangerous places to live, but there are alternatives to the modern police state. There is a better way.

Further Reading:

(all links are to free versions of the texts found online - many curated from this source)

white nationalists court and infiltrate a significant number of Sheriff's departments nationwide

Kropotkin and a quick history of policing

Center for Research on Criminal Justice. (1975). The Iron fist and the velvet glove: An analysis of the U.S. police. San Francisco: Center for Research on Criminal Justice.

Malcolm X Grassroots Movement. (2013). Let Your Motto Be Resistance: A Handbook on Organizing New Afrikan and Oppressed Communities for Self-Defense.

Rose City Copwatch. (2008). Alternatives to Police.

Williams, Kristian. (2011). “The other side of the COIN: counterinsurgency and community policing.” Interface 3(1).

Williams, Kristian. (2004). Our Enemies in Blue: Police and power in America. New York: Soft Skull Press.

[jamesm772]

The National Party and Nelson Mandela

National Party of South Africa in 1948 following their election win, the beginning of apartheid. Source: The Nation

The National Party came to power in South Africa in 1948 and began instituting the system known as apartheid immediately. The party was made up of Afrikaners, decedents of the original Dutch colonialists, and the other whites that were a large minority in the country. (Britannica, 2022) It was originally founded in opposition to the Anglicization of the country but began focusing on white superiority around WWII, during which the members who would eventually lead the National Party in 1948 were Nazi sympathizers. Even though this party is well-known for its racial segregation and suppression of black South Africans, it was just a continuation and expansion of the system that had existed in South Africa since the beginning of colonial rule. All non-white South Africans had been suppressed and treated as second-class citizens since the beginning of European colonization, but the system of apartheid took it to a whole new level, especially because the fact that it lasted until 1994.

It was this system that gave way to Nelson Mandela’s success and eventual election as president of the country after having been in prison for twenty-seven years, only being released in 1990. Mandela was able to use populist ideas such as the people vs. the elite as discussed by Judis and fighting for further democratization as discussed by Mudde and Kaltwasser. (Judis, 2016) (Mudde and Kaltwasser, 2017) The National Party’s suppression of and control over the majority black population was bound to fall as this populist movement led by Mandela gained popularity and power among the citizens of South Africa. From 1989 until 1994 Mandela negotiated directly with the National Party leader and South African president Frederik Willem de Klerk to find a solution to this problem that had at this point lasted for hundreds of years. After coming to power in 1994, Mandela and the rest of the African National Congress could have decided anything regarding the treatment of the former white suppressors, but Mandela was insistent on a fair and equal society.

This makes Mandela one of the few populist leaders I have discovered who increased levels of democracy after gaining the majority share of power in the country and this was a result of them knowing the reality of being treated like second-class citizens. They didn’t want former National Party leaders and supporters to feel the pain they did but rather focused on helping them understand it. One of Mandela’s most popular quotes is, “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” (Ellis, 2019) One of the things he meant by this was that educating those in the National Party and all others who supported apartheid was much more effective than taking up arms against them or fighting in some other way. Although the National Party was disbanded in 1997, the racist feelings of many white South Africans did not go away and even today there is a neo-Nazi party called the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging, who make absolutely no attempt to hide their true feelings and has existed since 1973. (O’Malley, 1991) This speaks to South Africa’s ability to allow democracy to flourish under their new leadership rather than banning or making illegal the types of parties that had suppressed them. Instead, they focused on making sure these groups never had enough power to take away the right to democracy ever again.

[blackpowerfrontsblog]

THE BLACK WORLD MUST NEVER FORGET SAMORA MOISES MACHEL, BY VELI MBELE, 8 DECEMBER, 2018

In her classic tune, 'Aluta Continua', the majestically graceful Warrior Queen, uMam’uZenzile Makeba sings:

My people, my people open your eyes

And answer the call of the drum

FRELIMO, FRELIMO,

Samora Machel, Samora Machel has come.

Maputo, Maputo home of the brave

Our nation will soon be as one.

FRELIMO, FRELIMO,

In South Africa a luta continua

Samora Machel, Samora Machel has won.

Mozambique a luta continua

A luta continua, continua, continua.

Through this tune, Mama Makeba poignantly captures the beauty, gallantry and heroism that is the great uBab'uSamora Moises Machel.Born on 29 September in 1933, in the village of Chilembene, Mozambique. Machel was raised by parents who were forced to grow cotton by the Portuguese invaders, after they had dispossessed his family of their farm land.

As a result, his relatives were forced to go and work in the mines in neighbouring South Africa, where his brother later died in what was reported as a ‘mining accident’. Machel went to a catholic school and later studied to become a nurse.

While a nursing student, he became attracted to the philosophy of Marxism. This inspired him to protest against the disparities in the wages of Black and white nurses and the general poor medical treatment that ordinary people were getting.

Expressing his disgust with these injustices, in an interview, he asserted that “…the rich man's dog gets more in the way of vaccination, medicine and medical care than do the workers upon whom the rich man's wealth is built."

Unsurprisingly, he then went on to join the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique or FRELIMO, in 1962. By joining FRELIMO, Machel was not doing anything unusual. Before him, his grandparents and great-grandparents were involved in the resistance against Portuguese invasion of Mozambique.

It is therefore no exaggeration to say that resistance, rebellion and revolution ran through Machel’s veins.After receiving military training in several Afrikan countries, Machel led various guerrilla campaigns against Portuguese invasion of Mozambique.

His experience and prowess on the battle failed led to him becoming one of the most astute military strategists of his generation and eventually ascending to the position of commander and chief of the armed wing of FRELIMO.

It was under Machel’s leadership that the Portuguese invaders were forced to leave Mozambique in 1974 and victory was declared. A new Black revolutionary government was installed in June 1975, with Machel as its first president.

It is this victory over Portuguese invasion that inspired the Black Consciousness Movement ( SASO to be exact) in the white-criminal settler-colony referred to as South Africa, to organise what was called ‘VIVA FRELIMO Rallies’.

These rallies were essentially an act of rebellion against settler invasion in South Africa and other parts of Afrika, but they were also SASO’s way of reminding Black people in South Africa of the connectedness of their struggle to that of Black people in Afrika and other parts of the world.

For daring to openly celebrate the defeat of Portuguese invasion in Mozambique- the South African settler-colonial regime arrested Black Consciousness leaders such as Muntu Myeza, Zithulele Cindi, Pandelani Nefolovhodwe, Nchaupe Aubrey Mokoape, Saths Cooper, Nkwenkwe Nkomo, Kabarone ‘KK” Sedibe, Striny Moodley ( MHSRIP) and yes, believe it or not, Mosioua ‘Terror’ Lekota.

At the time of their arrest, many of them were in their twenties and were sentenced to long prison terms in the dungeon named Robben Island by the European invaders.

Upon taking power, Machel’s government instituted far-reaching social changes in the areas of economic ownership, health care and education. And because he was a pan afrikanist in word and in deed, Machel also used his government to provide military and other forms of support to the liberation armies of Black people in the neighbouring settler states of Rhodesia and South Africa.

In reaction to Machel’s support for revolutionary movements in these states, the racist-settler-minority regimes of Rhodesia and South Africa combined their resources to create and bolster a ruthless-deadly-anti-Black-counter-revolution force called RENAMO.

RENAMO went on a vicious campaign to undo all the social changes that had been introduced by the FRELIMO government. Part of REMANO’s campaign included bombing critical road infrastructure, hospitals, schools and even killing ordinary Black people in Mozambique.

This counter-revolutionary programme was carried out with the full knowledge and support of people like P.W Botha, Pik Botha, Magnus Malan, Constand Viljoen ( all of whom have never been held accountable for the atrocities they committed against thousands of Black in South Africa and other parts of Afrika).

Remember, with similar consequences for Black people in Angola, the same generals of the apartheid regime gave similar support to another anti-Black-counter-revolutionary project called UNITA ( under Jonas Savimbi).

At this stage, it became increasingly clear that, the very existence of the Black FRELIMO government, under Machel, posed a serious threat to the persistence and sustainability of the project of white-western imperialism in Afrika, and in particularly, in Southern Africa.

On October 19, 1986, on his way back from an international meeting in Zambia, Machel’s Russian-made Tupolev Tu-134 aircraft crashed in the Lebombo Mountains, near Mbuzini, Mpumalanga province. There were over 30 people on board and only 9 survived. Machel and 24 others died, this includes some of his ministers and civil servants.

There are many theories to his death. I align myself with the theory that says he was killed by a combination of agents of apartheid South Africa’s intelligence, working with some puppet Afrikan leaders and foreign intelligencies.

The growing stature and influence of Machel in the region and his close ties to communist Russia, Cuba and Warriors like Thomas Sankara, was a geo-political nightmare for the British and AmeriKKKan led project of western imperialism in Afrika- so the permanent elimination of Machel was of great benefit to western imperialism.

Besides they had already assassinated many Afrikan revolutionaries, who like him were not prepared to kneel at the feet of the white man. These are Afrikan revolutionaries like Patrice Lumumba, Amilca Cabral and his own FRELIMO comrade, Eduardo Chivambo Mondlane.

It is also important to note that, 13 days before Machel’s assassination, soldiers of the apartheid South African Defence Force (SADF) were injured by land mines near the very spot where his plane later crushed. In reaction, the chief of SADF , general Magnus Malan issued a direct threat to Machel and indicated there will be consequences for this.

This year 19 October, marked the 32nd anniversary of the assassination of this great Warrior of our race. This interestingly coincides with the 41st anniversary of the banning of 17 Black Consciousness organisations in South Africa, by the illegitimate-white settler-colonial regime of BJ Vorster in October,1977 (a month after the same regime had brutally murdered the BCM's principal leader, uBab'uBantu Biko).

The decision to ban these BC organisations was carried out by the same apartheid minister of (in) justice, Jimmy Kruger who 3 years earlier, in 1974, administered the apartheid state's ban of the BCM’s VIVA FRELIMO rallies.This is how important and connected Samora Machel and the Black people of Mozambique are to the Black people of South Africa.

At a recent commemoration of Machel's assassination, a spokesperson of the government of Mozambique indicated that the investigation into Machel's murder is on-going. Whatever happens, the truth about who killed this great Warrior of our race, must be uncovered, no matter how long it takes.

It is a pity that la nja uPik Botha died before he and the other remaining generals of the bloodthirsty-anti-Black apartheid machinery could tell us who actually killed Machel.Samora Machel lived and died for all Black people, regardless of where they may be in the world.

For this reason, the Black world must ensure that his name is never forgotten. Where possible, we should name our children and grandchildren after him and others like him.

Most importantly, Machel’s life and example will assume even greater meaning if we internalise his immortal wisdom when he said “Your life continues in those who continue the revolution.” Samora Machel lives!

#BlackPowerOrDeath

#SamoraMachelLives

Camagu!

[the-final-straw-blog]

Revolutionary Arts with Signal Journal + Abolition with Mwalimu Shakur

Josh MacPhee & Alec Dunn on Signal 08

First up, Ian interviews Josh MacPhee and Alec Dunn, co-editors of Signal, about the recently published eighth volume of the Journal of International Political Graphics and Culture. They discuss their motivations and experiences producing Signal for over a decade, designing print media in the digital age, and their work as part of Justseeds Artists' Cooperative, long-running, geographically dispersed artist collective dedicated to the production of radical art for grassroots movements. [ 00:05:33 - 00:44:37]

Transcript

PDF (Unimposed)

Zine (Imposed PDF)

Mwalimu Shakur on Abolition, Organizing and Education

Then, you’ll hear most of a conversation with imprisoned New Afrikan revolutionary socialist, Mwalimu Shakur currently incarcerated in Corcoran Prison in CA, about abolition, political education and the hunger strikes of 2013 in which he participated. [00:45:14 - 01:12:37]

Transcript

Mwalimu PDF (Unimposed)

Mwalimu Zine (Imposed PDF)

Mwalimu's Instagram

Past interview with Mwalimu

Mwalimu's writing on KnockLA and SFBayView (1, 2)

Interviews about CA Hunger Strikes in 2013 with Ed Mead of CA Prison Focus (1, 2)

You can get in touch with Mwalimu:

Terrence White #AG8738 CSP Corcoran PO Box 3461 Corcoran, CA 93212

Sean Swain

Sean's segment [01:12:40 - 01:20:01]

Announcements

BRABC Letter Writing

Join Blue Ridge ABC on the first Sunday of each month, next up being August 6th from 3-5pm at the NEW Firestorm spot at 1022 Haywood Road, in West Asheville. And swing by our table at the ACABookfair August 12-13 at Different Wrld to get involved, get a poster for the upcoming International Week of Solidarity with Anarchist Prisoners and check out the other awesome stuff.

ACABookfair

If you're nearby, consider a visit to the 3 days of event around the Another Carolina Anarchist Bookfair in Asheville from August 11-13 with tons of speakers, publishers, music and more. https://acabookfair.noblogs.org

Dr. Mutulu Shakur, ¡Presenté!

New Afrikan revolutionary elder, accupuncturist and revolutionary Dr. Mutulu Shakur joined the ancestors at the age of 72. He was released by the state after 36 years in prison, organizing, healing, educating and inspiring despite having developed a virulent bone cancer. Dr. Shakur spent the last year on this planet continuing his work, speaking and attending events, surrounded by loved ones. Rest in power.

Ruchell "Cinque" Magee Will Be free!

Politicized prisoner and jailhouse lawyer, Ruchell “Cinque” Magee, is slated to be released after 67 years in the California prison system. Cinque is 84 years old, arrested on an indeterminate sentence around a marijuana charge from 1963, he joined the attempted jailbreak during the Marin County Courthouse shootout in which Jonathan Jackson attempted to free William A. Christmas and James McClain. Ruchell was the sole survivor and was a co-defendant of Angela Davis until their cases were split. There is a fundraiser to support Cinque’s post-release needs as an elder: https://fundrazr.com/82E6S2

Rashid's Treatment Resumes, Thanks To Support!

As an update to past announcements from Kevin “Rashid” Johnson of the Revolutionary Intercommunal Black Panther Party, the public pressure from calls & emails apparently had the desired results and as of a few days ago he was receiving the medical treatment he needs for his prostate cancer, though he hasn’t received all of his papers so he can continue to pursue his lawsuits against the Virginia DOC since they were confiscated by prisoncrats, but he’s super thankful for public engagement to defend his health. More updates on his case can be found at rashidmod.com

. ... . ..

Featured Tracks:

Don't Play Around (Instrumental) by DJ Nu-Mark from Broken Sunlight Series 6

Black Hole by The Bulletproof Space Travelers from Urban Revolutions - The Future Primitive Sound Collective

Check out this episode!

#anarchist #podcast #interview #feminist #antifa #anticapitalist

[ara-la]

Maroon Comix: Origins and Destinies

Maroon Comix: Origins and Destinies

Conceived, compiled and coordinated by Quincy Saul, illustrated by Songe Riddle, Mac McGill, Seth Tobocman, Hannah Allen, Emmy Kepler and Mikaela Gonzalez, with selections primarily from the writings of Russell Maroon Shoatz. ISBN: 978-1-62963-571-2; $15.95 from PM Press, PO Box 23912, Oakland CA 94623, www.pmpress.org. wwww.ecosocialisthorizons.com; [email protected]

Reviewed by Michael Novick, Anti-Racist Action LA

    This fascinating book, based primarily on the writings of political prisoner Russell Maroon Shoats (#AF-3855, SCI Dallas, 1000 Follies Rd. Drawer K, Dallas PA 18612-0286), examines the history of slavery and liberation, particularly the form of resistance known as "maroons" -- escapees from slavery, or territories liberated from slavery by rebellion, such as Haiti -- in the US, the Caribbean and South America by applying the techniques of graphic novels to sometimes dense political tracts and analysis, increasing their appeal, accessibility and imbuing them with the spirit of a new Black arts movement as well as the cultural creativity and many-sidedness of the maroons themselves.

    Sections include a short "Initiation" to the concept of the maroons, and pieces on "Slavery and Liberation", Modern Maroons, and most challenging perhaps, Shoats's manifesto "The Dragon or the Hydra?" counterposing centralized and hierarchical liberation movements or struggles, --the dragon -- too often sold out by their own leadership, with the more decentralized, horizontal and variegated "maroon" struggles -- the hydra, which grows many new heads when decapitated.

    This is of course an issue in contention not only in the Black liberation movement, and among former Black Panthers and Black Liberation Army members like Shoats or their latter-day successors, but in many movements and contexts. Consider the contrast between the recent essentially anti-electoral presidential campaign of the Zapatista-influenced Marichuy and the more more traditional, and finally successful, of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who will take office as president of Mexico in December with a strong legislative and gubernatorial cadre of MORENA partisans who ran with him.

    As the piece acknowledges, it may be faulty to identify all virtue with the autonomous communities of the Maroons. "In Jamaica, the British tried to make treaties with the maroons, to get them to stop welcoming escapees into their towns. Some maroons were even recruited to hunt down escaped slaves." While Shoats see the decentralized structure of the maroons as an asset, so that "if one [leader] was bought off, others continued the struggle," it seems clear that autonomy or decentralization in itself is not a safeguard against cooptation, nor do maroon zones or liberated areas necessarily threaten the entire edifice of empire and slavery.

    A stronger element of the same piece, however, is definition of a "mosaic" -- a Movement of Oppressed Sectors Acting In Concert. Each group (women, New Afrikan and Pan-Afrikan peoples, Puerto Ricans, anarchists, Chicanos and Mexicans, Asians, LGBTQ people, etc) "retains its integrity, has its own culture and autonomy, but we are united because we share one economy, one ecology, and one planet. we must work together for our survival and our freedom." This segues naturally into two final sections, "Modern Maroons" and an extensive bibliography of suggested additional readings of more traditional texts about maroons historically and currently and analyses of the system and of approaches to overturning and replacing it. The book has some of the appeal of "Addicted to War," but is much more variegated in artistic styles and types of content, including a series of biographies and full page portraits of a large number of exemplars of the maroon spirit the book promotes, such as Haitians Ezili Dantor, Cecile Fatiman and Dutty Boukman, Queen Mother Moore, and the Black Liberation Army. Those introduced to the material thereby will find a wealth additional reading and study, as mentioned, in Saul's bibliographic "Maroon Library," (with thanks expressed to Matt Meyer and Richard Price).

[blogbamnbyanymeansnecessary-blog]

“Tell No Lies, Claim No Easy Victories”: Response to Ultra-Left Attacks on the Lumumba Administration in Jackson, Mississippi

By Akinyele K. Umoja for the National Coordinating Committee of the New Afrikan People’s Organization 

On May 2, 2017, 34-year old activist attorney Chokwe Antar Lumumba defeated a field of eight other candidates to win the Democratic Primary election for Mayor of Jackson, Mississippi. Lumumba surprised political pundits and experts as his campaign won the primary election with 55% of the vote against a State Senator, County Supervisor, and the city’s incumbent Mayor. 

Chokwe Antar Lumumba is the son of former Mayor Chokwe Lumumba, a co-founder of our organization the New Afrikan Peoples Organization (NAPO) and its mass association and activist wing, the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM). Baba Chokwe Lumumba served as NAPO Chairman from 1984 until 2013. Chokwe Antar received 94% of the vote in the city’s June 6, 2017 general election with his primary campaign slogan, “when I become Mayor, you become mayor.” Lumumba declared his intention to make Jackson, “the most radical city on the planet.”

While the Lumumba electoral victory was hailed throughout the Black liberation movement and by social justice activists around the United States as well as internationally, it has received some “shade” from ultra-left activist, promoting what they believe is a more revolutionary agenda for people’s power in the city of Jackson. What do we mean when we say “ultra-left” politics? Ultra-left politics is an orientation that overestimates the level of consciousness and organization of the people and capacity of the revolutionary movement while often engaging in sectarian politics divorced from the people’s struggle. We will examine this tendency in the Black liberation movement and how it applies to the critics of the electoral victories in Jackson and the administration of Chokwe Antar Lumumba. We are taking this stand because the Lumumba Administration and the work of NAPO/MXGM in Jackson has been publicly attacked by Bruce Dixon, a writer for The Black Agenda Report. We have considered Dixon to be a comrade, and we previously believed The Black Agenda Report to be a friendly publication. Additionally, The Black Agenda Report’s undermining attacks have included statements from former NAPO and MXGM member Kali Akuno representing his organization Cooperation Jackson. Though he formerly worked with us, since leaving our organization, Akuno has failed to engage in comradely struggle with us or with the Lumumba administration prior to these attacks. Because of these antagonistic attacks on our political work and movement, we see it as necessary to respond publically since many of our friends and allies have asked us for clarity. Certainly, we believe that Comrades have a right to express their political differences with us, but this should be done in the spirit of comradeship and of engaging us in principled dialog and ideological struggle rather for the purpose of political “one up-man- ship”. We can only build a movement and revolutionary solidarity, through principled relationship, and trust.

What is the New Afrikan People’s Organization and What Do We Want? 

The New Afrikan People’s Organization’s ideological orientation is New Afrikan revolutionary nationalism. We want self-determination, independence, and national liberation for our people from U.S. capitalism and imperialism and desire a socialist future for our people. We are also internationalist, in solidarity with oppressed people across the globe to free ourselves from global capitalism, corporate plunder of the world’s natural resources and labor. We are aligned with radical and left political forces against neo-liberal and imperialist elites, nationally and internationally. 

We believe that at its foundation the U.S. is a white settler colonial regime and an empire based on the exploitation of our Ancestors’ labor and the appropriation of the labor, resources, and territories of indigenous nations, northern Mexico (aka Colorado, California, Texas, Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico), Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and Hawaii. The ability of people of African descent to vote and have some representation in the U.S. empire is a result of the resistance and struggle for human rights of New Afrikan and other oppressed people, and consequential efforts of the State to quell that resistance by creating the illusion of inclusion and equality. Yet, this concession by the empire has also created the possibility of establishing bases of people’s power in Black majority areas like Jackson, Mississippi.

The rise of Fascism and Donald Trump in the empire, is primarily in reaction to the 2008 election of an “African-American”, Barack Obama. White supremacist sentiment catapulted the election of Trump with his brand of “America-first” nationalism to the leadership of the U.S. imperialist state. This form of neo-fascist, reactionary nationalism presents a danger to human rights and democracy not only for New Afrikans, but for all oppressed people’s. Under these conditions, NAPO believes that a strategy of “uniting the many to defeat the few” is necessary to fight the neo-fascist mobilization during this period. The Isolationist and sectarian politics of the ultra-leftists increases the danger of facilitating the “divide and conquer” strategies of the imperialists and the fascists. 

Our History of Revolutionary Nationalist Struggle in Jackson

The New Afrikan People’s Organization founding Chair, Baba Chokwe Lumumba and his partner and soul mate, Nubia Lumumba, moved to Jackson from Detroit with their children, Rukia and Chokwe Antar, in 1988, though Baba Chokwe had first come to Mississippi in 1971 as a worker of the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Afrika (PGRNA). The PGRNA was founded in 1968 at a convening of 500 Black Nationalists in Detroit during the zenith of the Black Power movement. One hundred conference participants signed a Declaration of Independence from the United States and decided to form a new nation, the Republic of New Afrika or RNA. The RNA would be established in Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina, the states which had the highest percentages of descendants of enslaved Africans. The participants also established a provisional government until independence was achieved. Baba Chokwe Lumumba joined the PGRNA the following year and would first travel to Mississippi with the group in 1971. The PGRNA planned to organize for an independence vote in the contiguous Black majority counties running along the Mississippi River (primary in Mississippi, but including counties in Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee) which the group labeled the Kush district. The PGRNA strategy was to organize the population in the Kush district to vote for independence in a United Nations supervised plebiscite (election). The FBI, state and local government officials and other white supremacist forces organized to stop the growth and development of the PGRNA in Mississippi through political repression, including military force. On August 18, 1971, eleven PGRNA workers, including President Imari Obadele, were arrested and ultimately convicted on felony charges after defending themselves from a pre-dawn raid by the FBI and Jackson police resulting in the death of Officer William Skinner and the wounding of a federal and another city officer. This became known as the case of the RNA 11. The raid was part of the FBI’s Cointelpro program to smash the Black Power movement. Repression ultimately weakened and neutralized the PGRNA organizing efforts in Mississippi. The ordeal of the RNA 11 motivated Baba Chokwe Lumumba to finish law school and become an attorney to defend political prisoners and Black people charged unjustly. Baba Chokwe, along with other former PGRNA workers and members of other Black Power movement formations, particularly the African People’s Party, the House of Umoja, the Black Panther Party, and the Revolutionary Action Movement, re-assessed the PGRNA Strategy, the New Afrikan independence and the general Black liberation movements. We decided to found a new organization, the New Afrikan People’s Organization, that would take a different approach than the PGRNA. We accessed that while the PGRNA had support and sympathy of the masses of Black people in Mississippi, the New Afrikans were still seen as “outsiders by grassroots, working class people. We recognized that if We were to be successful in a revolutionary movement, it would be necessary for our people to be part of the liberation movement, and not simply observers and/or sympathizers with it.

So, when Baba Chokwe and Nubia Lumumba moved to Jackson in 1988, they strove to become one with the Black community of Jackson and the state of Mississippi. Baba Chokwe became engaged in local activism and brought his law practice to Jackson. As an attorney, he fought against police terror and unjust incarceration, and for workers’ and human rights. He also began to coach young men in basketball and formed an amateur athletic program, the Jackson Panthers. Nubia, a flight attendant and entrepreneur was active in local churches in the city, particularly in the choir, and in parent associations of Rukia and Chokwe Antar’s schools. Baba Chokwe led the effort to recruit Black people from Mississippi into the ranks of NAPO and MXGM. While building NAPO and MXGM, Chokwe always worked with other organizations and groups in the city and state, including Marxists, Black nationalists, Pan- Africanists, and liberals based on the principle of “uniting the many, to defeat the few.” From these broad coalitions, NAPO and MXGM in Jackson led campaigns against white supremacist mobilizations, helped to re-open the Medgar Evers’ murder case (leading to the conviction of white supremacist Byron de La Beckwith), and fought for community empowerment efforts. Due to the Lumumba’s grounding and standing in Jackson’s Black community, Baba Chokwe was approached several times by local political activists to run for political office in the city.

How Did Revolutionary Nationalists Decide to Participate in Electoral Politics?

 We debated our engagement in electoral politics from the inception of the New Afrikan People’s Organization. In Mississippi, we reached consensus that We would tactically run candidates who would advance the struggle for human rights and self-determination and who would challenge genocidal conditions of our people. We recognized that participation and representation in the empire’s political system at this stage of our struggle did not equate to a seizure of political power but it could be a vehicle and another arena to fight for our people’s interest and to mobilize and organize them. 

NAPO/ MXGM proposed a new organizing initiative in Mississippi, the Jackson/ Kush Plan (JK Plan) in 2008. While the PGRNA had targeted the overwhelmingly Black population counties along the Mississippi River which it named the Kush district for a plebiscite or vote for independence from the U.S., NAPO/ MXGM’s new proposal for building towards self- determination in Mississippi focused on building people’s assemblies for political power and Mondragon-styled, worker-managed, economic cooperatives for a solidarity economy. The people’s assemblies and solidarity economy would serve as vehicles to promote dual power through participatory and economic democracy in the Black majority Kush District. Jackson was more than 80% Black and was the primary center for building a popular assembly and the JK Plan. The JK Plan envisioned building the assemblies as popular organs of parallel power and “vehicles of Black self-determination and autonomous political authority of the oppressed peoples’ and communities in Jackson.”

Baba Chokwe’s popularity and relationships and NAPO/ MXGM’s base built on two decades of activism in Jackson would serve as a vehicle to build the people’s assembly and the concept of participatory democracy through an electoral campaign centered around his candidacy. While there was popular demand for Baba Lumumba to run for Jackson’s Mayor, NAPO/MXGM’s leadership agreed for him to run for City Council in 2009. This decision not to “The Jackson Plan: A Struggle for Self-determination, Participatory Democracy, and Economic Justice,” run for Mayor in the 2009 election was based on our lack of experience running a political campaign. The campaign for City Council would establish the basis for the building of the firstPeople’s Assembly in Ward 2 in the northwest neighborhoods of the city of Jackson where his household resided. The Jackson MXGM chapter and friends of the campaign organized an Assembly in Ward 2 that developed Lumumba’s platform under the slogan, “The People Must Decide.” The Ward 2 Assembly’s platform was titled, “The People’s Platform.”

 Baba Chokwe was opposed to running a symbolic campaign simply to demonstrate how much support We had, as some left electoral initiatives had run in the past. He asserted that if We were to mount the effort to engage in an electoral campaign, we should vigorously work to actually win the election. He believed that such a mobilization of human and material resources for only a symbolic message was wasteful, and a victory was possible in Jackson, given his reputation and standing in the Mississippi and the capacity of our organization in the city and nationally.

Independent Politics, the Democratic Party, and the People’s Assembly

One of the ultra-left critiques of our engagement with electoral politics is the entry of Baba Chokwe and current Mayor Chokwe Antar running in the Democratic primaries in municipal elections. Baba Chokwe and the Jackson NAPO and MXGM chapters decided he would run for City Council in the 2009 Democratic Primary. This tactical decision was based on the reality that the overwhelming majority of Black voters participated in the Democratic Party Primary in the election system for municipal office in Jackson and significantly less attention is given during the general election. Some left political forces attempted to pressure the campaign to run on an independent ticket by threatening to withhold financial support to the campaign. Baba Chokwe took the position that we had to rely on our people and not external forces as a primary source of support. The position to run in the Democratic Primary was based on Baba Chokwe and our Jackson NAPO and MXGM chapter assessment of our people’s political consciousness and how best to mobilize and ultimately organize them. Years before running for office, Baba Chokwe previously joined the historic Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). The MFDP was formed in 1964 to challenge exclusion of Black people from participation in the Democratic Party. Some local activists maintained the MFDP even after Black exclusion from the Mississippi Democratic Party was eliminated. When challenged by opponents in the 2009 City Council Race about his affiliation with the Democrats, Baba Chokwe replied, “I am not a member of the racist Democratic Party of the state of Mississippi, but, I am a member of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, the party of Fannie Lou Hamer.” He would often proclaim himself a, “Fannie Lou Hamer Democrat.” Baba Chokwe’s grassroots campaign won the most votes in the 2009 Democratic primary in the Ward 2 elections in a field of eight candidates with 49% of the vote., He would win the runoff with 63% of the vote on May 19 (Malcolm X’s birthday) in 2009.

He would later argue that we needed to analyze the political reality that the Democratic Party in the state of Mississippi had become a predominately African-American political organization. He said; In Mississippi, you also have to look very carefully at what can be done to seize hold of the Democratic Party here and see if it can be turned into something. In Mississippi, the Democratic Party is probably 80% Black already. It also has been very much affected by Fannie Lou Hamer’s movement (the MDFP). It’s totally independent from the reactionary politics that the Democratic Party pursues on the national level.

He also considered the possibility of moving the Mississippi Democratic Party in an independent direction stating; ….If a progressive movement wanted to take hold of the structure, and they felt that that was the best move, I think that’s an important consideration . . .So understanding the need for a strong party, do we want to seize hold of the Democratic Party and convert that into what we need or do we want to build something totally independent? If we decide to build it independently, then the People’s Assembly also exists as the ground floor for that movement. So we have some options. We need to consider those and we understand that as workers in the movement, we don’t make those decisions independently of the people.

We agree with our late Chairman that the People’s Assembly is a revolutionary vehicle for building independent politics. The People’s Assembly is not affiliated with either the Democratic or the Republican parties. Moreover, it has the potential for mass political education and moving in a more autonomous direction.

We recognize the role of the National Democratic Party and the two-party system in the historic and current oppression of our people and the maintenance of the U.S. imperial state. On the other hand, we nor any other Black liberation or left force do not currently have the organizational capacity to mobilize people to win the general election outside participation in the Democratic Primary in Jackson. 

The People’s Assembly concept was expanded city-wide in 2013, when Baba Chokwe Lumumba ran for Mayor. Again With 58% of the vote, Lumumba defeated entrepreneur Jonathan Lee on May 21, 2013 in a Democratic Party run-off and won the General Election with 87% of the vote in opposition to Republican and independent candidates weeks later. Rebounding from Tragic Loss and Reclaiming the Lumumba Legacy Our comrade, Baba Chokwe Lumumba unexpectedly joined the Ancestors on February 25, 2014, only nine months after being elected Mayor of Jackson, Mississippi. When his son, Chokwe Antar Lumumba ran in the election to complete his father’s term, he was defeated by City Council President Tony Yarber.

Yarber, running on a neo-liberal platform, was supported by a record White voter turnout while Lumumba’s campaign was crippled by a low Black voter turnout though he enjoyed overwhelming support in the Black community. 2 Our forces were divided during the campaign and did not effectively mobilize ourselves and distinguish the Chokwe Antar candidacy from that of Yarber’s. The financial plight of the city worsened under Yarber’s neoliberal administration while additionally elements in the predominately white suburbs initiated campaigns to strip the predominately Black city of its airport and other publicly controlled resources. 

NAPO/MXGM began to discuss whether Chokwe Antar should run for Mayor when Yarber’s term ended in 2017. A few, including some of our ultra-left comrades questioned why We should attempt to take political power in a city that was so financially challenged. Brother Chokwe Antar argued that not running would be abandoning the people of Jackson. He argued that by fighting to regain the Mayor’s office we could fight from a critical strategic position on the side of the people. Meanwhile Republican suburban political forces continued their plans to take over municipal resources and gentrify the city. In this context, we reasoned that the failure of the Grassroots Movement to promote a candidate would represent a serious retreat for the Kayla Diliza and Eric Ribellarsi, “Jackson’s Rise: Revolutionary Dreams in the Deep South,” Threshold Magazine, Vol I, (2016), http://thresholdmag.org/2015/01/18/jacksons-rise- reporting-on- revolutionary-dreams- in-the- deep-south/ (accessed 29 March 2016).

Jackson-Kush initiative. Chokwe Antar’s victory was significant in that it demonstrated mass support for his campaign and the People’s Platform, even though two of his opponents outspent him by two to one. The victory surprised most pundits who believed that with a field of eight candidates, none of them could win over 50% of the vote in the Democratic Primary and avoid a run-off.

How Should We Deal With Contradictions Among the People? 

African revolutionary Amilcar Cabral argued in his classic essay, “Tell No Lies, Claim No Easy Victories” that revolutionaries should: 

Always bear in mind that the people are not fighting for ideas, for the things in anyone’s head. They are fighting to win material benefits, to live better and in peace, to see their lives go forward, to guarantee the future of their children. Both the administration of Baba Chokwe Lumumba and now that of Chokwe Antar Lumumba have consistently fought for the interest of the masses of Black people and their children. 

Only weeks after the overwhelming victory, the Administration mobilized the community to challenge a Republican-inspired proposed take-over of the predominately-Black Jackson Public School system as an example of the commitment to fight for the people. Mayor Lumumba and our organizations determined to maintain this commitment to organizing the people to fight for material benefits and to live better and in peace with human rights.

Despite this however, the ultra-left forces have consistently attacked the Lumumba Administration, while at the same time promoting the work of Cooperation Jackson which originally was established as part of the work of the Jackson Kush plan, as the left alternative to the revolutionary work being done with the election of Chokwe Antar. Cooperation Jackson originally was established after the 2014 Jackson Rising conference as part of the MXGM strategic objective of building the solidarity economy of the Jackson Kush Plan. Cooperation Jackson is Directed by Kali Akuno, who terminated his membership to both NAPO and MXGM the day prior to the victory of Chokwe Antar as Mayor and consequently announced that Cooperation Jackson would no longer be affiliated with our organization. While it was intended to build worker owned and managed cooperatives and organize the Black working class in Jackson, Cooperation Jackson has not been able to develop a base of support among indigenous Black people in Jackson, particularly Black workers. This group has so far functioned merely as a non-profit to raise funds which seem to be dedicated primarily to employ a small clique of mostly transplants to Jackson. This group has failed to mobilize and organize Black workers in a city which is 80% Black and working class.

While it’s leadership has participated in the ultra-left attacks on the Lumumba Administration and the political work of NAPO/MXGM, Cooperation Jackson has relied on the legacy and used the name and image of Baba Chokwe and the Lumumba family and the history of NAPO/MXGM organizing in Jackson, to gain and maintain support locally, nationally, and internationally. 

Building a solidarity economy is an important aspect of the Jackson Kush Plan. It will require relying on and being able to speak to the people and building an economic program based upon our people’s consciousness and aspirations. Our hope is that Cooperation Jackson can fulfill its promise to build the solidarity economy and work in ways that inspire and politically organize Black grassroots people in Jackson and distances itself from ultra-left attacks on the Lumumba Administration and our organizing work. Cooperation Jackson can no longer undermine the contribution and political commitment of Baba Chokwe Lumumba, while cloaking itself in his political and organizational legacy.

We call on Bruce Dixon and Kali Akuno, if you consider us comrades, to engage us in dialog. If you have critique after engagement, then so be it. Please present that critique in public forum. As Revolutionary Nationalists, we are open to debate strategy and tactics. On the other hand, we believe sectarian politics and ultra-left dogmatic positions isolate us further from our people and make us vulnerable to repression from the state. We also believe that when liberation forces and revolutionaries refuse to engage in comradely dialog and choose to undermine and attack each other in public forums, this serves the “divide and conquer” counterinsurgency strategies that we all should be familiar with from our revolutionary history and memory of COINTELPRO. As for us, we have moved beyond the infantile revolutionary practices of the 1960’s. We can only hope that our comrades will agree and engage us in principled revolutionary struggle.

#mxgm #Chokwe Antar Lumumba

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"Yes. I'm a lesbian. It's part of what motivates me to be a revolutionary."

Lesbian Political Prisoners

"Gay people have no stake in a system that is racist and sexist and that impoverishes some sectors of this society in order to enrich others ... I don't think that we will ever be liberated under this system. We may have a few more rights, but we'll never win our liberation as human beings without some kind of real revolutionary changes."

Shortly after she began to make these realizations in the late 60s, Laura Whitehorn was a Chicago housewife. She came out as a lesbian at about the same time that the Black liberation struggle and the anti-Vietnam War movement had convinced her that nothing short of revolution would guarantee human equality. And, for over 20 years, Whitehorn was an activist in women's communities and Black and Puerto Rican movements. In 1985 she was arrested for weapons possession.

In her statement to the court, Whitehorn declared that she lived by "revolutionary and human principles." Those words, said the judge, were reason enough to hold her indefinitely in preventive detention, under the Bail Reform Act of 1984. Four and a half years later, Whitehorn, at 44, remains in prison without bail. She has yet to be tried on the charges for which she was arrested. During her years of incarceration, she has been placed in 11 different jails and prisons, allegedly for security reasons. After she was moved to the Federal Correctional Institute in Pleasanton, California, Whitehorn was reunited with her friend, Linda Evans.

Evans, the daughter of an industrial contractor and a schoolteacher, had lived all her life in the Midwest, and had come to Chicago in the late 60s to enter college. She met Laura Whitehorn in the SDS, and has been a lesbian activist ever since. Twenty years later, she smiles and declares: "Yes. I'm a lesbian. I'm proud of it. ... It's part of what motivates me to be a revolutionary."

Linda Evans has spent her life as a community organizer. She organized so well against racism in lesbian, Chicano and Black communities, in fact, that the Ku Klux Klan put her on its death list. Evans bought four handguns to protect herself. She was arrested in 1985 for weapons possession, and sentenced by the state of Louisiana to 40 years in prison for making false statements to purchase these guns. At the age of 42, Linda Evans is serving a reduced sentence of 35 years. "The thing that's interesting about the Louisiana case," she says, "is that it's the same jurisdiction where the Ku Klux Klan tried to mount an invasion of Dominica, a Black island in the Caribbean in 1981. Don Black had ten other men with him; he had almost a million dollars in cash; they had a boat full of illegal weapons, machine guns and stuff. ... And he received a total sentence of three years and was out in 24 months."

Laura Whitehorn and Linda Evans are two of an estimated 200 progressive and leftist political prisoners in the United States. Held indefinitely without bail, convicted on exaggerated, if not false, charges, sentenced to many more years in prison than right-wing defendants, these prisoners are invisible to the general public. Their numbers include a range of activists, from New Afrikan and Puerto Rican nationalists who identify as "prisoners of war" and support armed struggle, to sanctuary workers and anti-nuclear protestors, who have received as many as 18 years in prison for their nonviolent opposition to government policies. The gay and lesbian movement, increasingly radicalized by government indifference to the AIDS crisis, is becoming more aware of these prisoners. In doing so, lesbians and gay men have begun to ask: What makes these people so threatening to our government? What does it mean to us and our movement that these prisoners exist?

Whitehorn and Evans are now in the Detention Facility in Washington, D.C They await trial there with four other political prisoners — Susan Rosenberg, Marilyn Buck, Alan Berkman and Tim Blunk — for the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Capitol Building and three other government sites in the D.C. area. The bombings, protesting the invasion of Grenada and other acts of U.S. foreign aggression, damaged property but injured no one. The defendants — who face up to 45 years in prison, if convicted — express support for the bombings, but maintain that they did not carry them out. The government, moreover, admits that it does not know who committed the bombings and that it has neither evidence or witnesses to prove that any of the accused were directly involved.

Yet the Resistance Conspiracy trial, as the defendants call it, promises to be one of the most politically vindictive events in decades. Although the trial will probably not take place until early 1990, the government has already installed a bulletproof plexiglass wall to separate defendants from the rest of the courtroom. Special video monitors have also been positioned to observe spectators and the defense table, but not the prosecution. These courtroom security measures — which legal experts say will intimidate spectators and make an impartial jury trial impossible — are virtually unprecedented in U.S. judicial history. They were noticeably absent when Oliver North was tried last spring, in the same courthouse.

North, who admitted having helped engineer the illegal drug and weapons sales that killed thousands of Central Americans, was never held in any form of preventive detention, and was not sentenced to any term in prison. "So the whole case is political," concludes Nkechi Taifa, attorney for Laura Whitehorn, adding "The whole pre-trial detention is political. And the government should not be allowed to use the criminal justice system to suppress political opposition."

The indictment, if successful against these defendants, may help set precedents in suppressing political activism. Because the government has no direct evidence to convict the six, it has charged them with aiding and abetting, and with conspiracy to "influence, change and protest policies and practices of the U.S. government...through the use of violent and illegal means." These are ingeniously broad charges, which could, in the future, be brought against an increasing number of protestors, whose dissent is labelled "violent" or "illegal" by the government. And though it may not be used immediately against actions like sit-ins and blockades, it could well discourage them from happening. "They want to make sure that they can determine the boundaries of our activity at every point," says Linda Evans.

Conspiracy and aiding and abetting charges are traditionally easy to prove. Once a jury is convinced that defendants hold the same political sympathies, convictions can be obtained through mere circumstantial evidence. The prosecution in this case will use the defendants' own political writings and personal letters — exempt here from First Amendment protection — to establish that the six have all known each other and oppose government policies. A jury might, therefore, have no trouble finding a "conspiracy," given such evidence as Evans' and Whitehorn's lifelong friendship and the fact that both were underground at the time of their arrests. "Linda and I have known each other longer than anyone else in this case," Laura Whitehorn says. "I'm proud of that. And so, some of our proudest history is what they're going to bring against us."

Going underground, leaving friends and lovers perhaps forever, was a difficult decision for Whitehorn and Evans. But as their activism grew, including Whitehorn's support work for the Black Panther Party, so did FBI surveillance. When Panther leader Fred Hampton was murdered, Whitehorn thought very hard about what Malcolm X had said before he was killed. "I'll never forget the picture of the Chicago police carrying [Hampton's] body out on a stretcher and grinning. ... And it was proven that not a single shot had been fired from inside the apartment. It was a complete assassination of this man. ... We all pretend that it doesn't happen here. But they do things that actually torture and kill people. And I just feel like it's the height of self-deception to think that we can draw lines about what we will and will not do to stop that kind of thing."

Their years of support not only for the rights of lesbians and gays, but also for Black and Puerto Rican nationalist groups, made them phenomenally threatening to the government. Eventually, Whitehorn and Evans decided, they could be freer to do their political work if they dropped out of the public movement. Observes Linda Evans, "If we really want to change the power structure, I think there's going to have to be a revolutionary movement in this country. But, in order to build it, we have to build the capability that's not completely infiltrated and controlled by the government, the FBI. ... That applies not only to the AIDS movement, but to all the solidarity movements. ... It's just not enough to believe that we're going to be able to win change through the legislatures."

Although they have lived in different parts of the country, Evans and Whitehorn always remained close, always supported one another in a variety of political work. So, while Linda Evans was living in a women's commune in Arkansas, fighting developers who were clearing the land with Agent Orange, Laura Whitehorn was in Boston, taking over the Harvard Building with a group of anti-imperialist women — an action that led to the founding of the Boston/Cambridge Women's School. And while Whitehorn was helping to defend Black homes during the anti-busing violence in Boston in the mid-70s, Evans was teaching women to print in a press collective in Texas. While Evans was struggling against the Texas Neo-Nazis and the Klan, Whitehorn was organizing the Madame Binh Graphics Collective in New York City.

"We come out of a sector of the anti-imperialist movement that was dominated by women and lesbians," says Laura Whitehorn, "and I think the government is very well aware of that. And that's why one of the things that we've seen in the last few years was he development of the Lexington High Security Unit, to deal with women political prisoners."

The Lexington High Security Unit was opened in 1986 and within months became infamous for its isolation and sensory deprivation measures used to subdue women whom the Bureau of Prisons deemed "assaultive" or "escape prone." Yet the women assigned to the Unit — political prisoners Susan Rosenberg, Silvia Baraldini and Puerto Rican "prisoner of war" Alejandrina Torres — had never been convicted of injuring or assaulting another person. Nor had any of them presented behavioral problems while in prison. Finally, in 1988, after an international campaign that included the efforts of Puerto Rican groups, women's communities, church organizations and Amnesty International, the Lexington HSU was closed by court decree as a violation of the prisoners' First Amendment right to political freedom.

The closing of Lexington is known to many activists. What is not yet known is the fact that the government appealed the closing, and on September 8, 1989, won its appeal. Implications for every political prisoner in this country are devastating. "Now," says Linda Evans, "the Bureau of Prisons has absolute license to put us in any conditions it wants to, based solely on our past political affiliations and beliefs."

Although the government may not reopen the Lexington HSU, it has begun to create conditions in the Shawnee Unit for women in Marianna, Florida, that duplicate if not intensify, those of Lexington. Already, continues Evans, "They have installed television sets in the cells, which means they can lock us down and say that we're having social interaction via television, instead of via human beings."

"Lock down" is a form of solitary confinement familiar to political prisoners. People in lock down are caged in tiny, often parasite-infested cells for 23 hours each day. They are allowed out, in handcuffs and leg shackles, for one hour to shower and make phone calls. If Evans, Whitehorn, Susan Rosenberg and Marilyn Buck are convicted of the D.C. bombings, say defense attorneys, they will undoubtedly be sent to Marianna. Their codefendants Alan Berkman and Tim Blunk will be sent to the Marion Prison for men in Illinois, which is under permanent lock down.

Tough new "anti-crime" campaigns are making an open secret of the fact that U.S. prisons are used to dispose of unwanted sectors of society. In April 1989, the Justice Department reported that there was a total of 627,402 men and women in U.S. prisons. This is the largest prison population of any country in the world and, in less than five years, it is expected to rise to well over one million. Most U.S. prisoners are people of color, who, outside prison, represent "minority" populations. The rate of Black imprisonment alone is twice that of South Africa. "What I see in this jail," says Laura Whitehorn, "and in every jail I've been in, is genocide against Black people, and I think it's worse than it ever was."

Given our society's dependence on prisons, it is in the interest of the social "order" to strip prisoners of any form of self-respect. Women are continually under threat of sexual attack by male guards, and frequently raped with speculums or hands by prison officials in search of "contraband." Male prisoners are often beaten when they refuse to obey an order. Prisoners of both sexes are routinely subjected to humiliating — and unnecessary — strip searches. "Sexuality is not possible in prison," says Laura Whitehorn. "Sex is, but sexuality as a creative form of human expression — forget it. Certainly not under these conditions."

Yet in filthy, overcrowded U.S. prisons, lesbian and gay prisoners still attempt to love each other. They must literally risk their lives to have sexual relationships, since prisons have categorically refused to give out condoms or materials on safer sex. "They can bust you at any point," says Linda Evans. "Because sex is illegal in prison. And so you can be punished for having loving relationships, even though that clearly is one of the most rehabilitative things that can happen to someone."

Obviously, the primary purpose of U.S. prisons is not rehabilitation. While heterosexual prisoners in the general population may at times receive conjugal visits from their spouses, gay prisoners cannot even afford to acknowledge that they have lovers on the outside. Recently, report Whitehorn and Evans, a male prisoner's lover of three and a half years was stricken from the visiting list after authorities discovered that the prisoner was gay. Suspected of being gay or of IV drug use, prisoners in some states are tested against their will for HIV, the virus associated with AIDS, although treatment is rarely available. Once discovered to carry it, they are subjected to enormous abuse and contempt.

Whitehorn and Evans knew that they were taking a great risk in coming out as lesbians in prison. They realized they would open themselves up to the same kind of danger and humiliation that gay people face daily on the street; only in prison, the danger would be constant and inescapable. But coming out, they decided, was something they could do to continue to resist. And being open about their sexuality at times connects them solidly with the women around them. "I'm not saying this is Sisterhood City," remarks Laura Whitehorn, "but I find that there's something about talking to women about why I'm a lesbian, which has a lot to do with my own feelings of love for women and affirming that love, that come back positively."

Their defense attorneys see the "conspiracy" as the government's, not their clients'. If everything goes according to government plans, they say, Laura Whitehorn, Linda Evans and their codefendants will die in prison. They will be known, if they are known at all by the general public, as "terrorists," with a bizarre taste for violence. And those on the outside will judiciously avoid any semblance of extremes in their political speech or activity.

But all this may not prove to be so easy for the government. Already, activists have begun to learn about the case and respond. And 80 percent of this response, say Evans and Whitehorn, comes from lesbians and gay men. An open letter asking the government to drop the charges against the Resistance Conspiracy six has appeared in several gay and progressive publications; so far, 12 ACT UP chapters across the country have signed it, as well as hundreds of individual lesbians and gays. People in the community have also begun writing to these prisoners. Linda Evans speculates on the reason for this involvement:

"I think some of that is because the gay and lesbian movement is extremely under attack, because of the problems that our community has with AIDS and because of the rise in violence. ... and of the increasing sexism in our society in general. And I think that that means lesbians and gay people have recognized that, being under attack, we have to fight back."

— Susie Day, OutWeek Magazine No. 20, November 5, 1989, p. 16.

#outweek #issue 20 #lgbt history #hiv aids #act up #politics #protest #prison #political prisoners #incarceration #lesbian #laura whitehorn #linda evans #racism #resistance conspirancy #news #susie day #fighting invisibility #photo #jeb #joan e. biren

[blackkudos]

Nelson Mandela

Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela (/mænˈdɛlə/; 18 July 1918 – 5 December 2013) was a South African anti-apartheid revolutionary, politician, and philanthropist, who served as President of South Africa from 1994 to 1999. He was the country's first black head of state and the first elected in a fully representative democratic election. His government focused on dismantling the legacy of apartheid by tackling institutionalised racism and fostering racial reconciliation. Ideologically an African nationalist and socialist, he served as President of the African National Congress (ANC) party from 1991 to 1997.

A Xhosa, Mandela was born in Mvezo to the Thembu royal family. He studied law at the University of Fort Hare and the University of the Witwatersrand before working as a lawyer in Johannesburg. There he became involved in anti-colonial and African nationalist politics, joining the ANC and co-founding its Youth League. After the Afrikaner minority government of the National Party established apartheid—a system of racial segregation that privileged whites—he and the ANC committed themselves to its overthrow. Mandela was appointed President of the ANC's Transvaal branch, rising to prominence for his involvement in the 1952 anti-apartheid Defiance Campaign and the 1955 Congress of the People. He was repeatedly arrested for seditious activities and was unsuccessfully prosecuted in the 1956 Treason Trial. Influenced by Marxism, he secretly joined the South African Communist Party (SACP). Although initially committed to non-violent protest, in association with the SACP he co-founded the militant Umkhonto we Sizwe in 1961 and led a sabotage campaign against the government. In 1962, he was arrested for conspiring to overthrow the state and sentenced to life imprisonment in the Rivonia Trial.

Mandela served 27 years in prison, initially on Robben Island, and later in Pollsmoor Prison and Victor Verster Prison. Amid international pressure and growing fear of a racial civil war, President F. W. de Klerk released him in 1990. Mandela and de Klerk negotiated an end to apartheid and organised the 1994 multiracial general election in which Mandela led the ANC to victory and became President. Leading a broad coalition government which promulgated a new constitution, Mandela emphasised reconciliation between the country's racial groups and created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate past human rights abuses. Economically, Mandela's administration retained its predecessor's liberal framework despite his own socialist beliefs, also introducing measures to encourage land reform, combat poverty, and expand healthcare services. Internationally, he acted as mediator in the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing trial and served as Secretary-General of the Non-Aligned Movement from 1998 to 1999. He declined a second presidential term and in 1999 was succeeded by his deputy, Thabo Mbeki. Mandela became an elder statesman and focused on charitable work, combating poverty and HIV/AIDS through the Nelson Mandela Foundation.

Mandela was a controversial figure for much of his life. Although critics on the right denounced him as a communist terrorist and those on the radical left deemed him too eager to negotiate and reconcile with apartheid's supporters, he gained international acclaim for his activism. Widely regarded as an icon of democracy and social justice, he received more than 250 honours—including the Nobel Peace Prize—and became the subject of a cult of personality. He is held in deep respect within South Africa, where he is often referred to by his Xhosa clan name, Madiba, and described as the "Father of the Nation".

Early life

Childhood: 1918–34

Mandela was born on 18 July 1918 in the village of Mvezo in Umtata, then part of South Africa's Cape Province. Given the forename Rolihlahla, a Xhosa term colloquially meaning "troublemaker", in later years he became known by his clan name, Madiba. His patrilineal great-grandfather, Ngubengcuka, was king of the Thembu people in the Transkeian Territories of South Africa's modern Eastern Cape province. One of Ngubengcuka's sons, named Mandela, was Nelson's grandfather and the source of his surname. Because Mandela was the king's child by a wife of the Ixhiba clan, a so-called "Left-Hand House", the descendants of his cadet branch of the royal family were morganatic, ineligible to inherit the throne but recognised as hereditary royal councillors.

His father, Gadla Henry Mphakanyiswa, was a local chief and councillor to the monarch; he was appointed to the position in 1915, after his predecessor was accused of corruption by a governing white magistrate. In 1926, Gadla was also sacked for corruption, but Nelson was told that his father had lost his job for standing up to the magistrate's unreasonable demands. A devotee of the god Qamata, Gadla was a polygamist with four wives, four sons and nine daughters, who lived in different villages. Nelson's mother was Gadla's third wife, Nosekeni Fanny, daughter of Nkedama of the Right Hand House and a member of the amaMpemvu clan of Xhosa.

Mandela later stated that his early life was dominated by traditional Thembu custom and taboo. He grew up with two sisters in his mother's kraal in the village of Qunu, where he tended herds as a cattle-boy and spent much time outside with other boys. Both his parents were illiterate, but being a devout Christian, his mother sent him to a local Methodist school when he was about seven. Baptised a Methodist, Mandela was given the English forename of "Nelson" by his teacher. When Mandela was about nine, his father came to stay at Qunu, where he died of an undiagnosed ailment which Mandela believed to be lung disease. Feeling "cut adrift", he later said that he inherited his father's "proud rebelliousness" and "stubborn sense of fairness".

Mandela's mother took him to the "Great Place" palace at Mqhekezweni, where he was entrusted to the guardianship of the Thembu regent, Chief Jongintaba Dalindyebo. Although he did not see his mother again for many years, Mandela felt that Jongintaba and his wife Noengland treated him as their own child, raising him alongside their son, Justice, and daughter, Nomafu. As Mandela attended church services every Sunday with his guardians, Christianity became a significant part of his life. He attended a Methodist mission school located next to the palace, where he studied English, Xhosa, history and geography. He developed a love of African history, listening to the tales told by elderly visitors to the palace, and was influenced by the anti-imperialist rhetoric of a visiting chief, Joyi. At the time he nevertheless considered the European colonialists not as oppressors but as benefactors who had brought education and other benefits to southern Africa. Aged 16, he, Justice and several other boys travelled to Tyhalarha to undergo the circumcision ritual that symbolically marked their transition from boys to men; afterwards he was given the name Dalibunga.

Clarkebury, Healdtown, and Fort Hare: 1934–40

Intending to gain skills needed to become a privy councillor for the Thembu royal house, in 1933 Mandela began his secondary education at Clarkebury Methodist High School, Engcobo, a Western-style institution that was the largest school for black Africans in Thembuland. Made to socialise with other students on an equal basis, he claimed that he lost his "stuck up" attitude, becoming best friends with a girl for the first time; he began playing sports and developed his lifelong love of gardening. He completed his Junior Certificate in two years, and in 1937 moved to Healdtown, the Methodist college in Fort Beaufort attended by most Thembu royalty, including Justice. The headmaster emphasised the superiority of English culture and government, but Mandela became increasingly interested in native African culture, making his first non-Xhosa friend, a speaker of Sotho, and coming under the influence of one of his favourite teachers, a Xhosa who broke taboo by marrying a Sotho. Mandela spent much of his spare time at Healdtown as a long-distance runner and boxer, and in his second year he became a prefect.

With Jongintaba's backing, in 1939 Mandela began work on a Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree at the University of Fort Hare, an elite black institution in Alice, Eastern Cape, with around 150 students. There he studied English, anthropology, politics, native administration, and Roman Dutch law in his first year, desiring to become an interpreter or clerk in the Native Affairs Department. Mandela stayed in the Wesley House dormitory, befriending his own kinsman, K. D. Matanzima, as well as Oliver Tambo, who became a close friend and comrade for decades to come. Continuing his interest in sport, Mandela took up ballroom dancing, performed in a drama society play about Abraham Lincoln, and gave Bible classes in the local community as part of the Student Christian Association. Although he had friends connected to the African National Congress (ANC) and the anti-imperialist movement who wanted South Africa to be independent of the British Empire, Mandela avoided any involvement with the movement, and became a vocal supporter of the British war effort when the Second World War broke out. He helped to found a first-year students' house committee which challenged the dominance of the second-years, and at the end of his first year became involved in a Students' Representative Council (SRC) boycott against the quality of food, for which he was temporarily suspended from the university; he left without receiving a degree.

Arriving in Johannesburg: 1941–43

Returning to Mqhekezweni in December 1940, Mandela found that Jongintaba had arranged marriages for him and Justice; dismayed, they fled to Johannesburg via Queenstown, arriving in April 1941. Mandela found work as a night watchman at Crown Mines, his "first sight of South African capitalism in action", but was fired when the induna (headman) discovered that he was a runaway. He stayed with a cousin in George Goch Township, who introduced Mandela to realtor and ANC activist Walter Sisulu. Sisulu secured him a job as an articled clerk at the law firm of Witkin, Sidelsky and Eidelman, a company run by a liberal Jew, Lazar Sidelsky, who was sympathetic to the ANC's cause. At the firm, Mandela befriended Gaur Radebe, a Xhosa member of the ANC and Communist Party, as well as Nat Bregman, a Jewish communist who became his first white friend. Mandela attended communist talks and parties, where he was impressed that Europeans, Africans, Indians, and Coloureds were mixing as equals. He later stated that he did not join the Party because its atheism conflicted with his Christian faith, and because he saw the South African struggle as being racially based rather than as class warfare. To continue his higher education, Mandela signed up to a University of South Africa correspondence course, working on his bachelor's degree at night.

Earning a small wage, Mandela rented a room in the house of the Xhoma family in the Alexandra township; despite being rife with poverty, crime and pollution, Alexandra always remained a special place for him. Although embarrassed by his poverty, he briefly courted a Swazi woman before unsuccessfully courting his landlord's daughter. To save money and be closer to downtown Johannesburg, Mandela moved into the compound of the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association, living among miners of various tribes; as the compound was visited by various chiefs, he once met the Queen Regent of Basutoland. In late 1941, Jongintaba visited, forgiving Mandela for running away. On his return to Thembuland, the regent died in winter 1942; Mandela and Justice arrived a day late for the funeral. After he passed his BA exams in early 1943, Mandela returned to Johannesburg to follow a political path as a lawyer rather than become a privy councillor in Thembuland. He later stated that he experienced no epiphany, but that he "simply found [himself] doing so, and could not do otherwise."

Revolutionary activity

Law studies and the ANC Youth League: 1943–49

Mandela began studying law at the University of the Witwatersrand, where he was the only black African student. Although facing racism from some, he befriended liberal and communist European, Jewish, and Indian students, among them Joe Slovo and Ruth First. Becoming increasingly politicised, in August 1943 Mandela marched in support of a successful bus boycott to reverse fare rises. Joining the ANC, he was increasingly influenced by Sisulu, spending much time with other activists at Sisulu's Orlando house, including old friend Oliver Tambo. In 1943, Mandela met Anton Lembede, an ANC member affiliated with the Africanist branch of African nationalism, which was virulently opposed to a racially united front against colonialism and imperialism or to an alliance with the communists. Despite his friendships with non-blacks and communists, Mandela embraced Lembede's views, believing that black Africans should be entirely independent in their struggle for political self-determination. Deciding on the need for a youth wing to mass-mobilise Africans in opposition to their subjugation, Mandela was among a delegation that approached ANC President Alfred Bitini Xuma on the subject at his home in Sophiatown; the African National Congress Youth League (ANCYL) was founded on Easter Sunday 1944 in the Bantu Men's Social Centre, with Lembede as President and Mandela as a member of its executive committee.

At Sisulu's house, Mandela met Evelyn Mase, a trainee nurse and ANC activist from Engcobo, Transkei. Entering a relationship and marrying in October 1944, they initially lived with her relatives until moving into a rented house in the township of Orlando in early 1946. Their first child, Madiba "Thembi" Thembekile, was born in February 1945; a daughter, Makaziwe, was born in 1947 but died of meningitis nine months later. Mandela enjoyed home life, welcoming his mother and his sister, Leabie, to stay with him. In early 1947, his three years of articles ended at Witkin, Sidelsky and Eidelman, and he decided to become a full-time student, subsisting on loans from the Bantu Welfare Trust.

In July 1947, Mandela rushed Lembede, who was ill, to hospital, where he died; he was succeeded as ANCYL president by the more moderate Peter Mda, who agreed to co-operate with communists and non-blacks, appointing Mandela ANCYL secretary. Mandela disagreed with Mda's approach, and in December 1947 supported an unsuccessful measure to expel communists from the ANCYL, considering their ideology un-African. In 1947, Mandela was elected to the executive committee of the ANC's Transvaal Province branch, serving under regional president C. S. Ramohanoe. When Ramohanoe acted against the wishes of the committee by co-operating with Indians and communists, Mandela was one of those who forced his resignation.

In the South African general election, 1948, in which only whites were permitted to vote, the Afrikaner-dominated Herenigde Nasionale Party under Daniel François Malan took power, soon uniting with the Afrikaner Party to form the National Party. Openly racialist, the party codified and expanded racial segregation with new apartheid legislation. Gaining increasing influence in the ANC, Mandela and his cadres began advocating direct action against apartheid, such as boycotts and strikes, influenced by the tactics already employed by South Africa's Indian community. Xuma did not support these measures and was removed from the presidency in a vote of no confidence, replaced by James Moroka and a more militant executive committee containing Sisulu, Mda, Tambo, and Godfrey Pitje. Mandela later related that he and his colleagues had "guided the ANC to a more radical and revolutionary path." Having devoted his time to politics, Mandela failed his final year at Witwatersrand three times; he was ultimately denied his degree in December 1949.

Defiance Campaign and Transvaal ANC Presidency: 1950–54

Mandela took Xuma's place on the ANC national executive in March 1950, and that same year was elected national president of the ANCYL. In March, the Defend Free Speech Convention was held in Johannesburg, bringing together African, Indian, and communist activists to call a May Day general strike in protest against apartheid and white minority rule. Mandela opposed the strike because it was multi-racial and not ANC-led, but a majority of black workers took part, resulting in increased police repression and the introduction of the Suppression of Communism Act, 1950, affecting the actions of all protest groups. At the ANC national conference of December 1951, he continued arguing against a racially united front, but was outvoted.

Thenceforth, Mandela rejected Lembede's Africanist beliefs and embraced the idea of a multi-racial front against apartheid. Influenced by friends like Moses Kotane and by the Soviet Union's support for wars of independence, his mistrust of communism broke down and he began reading literature by Marxists like Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and Mao Zedong, eventually embracing the Marxist philosophy of dialectical materialism. Commenting on communism, he later stated that he "found [himself] strongly drawn to the idea of a classless society which, to [his] mind, was similar to traditional African culture where life was shared and communal." In April 1952, Mandela began work at the H.M. Basner law firm, which was owned by a communist, although his increasing commitment to work and activism meant he spent less time with his family.

In 1952, the ANC began preparation for a joint Defiance Campaign against apartheid with Indian and communist groups, founding a National Voluntary Board to recruit volunteers. The campaign was designed to follow the path of nonviolent resistance influenced by Mahatma Gandhi; some supported this for ethical reasons, but Mandela instead considered it pragmatic. At a Durban rally on 22 June, Mandela addressed an assembled crowd of 10,000, initiating the campaign protests, for which he was arrested and briefly interned in Marshall Square prison. These events established Mandela as one of the best-known black political figures in South Africa. With further protests, the ANC's membership grew from 20,000 to 100,000; the government responded with mass arrests and introduced the Public Safety Act, 1953 to permit martial law. In May, authorities banned Transvaal ANC President J. B. Marks from making public appearances; unable to maintain his position, he recommended Mandela as his successor. Although Africanists opposed his candidacy, Mandela was elected regional president in October.

In July 1952, Mandela was arrested under the Suppression of Communism Act and stood trial as one of the 21 accused—among them Moroka, Sisulu, and Yusuf Dadoo—in Johannesburg. Found guilty of "statutory communism", a term that the government used to describe most opposition to apartheid, their sentence of nine months' hard labour was suspended for two years. In December, Mandela was given a six-month ban from attending meetings or talking to more than one individual at a time, making his Transvaal ANC presidency impractical, and during this period the Defiance Campaign petered out. In September 1953, Andrew Kunene read out Mandela's "No Easy Walk to Freedom" speech at a Transvaal ANC meeting; the title was taken from a quote by Indian independence leader Jawaharlal Nehru, a seminal influence on Mandela's thought. The speech laid out a contingency plan for a scenario in which the ANC was banned. This Mandela Plan, or M-Plan, involved dividing the organisation into a cell structure with a more centralised leadership.

Mandela obtained work as an attorney for the firm Terblanche and Briggish, before moving to the liberal-run Helman and Michel, passing qualification exams to become a full-fledged attorney. In August 1953, Mandela and Tambo opened their own law firm, Mandela and Tambo, operating in downtown Johannesburg. The only African-run law firm in the country, it was popular with aggrieved blacks, often dealing with cases of police brutality. Disliked by the authorities, the firm was forced to relocate to a remote location after their office permit was removed under the Group Areas Act; as a result, their clientele dwindled. As a lawyer of aristocratic heritage, Mandela was part of Johannesburg's elite black middle-class, and was accorded much respect as a result from the black community. Although a second daughter, Makaziwe Phumia, was born in May 1954, Mandela's relationship with Evelyn became strained, and she accused him of adultery. Claims have emerged that he was having affairs with ANC member Lillian Ngoyi and secretary Ruth Mompati; various individuals close to Mandela in this period have stated that the latter bore him a child. Disgusted by her son's behaviour, Nosekeni returned to Transkei, while Evelyn embraced the Jehovah's Witnesses and rejected Mandela's preoccupation with politics.

Congress of the People and the Treason Trial: 1955–61

After taking part in the unsuccessful protest to prevent the forced relocation of all black people from the Sophiatown suburb of Johannesburg in February 1955, Mandela concluded that violent action would prove necessary to end apartheid and white minority rule. He advised Sisulu to request weaponry from the People's Republic of China, which was denied; though the Chinese government supported the anti-apartheid struggle, they believed the movement insufficiently prepared for guerilla warfare. With the involvement of the South African Indian Congress, the Coloured People's Congress, the South African Congress of Trade Unions and the Congress of Democrats, the ANC planned a Congress of the People, calling on all South Africans to send in proposals for a post-apartheid era. Based on the responses, a Freedom Charter was drafted by Rusty Bernstein, calling for the creation of a democratic, non-racialist state with the nationalisation of major industry. When the charter was adopted at a June 1955 conference in Kliptown, attended by 3,000 delegates, police cracked down on the event, but it remained a key part of Mandela's ideology.

Following the end of a second ban in September 1955, Mandela went on a working holiday to Transkei to discuss the implications of the Bantu Authorities Act, 1951 with local tribal leaders, also visiting his mother and Noengland before proceeding to Cape Town. In March 1956 he received his third ban on public appearances, restricting him to Johannesburg for five years, but he often defied it. Mandela's marriage broke down and Evelyn left him, taking their children to live with her brother. Initiating divorce proceedings in May 1956, she claimed that Mandela had physically abused her; he denied the allegations, and fought for custody of their children. She withdrew her petition of separation in November, but Mandela filed for divorce in January 1958; the divorce was finalised in March, with the children placed in Evelyn's care. During the divorce proceedings, he began courting and politicising a social worker, Winnie Madikizela, whom he married in Bizana in June 1958. She later became involved in ANC activities, spending several weeks in prison. Together they had two children: Zenani, born in February 1959, and Zindziswa, born in December 1960.

In December 1956, Mandela was arrested alongside most of the ANC national executive, accused of "high treason" against the state. Held in Johannesburg Prison amid mass protests, they underwent a preparatory examination before being granted bail. The defence's refutation began in January 1957, overseen by defence lawyer Vernon Berrangé, and continued until adjourning in September. In January 1958, Oswald Pirow was appointed to prosecute the case, and in February the judge ruled that there was "sufficient reason" for the defendants to go on trial in the Transvaal Supreme Court. The formal Treason Trial began in Pretoria in August 1958, with the defendants successfully applying to have the three judges—all linked to the governing National Party—replaced. In August, one charge was dropped, and in October the prosecution withdrew its indictment, submitting a reformulated version in November which argued that the ANC leadership committed high treason by advocating violent revolution, a charge the defendants denied.

In April 1959, Africanists dissatisfied with the ANC's united front approach founded the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC); Mandela disagreed with the group's racially exclusionary views, describing them as "immature" and "naïve". Both parties took part in an anti-pass campaign in early 1960, in which Africans burned the passes that they were legally obliged to carry. One of the PAC-organised demonstrations was fired upon by police, resulting in the deaths of 69 protesters in the Sharpeville massacre. The incident brought international condemnation of the government and resulted in rioting throughout South Africa, with Mandela publicly burning his pass in solidarity.

Responding to the unrest, the government implemented state of emergency measures, declaring martial law and banning the ANC and PAC; in March, they arrested Mandela and other activists, imprisoning them for five months without charge in the unsanitary conditions of the Pretoria Local prison. Imprisonment caused problems for Mandela and his co-defendants in the Treason Trial; their lawyers could not reach them, and so it was decided that the lawyers would withdraw in protest until the accused were freed from prison when the state of emergency was lifted in late August 1960. Over the following months, Mandela used his free time to organise an All-In African Conference near Pietermaritzburg, Natal, in March 1961, at which 1,400 anti-apartheid delegates met, agreeing on a stay-at-home strike to mark 31 May, the day South Africa became a republic. On 29 March 1961, six years after the Treason Trial began, the judges produced a verdict of not guilty, claiming that there was insufficient evidence to convict the accused of "high treason", since they had advocated neither communism nor violent revolution; the outcome embarrassed the government.

MK, the SACP, and African tour: 1961–62

Disguised as a chauffeur, Mandela travelled the country incognito, organising the ANC's new cell structure and the planned mass stay-at-home strike. Referred to as the "Black Pimpernel" in the press—a reference to Emma Orczy's 1905 novel The Scarlet Pimpernel—a warrant for his arrest was put out by the police. Mandela held secret meetings with reporters, and after the government failed to prevent the strike, he warned them that many anti-apartheid activists would soon resort to violence through groups like the PAC's Poqo. He believed that the ANC should form an armed group to channel some of this violence in a controlled direction, convincing both ANC leader Albert Luthuli—who was morally opposed to violence—and allied activist groups of its necessity.

Inspired by the actions of Fidel Castro's 26th of July Movement in the Cuban Revolution, in 1961 Mandela, Sisulu, and Slovo co-founded Umkhonto we Sizwe ("Spear of the Nation", abbreviated MK). Becoming chairman of the militant group, Mandela gained ideas from Marxist literature on guerilla warfare by Mao and Che Guevara as well as from the military theorist Carl von Clausewitz. Although initially declared officially separate from the ANC so as not to taint the latter's reputation, it later became widely recognised that MK was the party's armed wing. Most early MK members were white communists who were able to conceal Mandela in their homes; after hiding in communist Wolfie Kodesh's flat in Berea, Mandela moved to the communist-owned Liliesleaf Farm in Rivonia, there joined by Raymond Mhlaba, Slovo, and Bernstein, who put together the MK constitution. Although in later life Mandela denied, for political reasons, ever being a member of the Communist Party, historical research published in 2011 strongly suggested that he had joined in the late 1950s or early 1960s. This was confirmed by both the SACP and the ANC after Mandela's death. According to the SACP, he was not only a member of the party, but also served on its Central Committee.

Operating through a cell structure, MK planned to carry out acts of sabotage that would exert maximum pressure on the government with minimum casualties; they sought to bomb military installations, power plants, telephone lines, and transport links at night, when civilians were not present. Mandela stated that they chose sabotage because it was the least harmful action, did not involve killing, and offered the best hope for racial reconciliation afterwards; he nevertheless acknowledged that should this have failed then guerrilla warfare might have been necessary. Soon after ANC leader Luthuli was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, MK publicly announced its existence with 57 bombings on Dingane's Day (16 December) 1961, followed by further attacks on New Year's Eve.

The ANC decided to send Mandela as a delegate to the February 1962 meeting of the Pan-African Freedom Movement for East, Central and Southern Africa (PAFMECSA) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Leaving South Africa in secret via Bechuanaland, on his way Mandela visited Tanganyika and met with its president, Julius Nyerere. Arriving in Ethiopia, Mandela met with Emperor Haile Selassie I, and gave his speech after Selassie's at the conference. After the symposium, he travelled to Cairo, Egypt, admiring the political reforms of President Gamal Abdel Nasser, and then went to Tunis, Tunisia, where President Habib Bourguiba gave him £5,000 for weaponry. He proceeded to Morocco, Mali, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Senegal, receiving funds from Liberian President William Tubman and Guinean President Ahmed Sékou Touré. Leaving Africa for London, England, he met anti-apartheid activists, reporters, and prominent politicians. Returning to Ethiopia, he began a six-month course in guerrilla warfare, but completed only two months before being recalled to South Africa.

Imprisonment

Arrest and Rivonia trial: 1962–64

On 5 August 1962, police captured Mandela along with fellow activist Cecil Williams near Howick. Various rumours have circulated suggesting that the authorities were tipped off with regard to Mandela's whereabouts, although Mandela himself gave these little credence. One idea was that his location had been revealed to South African police by the United States' Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which feared that Mandela was a communist; this claim later received support from an ex-U.S. diplomat who claimed involvement in the operation. Jailed in Johannesburg's Marshall Square prison, Mandela was charged with inciting workers' strikes and leaving the country without permission. Representing himself with Slovo as legal advisor, Mandela intended to use the trial to showcase "the ANC's moral opposition to racism" while supporters demonstrated outside the court. Moved to Pretoria, where Winnie could visit him, in his cell he began correspondence studies for a Bachelor of Laws (LLB) degree from the University of London. His hearing began in October, but he disrupted proceedings by wearing a traditional kaross, refusing to call any witnesses, and turning his plea of mitigation into a political speech. Found guilty, he was sentenced to five years' imprisonment; as he left the courtroom, supporters sang "Nkosi Sikelel iAfrika".

In July 1963, police raided Liliesleaf Farm, arresting those they found there and uncovering paperwork documenting MK's activities, some of which mentioned Mandela. The Rivonia Trial began at Pretoria Supreme Court in October, with Mandela and his comrades charged with four counts of sabotage and conspiracy to violently overthrow the government; their chief prosecutor was Percy Yutar. Judge Quartus de Wet soon threw out the prosecution's case for insufficient evidence, but Yutar reformulated the charges, presenting his new case from December until February 1964, calling 173 witnesses and bringing thousands of documents and photographs to the trial.

Although four of the accused denied involvement with MK, Mandela and the five other accused admitted sabotage but denied that they had ever agreed to initiate guerrilla war against the government. They used the trial to highlight their political cause; at the opening of the defence's proceedings, Mandela gave his three-hour "I Am Prepared to Die" speech. That speech—which was inspired by Castro's "History Will Absolve Me"—was widely reported in the press despite official censorship. The trial gained international attention; there were global calls for the release of the accused from the United Nations and World Peace Council, while the University of London Union voted Mandela to its presidency. On 12 June 1964, justice De Wet found Mandela and two of his co-accused guilty on all four charges; although the prosecution had called for the death sentence to be applied, the judge instead condemned them to life imprisonment.

Robben Island: 1964–82

Mandela and his co-accused were transferred from Pretoria to the prison on Robben Island, remaining there for the next 18 years. Isolated from non-political prisoners in Section B, Mandela was imprisoned in a damp concrete cell measuring 8 feet (2.4 m) by 7 feet (2.1 m), with a straw mat on which to sleep. Verbally and physically harassed by several white prison wardens, the Rivonia Trial prisoners spent their days breaking rocks into gravel, until being reassigned in January 1965 to work in a lime quarry. Mandela was initially forbidden to wear sunglasses, and the glare from the lime permanently damaged his eyesight. At night, he worked on his LLB degree which he was obtaining from the University of London through a correspondence course with Wolsey Hall, Oxford, but newspapers were forbidden, and he was locked in solitary confinement on several occasions for possessing smuggled news clippings. Initially classified as the lowest grade of prisoner, Class D, he was permitted one visit and one letter every six months, although all mail was heavily censored.

The political prisoners took part in work and hunger strikes—the latter considered largely ineffective by Mandela—to improve prison conditions, viewing this as a microcosm of the anti-apartheid struggle. ANC prisoners elected him to their four-man "High Organ" along with Sisulu, Govan Mbeki, and Raymond Mhlaba, and he involved himself in a group representing all political prisoners on the island, Ulundi, through which he forged links with PAC and Yu Chi Chan Club members. Initiating the "University of Robben Island", whereby prisoners lectured on their own areas of expertise, he debated socio-political topics with his comrades.

Though attending Christian Sunday services, Mandela studied Islam. He also studied Afrikaans, hoping to build a mutual respect with the warders and convert them to his cause. Various official visitors met with Mandela, most significantly the liberal parliamentary representative Helen Suzman of the Progressive Party, who championed Mandela's cause outside of prison. In September 1970, he met British Labour Party politician Dennis Healey. South African Minister of Justice Jimmy Kruger visited in December 1974, but he and Mandela did not get on. His mother visited in 1968, dying shortly after, and his firstborn son Thembi died in a car accident the following year; Mandela was forbidden from attending either funeral. His wife was rarely able to visit, being regularly imprisoned for political activity, and his daughters first visited in December 1975; Winnie got out of prison in 1977 but was forcibly settled in Brandfort, still unable to visit him.

From 1967, prison conditions improved; black prisoners were given trousers rather than shorts, games were permitted, and the standard of their food was raised. In 1969, an escape plan for Mandela was developed by Gordon Bruce, but it was abandoned after the conspiracy was infiltrated by an agent of the South African Bureau of State Security (BOSS), who hoped to see Mandela shot during the escape. In 1970, Commander Piet Badenhorst became commanding officer. Mandela, seeing an increase in the physical and mental abuse of prisoners, complained to visiting judges, who had Badenhorst reassigned. He was replaced by Commander Willie Willemse, who developed a co-operative relationship with Mandela and was keen to improve prison standards.

By 1975, Mandela had become a Class A prisoner, allowing greater numbers of visits and letters; he corresponded with anti-apartheid activists like Mangosuthu Buthelezi and Desmond Tutu. That year, he began his autobiography, which was smuggled to London, but remained unpublished at the time; prison authorities discovered several pages, and his study privileges were revoked for four years. Instead, he devoted his spare time to gardening and reading until he resumed his LLB degree studies in 1980.

By the late 1960s, Mandela's fame had been eclipsed by Steve Biko and the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM). Seeing the ANC as ineffectual, the BCM called for militant action, but following the Soweto uprising of 1976, many BCM activists were imprisoned on Robben Island. Mandela tried to build a relationship with these young radicals, although he was critical of their racialism and contempt for white anti-apartheid activists. Renewed international interest in his plight came in July 1978, when he celebrated his 60th birthday. He was awarded an honorary doctorate in Lesotho, the Jawaharlal Nehru Award for International Understanding in India in 1979, and the Freedom of the City of Glasgow, Scotland in 1981. In March 1980, the slogan "Free Mandela!" was developed by journalist Percy Qoboza, sparking an international campaign that led the UN Security Council to call for his release. Despite increasing foreign pressure, the government refused, relying on its Cold War allies US President Ronald Reagan and UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher; both considered Mandela's ANC a terrorist organisation sympathetic to communism, and supported its suppression.

Pollsmoor Prison: 1982–88

In April 1982, Mandela was transferred to Pollsmoor Prison in Tokai, Cape Town, along with senior ANC leaders Walter Sisulu, Andrew Mlangeni, Ahmed Kathrada, and Raymond Mhlaba; they believed that they were being isolated to remove their influence on younger activists at Robben Island. Conditions at Pollsmoor were better than at Robben Island, although Mandela missed the camaraderie and scenery of the island. Getting on well with Pollsmoor's commanding officer, Brigadier Munro, Mandela was permitted to create a roof garden; he also read voraciously and corresponded widely, now permitted 52 letters a year. He was appointed patron of the multi-racial United Democratic Front (UDF), founded to combat reforms implemented by South African President P. W. Botha. Botha's National Party government had permitted Coloured and Indian citizens to vote for their own parliaments, which had control over education, health, and housing, but black Africans were excluded from the system; like Mandela, the UDF saw this as an attempt to divide the anti-apartheid movement on racial lines.

Violence across the country escalated, with many fearing civil war. Under pressure from an international lobby, multinational banks stopped investing in South Africa, resulting in economic stagnation. Numerous banks and Thatcher asked Botha to release Mandela—then at the height of his international fame—to defuse the volatile situation. Although considering Mandela a dangerous "arch-Marxist", in February 1985 Botha offered him a release from prison if he "unconditionally rejected violence as a political weapon". Mandela spurned the offer, releasing a statement through his daughter Zindzi stating, "What freedom am I being offered while the organisation of the people [ANC] remains banned? Only free men can negotiate. A prisoner cannot enter into contracts."

In 1985, Mandela underwent surgery on an enlarged prostate gland, before being given new solitary quarters on the ground floor. He was met by "seven eminent persons", an international delegation sent to negotiate a settlement, but Botha's government refused to co-operate, in June calling a state of emergency and initiating a police crackdown on unrest. The anti-apartheid resistance fought back, with the ANC committing 231 attacks in 1986 and 235 in 1987. The violence escalated as the government used the army and police to combat the resistance, and provided covert support for vigilante groups and the Zulu nationalist movement Inkatha, which was involved in an increasingly violent struggle with the ANC. Mandela requested talks with Botha but was denied, instead secretly meeting with Minister of Justice Kobie Coetsee in 1987, and having a further 11 meetings over the next three years. Coetsee organised negotiations between Mandela and a team of four government figures starting in May 1988; the team agreed to the release of political prisoners and the legalisation of the ANC on the condition that they permanently renounce violence, break links with the Communist Party, and not insist on majority rule. Mandela rejected these conditions, insisting that the ANC would only end its armed activities when the government renounced violence.

Mandela's 70th birthday in July 1988 attracted international attention, including a tribute concert at London's Wembley Stadium that was televised and watched by an estimated 200 million viewers. Although presented globally as a heroic figure, he faced personal problems when ANC leaders informed him that Winnie had set herself up as head of a criminal gang, the "Mandela United Football Club", who had been responsible for torturing and killing opponents—including children—in Soweto. Though some encouraged him to divorce her, he decided to remain loyal until she was found guilty by trial.

Victor Verster Prison and release: 1988–90

Recovering from tuberculosis exacerbated by the dank conditions in his cell, in December 1988 Mandela was moved to Victor Verster Prison near Paarl. He was housed in the relative comfort of a warder's house with a personal cook, and used the time to complete his LLB degree. While there, he was permitted many visitors and organised secret communications with exiled ANC leader Oliver Tambo.

In 1989, Botha suffered a stroke, retaining the state presidency but stepping down as leader of the National Party, to be replaced by F. W. de Klerk. In a surprise move, Botha invited Mandela to a meeting over tea in July 1989, an invitation Mandela considered genial. Botha was replaced as state president by de Klerk six weeks later; the new president believed that apartheid was unsustainable and released a number of ANC prisoners. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, de Klerk called his cabinet together to debate legalising the ANC and freeing Mandela. Although some were deeply opposed to his plans, de Klerk met with Mandela in December to discuss the situation, a meeting both men considered friendly, before legalising all formerly banned political parties in February 1990 and announcing Mandela's unconditional release. Shortly thereafter, for the first time in 20 years, photographs of Mandela were allowed to be published in South Africa.

Leaving Victor Verster Prison on 11 February, Mandela held Winnie's hand in front of amassed crowds and the press; the event was broadcast live across the world. Driven to Cape Town's City Hall through crowds, he gave a speech declaring his commitment to peace and reconciliation with the white minority, but made it clear that the ANC's armed struggle was not over, and would continue as "a purely defensive action against the violence of apartheid". He expressed hope that the government would agree to negotiations, so that "there may no longer be the need for the armed struggle", and insisted that his main focus was to bring peace to the black majority and give them the right to vote in national and local elections. Staying at the home of Desmond Tutu, in the following days Mandela met with friends, activists, and press, giving a speech to an estimated 100,000 people at Johannesburg's Soccer City.

End of apartheid

Early negotiations: 1990–91

Mandela proceeded on an African tour, meeting supporters and politicians in Zambia, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Libya and Algeria, and continuing to Sweden, where he was reunited with Tambo, and London, where he appeared at the Nelson Mandela: An International Tribute for a Free South Africa concert at Wembley Stadium in Wembley Park. Encouraging foreign countries to support sanctions against the apartheid government, in France he was welcomed by President François Mitterrand, in Vatican City by Pope John Paul II, and in the United Kingdom by Thatcher. In the United States, he met President George H.W. Bush, addressed both Houses of Congress and visited eight cities, being particularly popular among the African-American community. In Cuba, he became friends with President Castro, whom he had long admired. He met President R. Venkataraman in India, President Suharto in Indonesia, Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad in Malaysia, and Prime Minister Bob Hawke in Australia. He visited Japan, but not the Soviet Union, a longtime ANC supporter.

In May 1990, Mandela led a multiracial ANC delegation into preliminary negotiations with a government delegation of 11 Afrikaner men. Mandela impressed them with his discussions of Afrikaner history, and the negotiations led to the Groot Schuur Minute, in which the government lifted the state of emergency. In August, Mandela—recognising the ANC's severe military disadvantage—offered a ceasefire, the Pretoria Minute, for which he was widely criticised by MK activists. He spent much time trying to unify and build the ANC, appearing at a Johannesburg conference in December attended by 1600 delegates, many of whom found him more moderate than expected. At the ANC's July 1991 national conference in Durban, Mandela admitted the party's faults and announced his aim to build a "strong and well-oiled task force" for securing majority rule. At the conference, he was elected ANC President, replacing the ailing Tambo, and a 50-strong multiracial, mixed gendered national executive was elected.

Mandela was given an office in the newly purchased ANC headquarters at Shell House, Johannesburg, and moved into Winnie's large Soweto home. Their marriage was increasingly strained as he learned of her affair with Dali Mpofu, but he supported her during her trial for kidnapping and assault. He gained funding for her defence from the International Defence and Aid Fund for Southern Africa and from Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, but in June 1991 she was found guilty and sentenced to six years in prison, reduced to two on appeal. On 13 April 1992, Mandela publicly announced his separation from Winnie. The ANC forced her to step down from the national executive for misappropriating ANC funds; Mandela moved into the mostly white Johannesburg suburb of Houghton. Mandela's prospects for a peaceful transition were further damaged by an increase in "black-on-black" violence, particularly between ANC and Inkatha supporters in KwaZulu-Natal, which resulted in thousands of deaths. Mandela met with Inkatha leader Buthelezi, but the ANC prevented further negotiations on the issue. Mandela argued that there was a "third force" within the state intelligence services fuelling the "slaughter of the people" and openly blamed de Klerk – whom he increasingly distrusted – for the Sebokeng massacre. In September 1991, a national peace conference was held in Johannesburg at which Mandela, Buthelezi and de Klerk signed a peace accord, though the violence continued.

CODESA talks: 1991–92

The Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA) began in December 1991 at the Johannesburg World Trade Center, attended by 228 delegates from 19 political parties. Although Cyril Ramaphosa led the ANC's delegation, Mandela remained a key figure, and after de Klerk used the closing speech to condemn the ANC's violence, he took to the stage to denounce de Klerk as the "head of an illegitimate, discredited minority regime". Dominated by the National Party and ANC, little negotiation was achieved. CODESA 2 was held in May 1992, at which de Klerk insisted that post-apartheid South Africa must use a federal system with a rotating presidency to ensure the protection of ethnic minorities; Mandela opposed this, demanding a unitary system governed by majority rule. Following the Boipatong massacre of ANC activists by government-aided Inkatha militants, Mandela called off the negotiations, before attending a meeting of the Organisation of African Unity in Senegal, at which he called for a special session of the UN Security Council and proposed that a UN peacekeeping force be stationed in South Africa to prevent "state terrorism". Calling for domestic mass action, in August the ANC organised the largest-ever strike in South African history, and supporters marched on Pretoria.

Following the Bisho massacre, in which 28 ANC supporters and one soldier were shot dead by the Ciskei Defence Force during a protest march, Mandela realised that mass action was leading to further violence and resumed negotiations in September. He agreed to do so on the conditions that all political prisoners be released, that Zulu traditional weapons be banned, and that Zulu hostels would be fenced off, the latter two measures intended to prevent further Inkatha attacks; de Klerk reluctantly agreed. The negotiations agreed that a multiracial general election would be held, resulting in a five-year coalition government of national unity and a constitutional assembly that gave the National Party continuing influence. The ANC also conceded to safeguarding the jobs of white civil servants; such concessions brought fierce internal criticism. The duo agreed on an interim constitution based on a liberal democratic model, guaranteeing separation of powers, creating a constitutional court, and including a US-style bill of rights; it also divided the country into nine provinces, each with its own premier and civil service, a concession between de Klerk's desire for federalism and Mandela's for unitary government.

The democratic process was threatened by the Concerned South Africans Group (COSAG), an alliance of far-right Afrikaner parties and black ethnic-secessionist groups like Inkatha; in June 1993, the white supremacist Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) attacked the Kempton Park World Trade Centre. Following the murder of ANC activist Chris Hani, Mandela made a publicised speech to calm rioting, soon after appearing at a mass funeral in Soweto for Tambo, who had died of a stroke. In July 1993, both Mandela and de Klerk visited the US, independently meeting President Bill Clinton and each receiving the Liberty Medal. Soon after, Mandela and de Klerk were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in Norway. Influenced by Thabo Mbeki, Mandela began meeting with big business figures, and played down his support for nationalisation, fearing that he would scare away much-needed foreign investment. Although criticised by socialist ANC members, he was encouraged to embrace private enterprise by members of the Chinese and Vietnamese Communist parties at the January 1992 World Economic Forum in Switzerland.

General election: 1994

With the election set for 27 April 1994, the ANC began campaigning, opening 100 election offices and orchestrating People's Forums across the country at which Mandela could appear, as a popular figure with great status among black South Africans. The ANC campaigned on a Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) to build a million houses in five years, introduce universal free education and extend access to water and electricity. The party's slogan was "a better life for all", although it was not explained how this development would be funded. With the exception of the Weekly Mail and the New Nation, South Africa's press opposed Mandela's election, fearing continued ethnic strife, instead supporting the National or Democratic Party. Mandela devoted much time to fundraising for the ANC, touring North America, Europe and Asia to meet wealthy donors, including former supporters of the apartheid regime. He also urged a reduction in the voting age from 18 to 14; rejected by the ANC, this policy became the subject of ridicule.

Concerned that COSAG would undermine the election, particularly in the wake of the conflict in Bophuthatswana and the Shell House Massacre—incidents of violence involving the AWB and Inkatha, respectively—Mandela met with Afrikaner politicians and generals, including P. W. Botha, Pik Botha and Constand Viljoen, persuading many to work within the democratic system, and with de Klerk convinced Inkatha's Buthelezi to enter the elections rather than launch a war of secession. As leaders of the two major parties, de Klerk and Mandela appeared on a televised debate; although de Klerk was widely considered the better speaker at the event, Mandela's offer to shake his hand surprised him, leading some commentators to consider it a victory for Mandela. The election went ahead with little violence, although an AWB cell killed 20 with car bombs. As widely expected, the ANC won a sweeping victory, taking 63% of the vote, just short of the two-thirds majority needed to unilaterally change the constitution. The ANC was also victorious in seven provinces, with Inkatha and the National Party each taking another. Mandela voted at the Ohlange High School in Durban, and though the ANC's victory assured his election as President, he publicly accepted that the election had been marred by instances of fraud and sabotage.

Presidency of South Africa: 1994–99

The newly elected National Assembly's first act was to formally elect Mandela as South Africa's first black chief executive. His inauguration took place in Pretoria on 10 May 1994, televised to a billion viewers globally. The event was attended by 4,000 guests, including world leaders from disparate backgrounds. Mandela headed a Government of National Unity dominated by the ANC—which had no experience of governing by itself—but containing representatives from the National Party and Inkatha. Under the Interim Constitution, Inkatha and the National Party were entitled to seats in the government by virtue of winning at least 20 seats. In keeping with earlier agreements, both de Klerk and Thabo Mbeki were given the position of Deputy President. Although Mbeki had not been his first choice for the job, Mandela grew to rely heavily on him throughout his presidency, allowing him to organise policy details. Moving into the presidential office at Tuynhuys in Cape Town, Mandela allowed de Klerk to retain the presidential residence in the Groote Schuur estate, instead settling into the nearby Westbrooke manor, which he renamed "Genadendal", meaning "Valley of Mercy" in Afrikaans. Retaining his Houghton home, he also had a house built in his home village of Qunu, which he visited regularly, walking around the area, meeting with locals, and judging tribal disputes.

Aged 76, he faced various ailments, and although exhibiting continued energy, he felt isolated and lonely. He often entertained celebrities, such as Michael Jackson, Whoopi Goldberg, and the Spice Girls, and befriended ultra-rich businessmen, like Harry Oppenheimer of Anglo-American as well as Queen Elizabeth II on her March 1995 state visit to South Africa, resulting in strong criticism from ANC anti-capitalists. Despite his opulent surroundings, Mandela lived simply, donating a third of his R 552,000 annual income to the Nelson Mandela Children's Fund, which he had founded in 1995. Although dismantling press censorship, speaking out in favour of freedom of the press, and befriending many journalists, Mandela was critical of much of the country's media, noting that it was overwhelmingly owned and run by middle-class whites and believing that it focused too much on scaremongering around crime. Mandela was known to change his clothes several times a day and after assuming the presidency he became so associated with Batik shirts that they came to be known as "Madiba shirts".

In December 1994, Mandela published Long Walk to Freedom, an autobiography based around a manuscript he had written in prison, augmented by interviews conducted with American journalist Richard Stengel. In late 1994, he attended the 49th conference of the ANC in Bloemfontein, at which a more militant national executive was elected, among them Winnie Mandela; although she expressed an interest in reconciling, Nelson initiated divorce proceedings in August 1995. By 1995, he had entered into a relationship with Graça Machel, a Mozambican political activist 27 years his junior who was the widow of former president Samora Machel. They had first met in July 1990 when she was still in mourning, but their friendship grew into a partnership, with Machel accompanying him on many of his foreign visits. She turned down Mandela's first marriage proposal, wanting to retain some independence and dividing her time between Mozambique and Johannesburg.

National reconciliation

Presiding over the transition from apartheid minority rule to a multicultural democracy, Mandela saw national reconciliation as the primary task of his presidency. Having seen other post-colonial African economies damaged by the departure of white elites, Mandela worked to reassure South Africa's white population that they were protected and represented in "the Rainbow Nation". Although his Government of National Unity would be dominated by the ANC, he attempted to create a broad coalition by appointing de Klerk as Deputy President and appointing other National Party officials as ministers for Agriculture, Energy, Environment, and Minerals and Energy, as well as naming Buthelezi as Minister for Home Affairs. The other cabinet positions were taken by ANC members, many of whom—like Joe Modise, Alfred Nzo, Joe Slovo, Mac Maharaj and Dullah Omar—had long been comrades, although others, such as Tito Mboweni and Jeff Radebe, were much younger. Mandela's relationship with de Klerk was strained; Mandela thought that de Klerk was intentionally provocative, and de Klerk felt that he was being intentionally humiliated by the president. In January 1995, Mandela heavily chastised him for awarding amnesty to 3,500 police officers just before the election, and later criticised him for defending former Minister of Defence Magnus Malan when the latter was charged with murder.

Mandela personally met with senior figures of the apartheid regime, including Hendrik Verwoerd's widow, Betsie Schoombie, and lawyer Percy Yutar, also laying a wreath by the statue of Afrikaner hero Daniel Theron. Emphasising personal forgiveness and reconciliation, he announced that "courageous people do not fear forgiving, for the sake of peace." He encouraged black South Africans to get behind the previously hated national rugby team, the Springboks, as South Africa hosted the 1995 Rugby World Cup. After the Springboks won a celebrated final against New Zealand, Mandela presented the trophy to captain Francois Pienaar, an Afrikaner, wearing a Springbok shirt with Pienaar's own number 6 on the back. This was widely seen as a major step in the reconciliation of white and black South Africans; as de Klerk later put it, "Mandela won the hearts of millions of white rugby fans." Mandela's efforts at reconciliation assuaged the fears of whites, but also drew criticism from more militant blacks. Among the latter was his estranged wife, Winnie, who accused the ANC of being more interested in appeasing the white community than in helping the black majority.

Mandela oversaw the formation of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate crimes committed under apartheid by both the government and the ANC, appointing Desmond Tutu as its chair. To prevent the creation of martyrs, the Commission granted individual amnesties in exchange for testimony of crimes committed during the apartheid era. Dedicated in February 1996, it held two years of hearings detailing rapes, torture, bombings, and assassinations, before issuing its final report in October 1998. Both de Klerk and Mbeki appealed to have parts of the report suppressed, though only de Klerk's appeal was successful. Mandela praised the Commission's work, stating that it "had helped us move away from the past to concentrate on the present and the future".

Domestic programmes

Mandela's administration inherited a country with a huge disparity in wealth and services between white and black communities. Of a population of 40 million, around 23 million lacked electricity or adequate sanitation, and 12 million lacked clean water supplies, with 2 million children not in school and a third of the population illiterate. There was 33% unemployment, and just under half of the population lived below the poverty line. Government financial reserves were nearly depleted, with a fifth of the national budget being spent on debt repayment, meaning that the extent of the promised Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) was scaled back, with none of the proposed nationalisation or job creation. In 1996, the RDP was replaced with a new policy, Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR), which maintained South Africa's mixed economy but placed an emphasis on economic growth through a framework of market economics and the encouragement of foreign investment; many in the ANC derided it as a neo-liberal policy that did not address social inequality, no matter how Mandela defended it. In adopting this approach, Mandela's government adhered to the "Washington consensus" advocated by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

Under Mandela's presidency, welfare spending increased by 13% in 1996/97, 13% in 1997/98, and 7% in 1998/99. The government introduced parity in grants for communities, including disability grants, child maintenance grants, and old-age pensions, which had previously been set at different levels for South Africa's different racial groups. In 1994, free healthcare was introduced for children under six and pregnant women, a provision extended to all those using primary level public sector health care services in 1996. By the 1999 election, the ANC could boast that due to their policies, 3 million people were connected to telephone lines, 1.5 million children were brought into the education system, 500 clinics were upgraded or constructed, 2 million people were connected to the electricity grid, water access was extended to 3 million people, and 750,000 houses were constructed, housing nearly 3 million people.

The Land Restitution Act of 1994 enabled people who had lost their property as a result of the Natives Land Act, 1913 to claim back their land, leading to the settlement of tens of thousands of land claims. The Land Reform Act 3 of 1996 safeguarded the rights of labour tenants living on farms where they grew crops or grazed livestock. This legislation ensured that such tenants could not be evicted without a court order or if they were over the age of 65. Recognising that arms manufacturing was a key industry in South Africa, Mandela endorsed the trade in weapons but brought in tighter regulations surrounding Armscor to ensure that South African weaponry was not sold to authoritarian regimes. Under Mandela's administration, tourism was increasingly promoted, becoming a major sector of the South African economy.

Critics like Edwin Cameron accused Mandela's government of doing little to stem the HIV/AIDS pandemic in the country; by 1999, 10% of South Africa's population were HIV positive. Mandela later admitted that he had personally neglected the issue, in part due to public reticence in discussing issues surrounding sex in South Africa, and that he had instead left the issue for Mbeki to deal with. Mandela also received criticism for failing to sufficiently combat crime; South Africa had one of the world's highest crime rates, and the activities of international crime syndicates in the country grew significantly throughout the decade. Mandela's administration was also perceived as having failed to deal with the problem of corruption.

Further problems were caused by the exodus of thousands of skilled white South Africans from the country, who were escaping the increasing crime rates, higher taxes, and the impact of positive discrimination toward blacks in employment. This exodus resulted in a brain drain, and Mandela criticised those who left. At the same time, South Africa experienced an influx of millions of illegal migrants from poorer parts of Africa; although public opinion toward these illegal immigrants was generally unfavourable, characterising them as disease-spreading criminals who were a drain on resources, Mandela called on South Africans to embrace them as "brothers and sisters".

Foreign affairs

Mandela expressed the view that "South Africa's future foreign relations [should] be based on our belief that human rights should be the core of international relations". Following the South African example, Mandela encouraged other nations to resolve conflicts through diplomacy and reconciliation. In September 1998, Mandela was appointed Secretary-General of the Non-Aligned Movement, who held their annual conference in Durban. He used the event to criticise the "narrow, chauvinistic interests" of the Israeli government in stalling negotiations to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and urged India and Pakistan to negotiate to end the Kashmir conflict, for which he was criticised by both Israel and India. Inspired by the region's economic boom, Mandela sought greater economic relations with East Asia, in particular with Malaysia, although this was scuppered by the 1997 Asian financial crisis. He extended diplomatic recognition to the People's Republic of China (PRC), who were growing as an economic force, and initially also to Taiwan, who were already longstanding investors in the South African economy. However, under pressure from the PRC, in November 1996 he cut recognition of Taiwan, and in May 1999 paid an official visit to Beijing.

Mandela attracted controversy for his close relationship with Indonesian President Suharto, whose regime was responsible for mass human rights abuses, although on a July 1997 visit to Indonesia he privately urged Suharto to withdraw from the occupation of East Timor. He also faced similar criticism from the West for his government's trade links to Syria, Cuba, and Libya, and for his personal friendships with Castro and Gaddafi. Castro visited in 1998 to widespread popular acclaim, and Mandela met Gaddafi in Libya to award him the Order of Good Hope. When Western governments and media criticised these visits, Mandela lambasted such criticism as having racist undertones, and stated that "the enemies of countries in the West are not our enemies." Mandela hoped to resolve the long-running dispute between Libya and the US and Britain over bringing to trial the two Libyans, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi and Lamin Khalifah Fhimah, who were indicted in November 1991 and accused of sabotaging Pan Am Flight 103. Mandela proposed that they be tried in a third country, which was agreed to by all parties; governed by Scots law, the trial was held at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands in April 1999, and found one of the two men guilty.

Mandela echoed Mbeki's calls for an "African Renaissance", and was greatly concerned with issues on the continent. He took a soft diplomatic approach to removing Sani Abacha's military junta in Nigeria but later became a leading figure in calling for sanctions when Abacha's regime increased human rights violations. In 1996, he was appointed Chairman of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and initiated unsuccessful negotiations to end the First Congo War in Zaire. He also played a key role as a mediator in the ethnic conflict between Tutsi and Hutu political groups in the Burundian Civil War, helping to initiate a settlement which brought increased stability to the country but did not end the ethnic violence. In South Africa's first post-apartheid military operation, troops were ordered in September 1998 into Lesotho to protect the government of Prime Minister Pakalitha Mosisili after a disputed election prompted opposition uprisings. The action was not authorised by Mandela himself, who was out of the country at the time, but by Buthelezi, who was serving as acting president during Mandela's absence.

Withdrawing from politics

The new Constitution of South Africa was agreed upon by parliament in May 1996, enshrining a series of institutions to place checks on political and administrative authority within a constitutional democracy. De Klerk opposed the implementation of this constitution, and that month he and the National Party withdrew from the coalition government in protest, claiming that the ANC were not treating them as equals. The ANC took over the cabinet positions formerly held by the Nationalists, with Mbeki becoming sole Deputy President. Inkatha remained part of the coalition, and when both Mandela and Mbeki were out of the country in September 1998, Buthelezi was appointed "Acting President", marking an improvement in his relationship with Mandela. Although Mandela had often governed decisively in his first two years as President, he had subsequently increasingly delegated duties to Mbeki, retaining only a close personal supervision of intelligence and security measures. During a 1997 visit to London, he said that "the ruler of South Africa, the de facto ruler, is Thabo Mbeki" and that he was "shifting everything to him".

Mandela stepped down as ANC President at the party's December 1997 conference. He hoped that Ramaphosa would succeed him, believing Mbeki to be too inflexible and intolerant of criticism, but the ANC elected Mbeki regardless. Replacing Mbeki as Deputy President, Mandela and the Executive supported the candidacy of Jacob Zuma, a Zulu who had been imprisoned on Robben Island, but he was challenged by Winnie, whose populist rhetoric had gained her a strong following within the party; Zuma defeated her in a landslide victory vote at the election.

Mandela's relationship with Machel had intensified; in February 1998, he publicly stated that he was "in love with a remarkable lady", and under pressure from his friend Desmond Tutu, who urged him to set an example for young people, he organised a wedding for his 80th birthday, in July that year. The following day, he held a grand party with many foreign dignitaries. Although the 1996 constitution allowed the president to serve two consecutive five-year terms, Mandela had never planned to stand for a second term in office. He gave his farewell speech to Parliament on 29 March 1999 when it adjourned prior to the 1999 general elections, after which he retired. Although opinion polls in South Africa showed wavering support for both the ANC and the government, Mandela himself remained highly popular, with 80% of South Africans polled in 1999 expressing satisfaction with his performance as president.

Retirement

Continued activism and philanthropy: 1999–2004

Retiring in June 1999, Mandela sought a quiet family life, to be divided between Johannesburg and Qunu. He set about authoring a sequel to his first autobiography, to be titled The Presidential Years, but it was abandoned before publication. Finding such seclusion difficult, he reverted to a busy public life with a daily programme of tasks, met with world leaders and celebrities, and, when in Johannesburg, worked with the Nelson Mandela Foundation, founded in 1999 to focus on rural development, school construction, and combating HIV/AIDS. Although he had been heavily criticised for failing to do enough to fight the HIV/AIDS pandemic during his presidency, he devoted much of his time to the issue following his retirement, describing it as "a war" that had killed more than "all previous wars"; affiliating himself with the Treatment Action Campaign, he urged Mbeki's government to ensure that HIV-positive South Africans had access to anti-retrovirals. Meanwhile, Mandela was successfully treated for prostate cancer in July 2001.

In 2002, Mandela inaugurated the Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture, and in 2003 the Mandela Rhodes Foundation was created at Rhodes House, University of Oxford, to provide postgraduate scholarships to African students. These projects were followed by the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory and the 46664 campaign against HIV/AIDS. He gave the closing address at the XIII International AIDS Conference in Durban in 2000, and in 2004, spoke at the XV International AIDS Conference in Bangkok, Thailand, calling for greater measures to tackle tuberculosis as well as HIV/AIDS.

Publicly, Mandela became more vocal in criticising Western powers. He strongly opposed the 1999 NATO intervention in Kosovo and called it an attempt by the world's powerful nations to police the entire world. In 2003, he spoke out against the plans for the US and UK to launch a war in Iraq, describing it as "a tragedy" and lambasting US President George W. Bush and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair for undermining the UN, saying, "All that (Mr. Bush) wants is Iraqi oil". He attacked the US more generally, asserting that it had committed more "unspeakable atrocities" across the world than any other nation, citing the atomic bombing of Japan; this attracted international controversy, although he later reconciled his relationship with Blair. Retaining an interest in Libyan-UK relations, he visited Megrahi in Barlinnie prison and spoke out against the conditions of his treatment, referring to them as "psychological persecution".

"Retiring from retirement": 2004–13

In June 2004, aged 85 and amid failing health, Mandela announced that he was "retiring from retirement" and retreating from public life, remarking, "Don't call me, I will call you." Although continuing to meet with close friends and family, the Foundation discouraged invitations for him to appear at public events and denied most interview requests.

He retained some involvement in international affairs. In 2005, he founded the Nelson Mandela Legacy Trust, travelling to the U.S. to speak before the Brookings Institution and the NAACP on the need for economic assistance to Africa. He spoke with US Senator Hillary Clinton and President George W. Bush and first met then-US Senator Barack Obama. Mandela also encouraged Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe to resign over growing human rights abuses in the country. When this proved ineffective, he spoke out publicly against Mugabe in 2007, asking him to step down "with residual respect and a modicum of dignity." That year, Mandela, Machel, and Desmond Tutu convened a group of world leaders in Johannesburg to contribute their wisdom and independent leadership to some of the world's toughest problems. Mandela announced the formation of this new group, The Elders, in a speech delivered on his 89th birthday.

Mandela's 90th birthday was marked across the country on 18 July 2008, with the main celebrations held at Qunu, and a concert in his honour in Hyde Park, London. In a speech marking the event, Mandela called for the rich to help the poor across the world. Throughout Mbeki's presidency, Mandela continued to support the ANC, usually overshadowing Mbeki at any public events that the two attended. Mandela was more at ease with Mbeki's successor, Zuma, although the Nelson Mandela Foundation was upset when his grandson, Mandla Mandela, flew him out to the Eastern Cape to attend a pro-Zuma rally in the midst of a storm in 2009.

In 2004, Mandela successfully campaigned for South Africa to host the 2010 FIFA World Cup, declaring that there would be "few better gifts for us" in the year marking a decade since the fall of apartheid. Despite maintaining a low profile during the event due to ill-health, Mandela made his final public appearance during the World Cup closing ceremony, where he received much applause. Between 2005 and 2013, Mandela, and later his family, were embroiled in a series of legal disputes regarding money held in family trusts for the benefit of his descendants. In mid-2013, as Mandela was hospitalised for a lung infection in Pretoria, his descendants were involved in an intra-family legal dispute relating to the burial place of Mandela's children, and ultimately Mandela himself.

Illness and death: 2011–2013

In February 2011, Mandela was briefly hospitalised with a respiratory infection, attracting international attention, before being re-hospitalised for a lung infection and gallstone removal in December 2012. After a successful medical procedure in early March 2013, his lung infection recurred and he was briefly hospitalised in Pretoria. In June 2013, his lung infection worsened and he was rehospitalised in Pretoria in serious condition. The Archbishop of Cape Town Thabo Makgoba visited Mandela at the hospital and prayed with Machel, while Zuma cancelled a trip to Mozambique to visit him the following day. In September 2013, Mandela was discharged from hospital, although his condition remained unstable.

After suffering from a prolonged respiratory infection, Mandela died on 5 December 2013 at the age of 95, at around 20:50 local time (UTC+2) at his home in Houghton, surrounded by his family. Zuma publicly announced his death on television, proclaiming ten days of national mourning, a memorial service held at Johannesburg's FNB Stadium on 10 December 2013, and 8 December as a national day of prayer and reflection. Mandela's body lay in state from 11 to 13 December at the Union Buildings in Pretoria and a state funeral was held on 15 December in Qunu. Approximately 90 representatives of foreign states travelled to South Africa to attend memorial events. The media was awash with tributes and reminiscences, while images of and tributes to Mandela proliferated across social media. His $4.1 million estate was left to his widow, other family members, staff, and educational institutions.

Political ideology

Mandela was a practical politician, rather than an intellectual scholar or political theorist. According to biographer Tom Lodge, "for Mandela, politics has always been primarily about enacting stories, about making narratives, primarily about morally exemplary conduct, and only secondarily about ideological vision, more about means rather than ends." Mandela identified as both an African nationalist, an ideological position he held since joining the ANC, and as a socialist.

The historian Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni described Mandela as a "liberal African nationalist–decolonial humanist", while political analyst Raymond Suttner cautioned against labelling Mandela a liberal and stated that Mandela displayed a "hybrid socio-political make-up". Mandela took political ideas from other thinkers—among them Indian independence leaders like Gandhi and Nehru, African-American civil rights activists, and African nationalists like Nkrumah—and applied them to the South African situation. At the same time he rejected other aspects of their thought, such as the anti-white sentiment of many African nationalists. In doing so he synthesized both counter-cultural and hegemonic views, for instance by drawing upon ideas from the then-dominant Afrikaner nationalism in promoting his anti-apartheid vision.

His political development was strongly influenced by his legal training and practice, in particular his hope to achieve change not through violence but through "legal revolution". Over the course of his life, he began by advocating a path of non-violence, later embracing violence, and then adopting a non-violent approach to negotiation and reconciliation. When endorsing violence, he did so because he saw no alternative, and was always pragmatic about it, perceiving it as a means to get his opponent to the negotiating table. He sought to target symbols of white supremacy and racist oppression rather than white people as individuals, and was anxious not to inaugurate a race war in South Africa. This willingness to use violence distinguishes Mandela from the ideology of Gandhism, with which some commentators have sought to associate him.

Democracy

Although he presented himself in an autocratic manner in several speeches, Mandela was a devout believer in democracy and abided by majority decisions even when deeply disagreeing with them. He had exhibited a commitment to the values of democracy and human rights since at least the 1960s. He held a conviction that "inclusivity, accountability and freedom of speech" were the fundamentals of democracy, and was driven by a belief in natural and human rights, pursuing not only racial equality but also promoting gay rights as part of the post-apartheid reforms. Suttner argued that there were "two modes of leadership" that Mandela adopted. On one side he adhered to ideas about collective leadership, although on the other believed that there were scenarios in which a leader had to be decisive and act without consultation to achieve a particular objective.

According to Lodge, Mandela's political thought reflected tensions between his support for liberal democracy and pre-colonial African forms of consensus decision making. He was an admirer of British-style parliamentary democracy, stating that "I regard the British Parliament as the most democratic institution in the world, and the independence and impartiality of its judiciary never fail to arouse my admiration." In this he has been described as being committed to "the Euro-North American modernist project of emancipation", something which distinguishes him from other African nationalist and socialist leaders like Nyerere who were concerned about embracing styles of democratic governance that were Western, rather than African, in origin. Mandela nevertheless also expressed admiration for what he deemed to be indigenous forms of democracy, describing Xhosa traditional society's mode of governance as "democracy in its purest form". He also spoke of an influential African ethical tenet, Ubuntu, which was a Ngnuni term meaning "A person is a person through other persons" or "I am because we are."

Socialism and Marxism

Mandela advocated the ultimate establishment of a classless society, with Sampson describing him as being "openly opposed to capitalism, private land-ownership and the power of big money". Mandela was influenced by Marxism, and during the revolution he advocated scientific socialism. During the Treason Trial, he denied being a communist, maintaining this stance when later talking to journalists, and in his autobiography. According to the sociologist Craig Soudien, "sympathetic as Mandela was to socialism, a communist he was not." Conversely, the biographer David Jones Smith stated that Mandela "embraced communism and communists" in the late 1950s and early 1960s, while the historian Stephen Ellis stated that Mandela had assimilated much of the Marxist-Leninist ideology by 1960. Ellis also found evidence that Mandela had been an active member of the South African Communist Party, something that was confirmed after his death by both the ANC and the SACP, the latter of which claimed that he was not only a member of the party, but also served on its Central Committee. His membership had been hidden by the ANC, aware that knowledge of Mandela's former SACP involvement might have been detrimental to him attaining support in Western countries. In contrast to Marxist-Leninists, he had remained a committed democrat and did not share their view that Western governments were anti-democratic and reactionary.

The 1955 Freedom Charter, which Mandela had helped create, called for the nationalisation of banks, gold mines and land, to ensure equal distribution of wealth. Despite these beliefs, Mandela initiated a programme of privatisation during his presidency in line with trends in other countries of the time. It has been repeatedly suggested that Mandela would have preferred to develop a social democratic economy in South Africa but that this was not feasible as a result of the international political and economic situation during the early 1990s. This decision was in part influenced by the fall of the socialist states in the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc during the early 1990s.

Personality and personal life

Mandela was widely considered a charismatic leader, described by biographer Mary Benson as "a born mass leader who could not help magnetizing people". He was highly image conscious and throughout his life always sought out fine quality clothes, with many commentators believing that he carried himself in a regal manner. His aristocratic heritage was repeatedly emphasised by supporters, thus contributing to his "charismatic power". While living in Johannesburg in the 1950s, he cultivated the image of the "African gentleman", having "the pressed clothes, correct manners, and modulated public speech" associated with such a position. In doing so, Lodge argued that Mandela became "one of the first media politicians [...] embodying a glamour and a style that projected visually a brave new African world of modernity and freedom". In the 1990s, he came to be associated closely with the highly coloured "Madiba shirts" that he began wearing.

For Betty Glad and Robert Blanton, Mandela was an "exceptionally intelligent, shrewd, and loyal leader". His official biographer, Anthony Sampson, commented that he was a "master of imagery and performance", excelling at presenting himself well in press photographs and producing sound bites. His public speeches were presented in a formal, stiff manner, and often consisted of clichéd set phrases. He typically spoke slowly, and carefully chose his words. Although he was not considered a great orator, his speeches conveyed "his personal commitment, charm and humour".

Mandela was a private person who often concealed his emotions and confided in very few people. Privately, he lived an austere life, refusing to drink alcohol or smoke, and even as President made his own bed. Renowned for his mischievous sense of humour, he was known for being both stubborn and loyal, and at times exhibited a quick temper. He was typically friendly and welcoming, and appeared relaxed in conversation with everyone, including his opponents. A self-described Anglophile, he claimed to have lived by the "trappings of British style and manners". Constantly polite and courteous, he was attentive to all, irrespective of their age or status, and often talked to children or servants. He was known for his ability to find common ground with very different communities. In later life, he always looked for the best in people, even defending political opponents to his allies, who sometimes thought him too trusting of others. He was fond of Indian cuisine, and had a lifelong interest in archaeology and boxing.

He was raised in the Methodist denomination of Christianity; the Methodist Church of Southern Africa claimed that he retained his allegiance to them throughout his life. An analysis of his writings has led to him being described by theologian Dion Forster as a Christian humanist, who relied more upon Ubuntu than Christian theology. According to Sampson, Mandela never had "a strong religious faith" however, while Boehmer stated that Mandela's religious belief was "never robust".

Mandela was very self-conscious about being a man and regularly made references to manhood. He was heterosexual, and biographer Fatima Meer said that he was "easily tempted" by women. Another biographer, Martin Meredith, characterised him as being "by nature a romantic", highlighting that he had relationships with various women. Mandela was married three times, fathered six children, and had seventeen grandchildren and at least seventeen great-grandchildren. He could be stern and demanding of his children, although he was more affectionate with his grandchildren. His first marriage was to Evelyn Ntoko Mase in October 1944; they divorced after 13 years in 1957 under the multiple strains of his adultery and constant absences, devotion to revolutionary agitation, and the fact that she was a Jehovah's Witness, a religion requiring political neutrality.

The couple had two sons whom Mandela survived, Madiba "Thembi" Thembekile (1945–1969) and Makgatho Mandela (1950–2005); his first son died in a car crash and his second son died of AIDS. The couple had two daughters, both named Makaziwe Mandela (born 1947 and 1954); the first died at the age of nine months, the second, known as "Maki", survived Mandela. Makgatho's son, Mandla Mandela, became chief of the Mvezo tribal council in 2007. Mandela's second wife, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, also came from the Transkei area, although they too met in Johannesburg, where she was the city's first black social worker. They had two daughters, Zenani and Zindzi. He divorced Winnie in 1995, and married Graça Machel on his 80th birthday in 1998.

Reception and legacy

By the time of his death, within South Africa Mandela was widely considered both "the father of the nation" and "the founding father of democracy". Outside of South Africa, he was a "global icon", with the scholar of South African studies Rita Barnard describing him as "one of the most revered figures of our time". One biographer considered him "a modern democratic hero", while his popularity had resulted in a cult of personality building up around him. Some have portrayed Mandela in messianic terms, in contrast to his own statement that "I was not a messiah, but an ordinary man who had become a leader because of extraordinary circumstances." He is often cited alongside Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. as one of the 20th century's exemplary anti-racist and anti-colonial leaders. Boehmer described him as "a totem of the totemic values of our age: toleration and liberal democracy" and "a universal symbol of social justice".

Mandela's international fame had emerged during his incarceration in the 1980s, when he became the world's most famous prisoner, a symbol of the anti-apartheid cause, and an icon for millions who embraced the ideal of human equality. In 1986, Mandela's biographer characterised him as "the embodiment of the struggle for liberation" in South Africa. Meredith stated that in becoming "a potent symbol of resistance" to apartheid during the 1980s, he had gained "mythical status" internationally. Sampson commented that even during his life, this myth had become "so powerful that it blurs the realities", converting Mandela into "a secular saint". Within a decade of the end of his Presidency, Mandela's era was being widely thought of as "a golden age of hope and harmony", with much nostalgia being expressed for it. His name was often invoked by those criticising his successors like Mbeki and Zuma. Across the world, Mandela earned international acclaim for his activism in overcoming apartheid and fostering racial reconciliation, coming to be viewed as "a moral authority" with a great "concern for truth". Mandela's iconic status has been blamed for concealing the complexities of his life.

Mandela generated controversy throughout his career as an activist and politician, having detractors on both the radical left and right. During the 1980s, Mandela was widely labelled a terrorist by prominent political figures in the Western world for his embrace of political violence. According to Thatcher, for instance, the ANC was "a typical terrorist organisation". On the left, some voices in the ANC—among them Frank B. Wilderson III—accused him of selling out for agreeing to enter negotiations with the apartheid government and for not implementing the reforms of the Freedom Charter during his Presidency. Concerns were raised that the personal respect and authority he accrued were in contrast to the ideals of democracy that he promoted, and that he placed his own status and celebrity above the transformation of his country. His government would be criticised for its failure to deal with both the HIV/AIDS pandemic and the high levels of poverty in South Africa. Mandela was also criticised for his friendship with political leaders such as Castro, Gaddafi, and Suharto—deemed dictators by critics—as well as his refusal to condemn their governments' human rights violations.

Orders, decorations, and monuments

Over the course of his life, Mandela was given over 250 awards, accolades, prizes, honorary degrees and citizenships in recognition of his political achievements. Among the awards that Mandela received were the Nobel Peace Prize, the US Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Soviet Union's Lenin Peace Prize, and the Libyan Al-Gaddafi International Prize for Human Rights. In 1990, India awarded him the Bharat Ratna, and in 1992 Pakistan have him their Nishan-e-Pakistan. The same year, he was awarded the Atatürk Peace Award by Turkey; he at first refused the award, citing human rights violations committed by Turkey at the time, but later accepted the award in 1999. He was appointed to the Order of Canada, and was the first living person to be made an honorary Canadian citizen. Queen Elizabeth II appointed him as a Bailiff Grand Cross of the Order of St. John and granted him membership in the Order of Merit.

In 2004, Johannesburg granted Mandela the Freedom of the City, and in 2008 a Mandela statue was unveiled at the spot where Mandela was released from prison. On the Day of Reconciliation 2013, a bronze statue of Mandela was unveiled at Pretoria's Union Buildings.

In November 2009, the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed Mandela's birthday, 18 July, as "Mandela Day", marking his contribution to the anti-apartheid struggle. It called on individuals to donate 67 minutes to doing something for others, commemorating the 67 years that Mandela had been a part of the movement.

Biographies and popular media

The first biography of Mandela was authored by Mary Benson, based on brief interviews with him that she had conducted in the 1960s. Two authorised biographies were later produced by friends of Mandela. The first was Fatima Meer's Higher Than Hope, which was heavily influenced by Winnie and thus placed great emphasis on Mandela's family. The second was Anthony Sampson's Mandela, published in 1999. Other biographies included Martin Meredith's Mandela, first published in 1997, and Tom Lodge's Mandela, brought out in 2006.

Since the late 1980s, Mandela's image began to appear on a proliferation of items, among them "photographs, paintings, drawings, statues, public murals, buttons, t-shirts, refrigerator magnets, and more", items that have been characterised as "Mandela kitsch". Following his death, there appeared many internet memes featuring images of Mandela with his inspirational quotes superimposed onto them. Mandela has also been depicted in cinema on multiple occasions. Some of these, such as the 2013 feature film Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom and the 1996 documentary Mandela, have focused on covering his long life, whereas others, such as the 2009 feature film Invictus and the 2010 documentary The 16th Man, have focused on specific events in his life. It has been argued that in Invictus and other films, "the American film industry" has played a significant part in "the crafting of Mandela's global image".

Wikipedia

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