[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 64 (Friday, May 20, 1994)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: May 20, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                             NELSON MANDELA

                                 ______


                         HON. ROMANO L. MAZZOLI

                              of kentucky

                    in the house of representatives

                          Friday, May 20, 1994

  Mr. MAZZOLI. Mr. Speaker, an article about Nelson Mandela written by 
Richard Cohen for the Washington Post on May 12, 1994, describes the 
unique and remarkable man who has emerged from decades in prison to 
become the first President of a unified South Africa.
  I commend to the attention of my colleagues the following article 
about Nelson R. Mandela.

                [From the Washington Post, May 12, 1994]

                    The Wonderful Mystery of Mandela

                           (By Richard Cohen)

       Albert Einstein's brain remains in the possession of Dr. 
     Thomas Harvey of Lawrence, Kan., who has over the years 
     peered into it to discover the secret of genius. He has 
     learned nothing. But if, as Alexander Pope wrote, the proper 
     study of mankind is man, let us study the living Nelson 
     Mandela. He is, as the gentle Einstein himself would have 
     acknowledged, an even greater miracle. Nothing accounts for 
     the man except the man himself.
       Over the course of the last several weeks, I would find 
     myself pausing in my work to ponder the mystery of Mandela. 
     On occasion, I would sit in the car, not going into the house 
     until this or that report from South Africa had concluded. 
     Always the voice of Mandela urged reconciliation: no 
     retribution or vengeance, inclusion instead of exclusion, 
     love instead of hate. Why?
       Mandela humbles psychology. Where in his childhood do we 
     find the clues to his character? He was raised in a 
     polygamous household, four wives, of which his mother was the 
     third. His father died when he was 12. He loved the 
     stunningly beautiful Winnie, divorcing his first wife to 
     marry her, but a life on the run and, later, in jail meant he 
     saw her seldom. Daily, in jail, he would dust her photo, and 
     it was 20 years before prison authorities allowed them to 
     embrace. When, finally, they separated, he said, ``My love 
     for her remains undiminished.''
       He lived underground and on the run and paced a cell on 
     Robben Island, South Africa's Alcatraz. He was treated like 
     dirt, but he came out of prison with his immeasurable dignity 
     intact. He said prison ``matured'' him, but nearly three 
     decades earlier, at his trial in 1964, he uttered words 
     remarkably similar to those we've heard recently: ``I have 
     fought against white domination, and I have fought against 
     black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic 
     and free society.'' He was sentenced to prison for the rest 
     of his life. He was 44 when he went in, 71 when he got out.
       Maybe Primo Levi could have explained Mandela. The one-time 
     Italian chemist, a Jew, went through Auschwitz, but wrote 
     about his experience without bitterness. Levi extolled work, 
     the occupation of the hands and the mind, raising vocation to 
     virtually metaphysical heights. In the end, it seemed he 
     couldn't escape Auschwitz after all. He killed himself in 
     1987, but if he turned bitter and angry he never showed it--
     not in his writing anyway.
       Mandela has that Levi quality--and then some. His lack of 
     rancor is downright dumbfounding. In an age of strutting, 
     vengeance-seeking political leaders, he is an anomaly. Never 
     mind 27 years in jail. Never mind the time robbed from 
     fatherhood and marriage--bedtime stories, and bed, the 
     mundane pleasures that are the condiments of life. Like all 
     black South Africans, he suffered on account of his skin. As 
     good as any man, better in fact than most, he was treated 
     little better than an animal. The essence of apartheid wasn't 
     segregation, it was a forced mortification, an incessant 
     humiliation by the state. There is ample reason for anger 
     here.
       I was in South Africa once. Mandela was still in jail. I 
     stayed a week and never went back. I never wanted to. That 
     gorgeous country, so spectacular in its natural beauty, 
     seemed to me a dismal place, a vast jail where all the 
     nonwhites were inmates. I remember asking cabdriver after 
     cabdriver to take me to the station where the trains from 
     Soweto came in. None of them knew the place. Someday they 
     would, I thought. The payback was surely coming. Mandela may 
     yet prove me wrong.
       Mandela refutes an entire historical theory. There are 
     those who believe that no single person is of historical 
     importance. Movements--social, economic, religious--are the 
     engines of change. For the most part I believe that. It is 
     not Ronald Reagan who brought down the Soviet Union but the 
     illogic of communism. The late philosopher Sidney Hook argued 
     otherwise. He said here and there were great men who on their 
     own changed history.
       Mandela vindicates Hook. With the self-discipline of a 
     biblical martyr, with the force of his own personality, with 
     a keen appreciation that evil is a useless term when applied 
     to a whole people, with all of that and something else, 
     Mandela has so far held together a nation that is not really 
     a nation at all. It is, instead, a place with a name. Its 
     problems are immense--ethnic tribalism, racial tribalism, 
     economic tribalism and, of course, the core tribalism of 
     individual political egos. In the end, South Africa may well 
     go the way of Africa. It it does not, Mandela will be the 
     reason.
       At his inauguration, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela was 
     characteristically embracing. He did not hail the victory of 
     one race or ideology over another but instead proclaimed his 
     triumph as ``a common victory for justice, for peace, for 
     human dignity.'' Here again, he was being inclusive, inviting 
     everyone to savor a truly marvelous historical moment. 
     Mandela rebukes most of us. As with Einstein's brain, it 
     would be folly to examine the cause of Mandela's greatness. 
     Maybe, as he would probably prefer, we would be better off 
     studying another question: Why can't more of us be like him?

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