The convergence of outrage over the verdict in the Trayvon Martin case in Florida, where I live, and the celebrations of Nelson Mandela’s ninety-fifth birthday in South Africa, my home for many years, brought me back to a story from a time in Mandela’s life when he was on the run.
It was 1961. Mandela and other members of the African National Congress had just declared war on the unjust system of apartheid. He had organized the A.N.C.’s underground wing Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation)—resorting to violent force after, he insisted, all peaceful means of trying to achieve freedom and first-class citizenship for the black majority in South Africa had failed. He was being sought by the police, moving from place to place. On this occasion, he had taken refuge in the home of Wolfie Kodesh, a white supporter.
One day, Kodesh got up at 5 A.M. to find that Mandela, a fitness buff from his early days, was dressed in a tracksuit and getting ready to go running. Mandela wrote about it later, simply saying that he “annoyed Wolfie every morning, for I would wake up at five, change into my running clothes and run on the spot for more than an hour.”
But there was more to it. When Kodesh got up for the first time and saw Mandela preparing to run, according to the South African journalist Max du Preez, ”He told him that a black man running around a white suburb would look very suspicious and refused to give him the key to the door.”
Mandela might give his great-grandchildren the same advice today—even fifty-two years later, and even under different political circumstances—in most of the country’s suburbs, which remain predominantly white. In an article from South Africa entitled “From Trayvon Martin to Andries Tatane: Cognitive Dissonance and the Black Male Body,” the writer Gillian Schutte reports what I have heard from many other South Africans—that the Trayvon Martin case has resonance there and that there is “shock and anger” over the not-guilty verdict. “We commiserate about our own black sons and how unsafe they would be in the United States,” Schutte writes. But then she goes to cite instances when black men and boys in South Africa have recently met fates parallel to Trayvon Martin’s—including the case of Andries Tatane, who was “beaten by police and shot in the chest at close range with rubber bullets.” Continuing, Schutte writes, “And somehow in all of this we fail to make the connection with the continued violence towards the black male body in South Africa.”
Schutte asks the question that many people in the United States—black and white—are also asking: When is this going to change? How much longer must we watch young black boys and men die?
And the questions come as the world—almost as one—prays for the man who was once warned not to go running in a suburb, Nelson Mandela. Statements from his African National Congress party ask everyone to reflect on his life, and say that this day “most importantly … provides an opportunity to emulate this life well lived.”
These are appropriate words for the South African nation, including the A.N.C., which many believe sometimes sends mixed signals about its commitment to those ideals. But they also resonate for those living in the United States in troubled times like these. In a few days, another case will be heard, in Wisconsin, involving a white man killing an unarmed black thirteen-year-old, in which three of four black people in the jury pool have been removed by the defense.
One of my nieces wrote to me saying that she was so angry about the verdict in the Trayvon Martin case and asking me, “Auntie, what can I do?” She is of the age that South Africans call “born frees”—those born long after Nelson Mandela went to prison. I will tell her to honor his birthday today and channel her anger by studying (maybe anew or reviewing) his history and that of the people in this country who fought and made sacrifices for freedom. And maybe she and her generation (and members of mine who need reminding) will come away understanding that it takes more than a few days of protest and momentary righteous anger to redress wrongs. I will write and ask my niece: How long are you prepared to fight for what’s right?
I will also suggest, if she plans to post a birthday greeting to Nelson Mandela on her Facebook page or elsewhere, that she might do so with the words that he and his fellow freedom fighters often used when they spoke about freedom and those who fought for it—here and there: “Long live!”
Photograph by Peter Dejong/AP.