All news foreign and domestic shall be from McNamara Ground Ops coffee shop,
where bankruptcy judge has ruled that all city worker's pensions will be revoked, in order to "restructure the debt" and continue to pay interest to the richest City of Detroit Bond Holders.
Ironically, Mandela came to Detroit in 1990 before he became president, to put pressure -- pressure partly coming from this big African American Working class community -- to force the Apartheid government to step down and hold elections.
Here are some highlights of Mandela and the ANC, particularly July 1955 when the meeting of 3,000 adopted the Freedom Charter:
"When Mandela first joined the struggle he considered himself an Africanist, skeptical of whether or not Indians and Coloureds “could truly embrace our cause” and was “firmly opposed to allowing Communists or whites to join” the ANC. But through experiences in the struggle, Mandela changed his views and organized to overthrow apartheid by helping to mobilize a mass movement of all those who opposed it.
In 1952 the ANC and the South African Indian Congress launched the Defiance Campaign, the first large-scale, multiracial mobilization against the apartheid laws imposed by the National Party. Mandela was its central organizer. More than 8,000 were thrown in jail.
The new laws were not overturned “but the Defiance Campaign marked a new chapter in the struggle,” Mandela wrote. “Our membership swelled to 100,000. The ANC emerged as a truly mass-based organization with an impressive corps of experienced activists who had braved the police, the courts, and the jails.”
In 1954, the ANC together with the Indian Congress, the recently formed South African Coloured Peoples Organization and the Congress of Democrats, made up of white opponents of apartheid, issued a call for a Congress of the People, which met June 25-26, 1955, attended by more than 3,000 delegates. “Although the overwhelming numbers of delegates were black, there were more than three hundred Indians, two hundred Coloureds, and one hundred whites,” Mandela said.
Before the police broke up the gathering, participants approved the Freedom Charter. “South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white,” the charter said. It put forward a series of demands. The first four headings were: “The people shall govern! All national groups shall have equal rights! The people shall share in the country’s wealth! The land shall be shared among those who work it!” The charter called for the nationalization of the banks and mines.
The Freedom Charter triggered a sharp debate, including in the ANC itself where a minority, which soon split from the organization, backed the view that “South Africa was for Africans, and no one else” and considered whites and Indians “foreign minority groups.”
In 1962 Mandela was arrested after returning to South Africa from a tour of African countries where he sought financing and military training for the newly formed armed wing of the ANC, Spear of the Nation. The next year Mandela and seven others were convicted on charges of sabotage and conspiracy and sentenced to life in prison.
In October 1975 the South African army invaded Angola, hoping to crush the liberation movement against Portuguese rule there, deal a blow to the anti-colonial revolution on the continent and thereby strengthen apartheid rule at home.
At the request of the newly independent Angolan government, thousands of Cuban volunteer combatants went to Angola and in less than six months stopped the South African invasion in its tracks. The myth of the invincibility of the apartheid regime was punctured."
*quoted from the December 23 newsweekly with the views of
Pathfinder press. Subscriptions to this newsweekly can be had by writing to Pathfinder Press/SWP, 306 W. 37th St. 10th Floor, New York, NY 10018
