Talk:Nelson Mandela/Archive 3

Links "Spam"

• A concise history of Nelson Mandela

If you bother to check the link at the bottom of this page you will see that it takes you to the most comprehensive research on the web of the Griqua and native people from the Umtata region.

See: http://www.tokencoins.com/griqua.html

As Mandela comes from thsi area and clearly has Griqua blood I find it quite extraordinary that this link has been referred to as spam.

Please do your due dilligence before vandalising this page and removing links that have far more relevance that an obsession with Lockerbie which has nothing to do with SA history.

—Preceding unsigned comment added by 210.49.80.224 (talk • contribs) 3 April 2006

Please do not add inappropriate external links to Wikipedia, as you did in Nelson Mandela. Wikipedia is not a mere directory of links nor should it be used for advertising or promotion. Inappropriate links include (but are not limited to) links to personal web sites, links to web sites that you are affiliated with, and links that exist to attract visitors to a web site or promote a product. See the external links guideline and spam policies for further explanations of links that are considered appropriate. If you feel the link should be added to the article, then please discuss it on the article's talk page rather than re-adding it. See the welcome page to learn more about Wikipedia. Thank you. Zaian 22:01, 3 April 2006 (UTC)

Zaian are you listening or a bureaucrat pushing buttons?

The web page you are refering to as spam represents 30 years of research on the Griqua people (Mandela's forefathers). IT IS NOT A COMMERCIAL PAGE and has far more relevance than 90% of the links currently linked to the Mandela article.

As I said before do your due diligence before you knock a contribution made in good faith.

That's what defines a good researcher from a poor one.

—Preceding unsigned comment added by 210.49.80.224 (talk • contribs) 3 April 2006

I am not the only person to have removed the link to your biography of Mandela. Several other experienced contributors also clearly believe it is not worthy of inclusion. Thank you for entering into this dicussion page though, as it gives us a chance to attempt to resolve this. Please remain civil. Zaian 22:34, 3 April 2006 (UTC)

Anonymous editor: Wikipedia benefits nothing from external links like that, especially when the project is looking at publishing a print or DVD edition. If you want to give your research more exposure, why not consider contributing it directly to the article itself? dewet|™ 02:20, 4 April 2006 (UTC)

With a decent respect to wikipedia's purpose, anyone interested in Nelson Mandela would be glad to have access to anything in relation to him, so what's the problem with it? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 141.153.197.21 (talk • contribs) 05:38, 24 September 2006

I agree with 141.153.197.21, but we'll just have to see. Until next edit, SonicBoom95 16:53, 13 March 2007 (UTC)

Griqua

If you look up "Griqua" you will see that the link to the page referred to above (http://www.tokencoins.com/griqua.html) was placed there by one of your editors and not by us. It is the only external link on the Griquas - and for good reason.

We only learnt about Wikipedia through the statistics search engine resulting from this link and recommended our link on NELSON MANDELA knowing that it would add value for your readers.

We really did not want to get involved in some bureaucratic mindfield or being referred to as "spam" which we found quite disgraceful under the circumstances.

That is why we suggested research before you label. Simple strategy - but shows professionalism in journalism - after all that's what Wikipedia editors are. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 210.49.80.224 (talk • contribs) 4 April 2006

That Mandela has Griqua blood is mere speculation, not a proved fact. Also, Wikipedia benefits much more from information being in the actual article and not available in an external link. So, if you care so much about the information being available, please release the content of your webpage into the public domain for inclusion in Wikipedia (keeping in mind the "no original research" guideline). And no, we are not journalists, we're encyclopedists - different things. Elf-friend 06:17, 4 April 2006 (UTC)

Griqua is a specific khoisanid group in South Africa. It is likely that Mandela has some Hottentot ancestors, who absorbed by the Xhosa people. The khoisanid people are using many clicksounds, while Xhosa is the Bantu-language with most clicksounds. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 196.2.124.251 (talk • contribs) 29 May 2006

The content of the linked Mandela biography has little to mark it as anything out of the ordinary. There are hundreds of similar Mandela biographies on the web. The speculative link to Strachan and Co coins marks it as a special interest page, smacking heavily of self-promotion. The author's history is also unhelpful, consisting of anonymous editing, unsigned contributions and repeated reverts. As several others have said, Wikipedia is about content, not links, and it's certainly not about self-promotion. Zaian 06:47, 4 April 2006 (UTC)

Mandela's Khoisan ancestry is confirmed elsewhere 1, however it's not entirely certain that it was specifically Griqua and not some other Khoisan group. — Impi 06:03, 30 May 2006 (UTC)

Impi - very interesting link at carteblanche - there can be no debate over whether "Mandela is a Griqua or not". The coloured people of Khoisan origin (like Mandela) are recognised as Griqua (Griqua is the abbreviation of a Hottentot tribal name). - Le Fleur went around the country in the early 1900s gathering up the scattered seeds of the (coloured) Griqua people using his choirs or "Roepers" to encourage them to "come home". Today the Griquas are centered at Krantskoek near Plettenburg Bay, Ratelgat north of Cape Town and in the Kokstad District in KwaZulu Natal. It is clear that Mandela's Khoisan blood comes from the Kat River Hottentots who were forced out of the Cape by the early settlers and who often bred with the Tswana. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Mediaa (talk • contribs) 06:13, 17 August 2006

Mandela, Italy

The dab link to Mandela, Italy does not work. I've removed it!Phase4 19:35, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

Infobox

Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela
File:Mandelaza.jpg
1st President of South Africa
In office 1994–1999
Vice President	F.W. de Klerk and Thabo Mbeki
Preceded by	F.W. de Klerk (as State President)
Succeeded by	Thabo Mbeki
Personal details
Born	18 July 1918 Mvezo, Umtata district, Transkei
Political party	ANC
Spouse	Graça Machel

Would anyone object to me replacing the current table with a proper president infobox? Something like this:

My biggest problem with the template is "vice president" (instead of "deputy president"). dewet|™ 12:10, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

• Be bold! → \\/\//esleyPinkha//\/\\ • 02:06, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

Maghato Mandela

I was in the norwegian article of nelson madela, and when i clicked the link in the bottom left corner, to the english article, i was taken to the article of Makgatho Mandela shouldnt that article be redirected to this one?

user:wilhel1812

Never mind

sorry, my mistake. everything is just as it should be.

user:wilhel1812

Ubuntu

does this link belong in this article?:

• Nelson Mandela explains the concept of Ubuntu

or should it be under the ubuntu article? --mimithebrain 03:23, 6 June 2006 (UTC)

NPOV

The passage "The 1955 Freedom Charter ... the Moscow line." seems to me to have a discernable political POV. If there is no comment to the contrary, I will rectify this. Too Old 06:23, 12 June 2006 (UTC)

disambiguation

Created a Mandela (disambiguation) page, mostly to get rid of that damn eyesore of a book promotion.--Ezeu 17:58, 13 June 2006 (UTC)

NPOV 2

I am re-deleting the (terrorism) statement. This is simply not neutral nor is it accepted fact, if you want to discuss certain actions being considered terrorism this is not the right place in the article.-The preceding unsigned comment was added by 75.22.68.239 (talk • contribs) 9 August 2006.

I agree. I mistakenly reverted your edit. --Ezeu 15:50, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

I found it there again, (Terrorist) right by the activities, the definition of a terrorist activity would be one for the purpose of instilling terror, where as this was a revolutionary group. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 141.153.197.21 (talk • contribs) 05:31, 24 September 2006

I can't believe you guys missed the recent edit by User:Kokeyinkling (check his contributions -- he currently only has three edits). Zyxoas (talk to me - I'll listen) 09:25, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

I have substituted sabotage for terrorism. This is the historically accurate term used contemporary to events. The early MK sabotage campaign was essentially "propaganda of the deed," and quite explicitly sought to avoid civilian and I believe even military and police casualties. The later armed struggle (especially after the revolution in Portugal and Mozambiquan independence in 1974 which opened an infiltration route through Swaziland) was more ambitious in its targets and involved attacks on (as well as from) S.A. military and police forces. In the 1980s the MK underground carried out and encouraged attacks on "collaborators", especially African members of the police. In the very late 1980s certain MK underground cells started attacking civilians in a way that might fairly be called terrorist, for example the infamous bombing of a nightclub called Magoo's in Durban. It is my recollection that the ANC leadership repudiated that act as contrary to ANC policy, though I hesitate slightly as to how clearly they did so, and certainly there were accusations that the repudiation was disingenuous. The event was taken at the time as reflecting generational conflict and a possible loss of control by top exile leadership over parts of the underground. For present purposes the point is the contrast between such actions, clearly intended to terrorize the white civilian population, and the sabotage campaign of the early 1960s, which was mostly intended to advertise the intransigence of the S.A. government.

The definition of terrorism in Wikipedia, though cited from Encyclopedia Britannica and in that sense presumably "encyclopedic", is taken more or less directly from recent U.S. law (since Clinton's 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act) which does not really conform to longer-standing and common-sense understandings of terrorism as actions designed to induce terror in a populace, in part through being arbitrary and unpredictable as to targets. The reduction of the standard by this novel law to "intimidation by violence for political ends" is overly broad, potentially encompassing acts such as riots or picket-line violence which certainly are not terrorism in any ordinary sense of the word.

The other issue here, of course, is that such definitions do not usually encompass terrorism by the state against portions of its own population. Yet quite clearly by the 1980s the S.A. state was engaged not only in massive overt repressive violence, e.g. live ammunition fired at rock-throwing kids, but also secret campaigns of disappearances and extra-judicial murders. In terms of violence against the persons of civilians, an NPOV account of South Africa from the the late 1950s onward would have to show the state leading the way at each phase of increasing the depth and breadth of such violence. Ngwe 05:35, 5 October 2006 (UTC)

"the Thembu Xhosa family"

This is the characterization of Mandela's birth. I suppose "the" should just be "a", but "Thembu Xhosa" is a nonsense and is wrong. His family was clearly Thembu, who are clearly an historically distinct people from the Xhosa, like the Mpondo, the Xesibe, the Bhaca and the Mfengu. Their common language is called isiXhosa because of the history of its reduction to writing by missionaries & the evolution of the term "kaffir." This was reinforced by the apartheid government's creation of what had been called "the Transkeian territories" of the old Cape Colony/province, with "the Transkei" as a shorthand, into the basis for a putatively independent bantustan.

It is true that in the political conflicts with Inkatha/the Inkatha Freedom Party Mandela was characterized by the IFP & its key leader Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthezezi as "Xhosa," in the context of proganda characterizing the African National Congress as "a Xhosa organization" to put it on the same footing as the IFP, whose support was overwhelming among Zulu people. But both of those characterizations were untrue.

If I can figure out a way to change this other than just removing the "Xhosa" which is my initial inclination, am I going to be restarting some old controversy? Ngwe 03:07, 4 September 2006 (UTC)

Thembu, "kraal," democracy & other matters

Since Nelson Mandela is now our African Collaboration of the month, I have done some edits on the "Early life" section, as well as correcting some connected links. The Thembu, while said to speak isiXhosa for historical reasons related to which missionaries reduced the language to writing, are historically a distinct people from the Xhosa, a fact of considerable significance during the apartheid era in political struggles within the Transkei bantustan. To call them Xhosa because they speak isiXhosa is like saying the Irish (or U.S. Americans, or Scots or Canadians or Jamaicans) are English because they speak English. The earlier version was inconsistent in recognizing this; I have fixed it & also the Thembu entry (still incomplete but now somewhat expanded stub).

I changed "kraal" to "homestead", which is now the conventional ethnographic and historical usage among scholars writing in English, including South African scholars; also edited the entry for kraal and created a new stub for homestead. To say someone lives in a kraal is ultimately to say they live in a cattle-pen. Actually they lived around the cattle pen, to protect it. Even if one wanted to argue that white South Africans don't understand that or mean it that way, homestead is more NPOV for an article like this - white South African popular culture POV usage is not NPOV in a biographical article on an African nationalist leader. I also clarified that when Mandela was born, the Transkeian Territories were part of the Cape Province of the Union, not the quasi-autonomous Transkei of mid & late apartheid.

There is an inconsistency in the characterization of Jongintaba Dalindyebo, said once to have been the actual Thembu king, but then several times to have been the regent. I think regent is right but need to check.

I probably am going to change the statement that Mandela was "learning about Western culture" at Clarkebury, which is anachronistic in its cultural relativism & not at all what he would have been told he was learning by the missionary teachers in the early 1930s.

I also want to raise again the point that the 1994 elections were in fact South Africa's first democratic elections. I saw the debate in the archives on this, which is why I didn't just change it, but I think it should be changed back to that simple truth.

The arguments in the earlier debate for prior elections having been democratic are mistaken I believe. Wikipedia's own definition for democracy correctly says it means rule by the people. No South African system of government or election prior to 1994 could fit that definition. The arguments by analogy to the U.S. are mistaken. When Washington was president the U.S. was pretty explicitly not a democracy, but a republic; in addition to disfranchisement of enslaved black persons (& free blacks mostly) and women, a number of states, maybe most, had property qualified franchises into the 19th century, the Senate was indirectly elected by state legislatures (& often state senates were indirectly elected as well, making national senate elections even less direct), and the president was elected by an electoral college conceived of as having much greater independence than it now does. Although Jefferson's Democratic Republican Party argued that the country should be more democratic, a point made more vigorously in the era of "Jacksonian democracy" in the 1830s, the arguments reflect the fact that it wasn't. The claim someone made that other countries recognized South Africa as a democracy is amazing and weird, though interesting if it reflects an illusion held by any substantial number of white South Africans. It just wasn't so. Sympathy with white South African explanations of why they ostensibly couldn't be democratic, which was pretty widespread in Europe and the Euro-diaspora in the age of (undemocratic) European colonial empires, was not the same as saying South Africa was democratic.

Racial disfranchisement, whether in South Africa or the U.S., was a species of class disfranchisement (& in the U.S., the laws that ended the post-Civil War black vote in the ex-Confederate states also disfranchised many poor whites).

The old Non-European Unity Movement (a political grouping in the Western Cape and to a lesser degree the Eastern Cape that brought together Coloured and African activists & was influenced by Trotskyism) developed a theory of the South African state as what they called a "Herrenvolk Democracy", meaning something like Overlord-People Democracy. In other words, a system in which one people held other peoples in subjection, with its "democracy" restricted to the Herrenvolk. From the point of view of South Africa's people as a whole, this was not democracy at all, reflecting nothing like "the will of the people" and not even "deriving its just powers from the consent of the governed" to take a phrase from the U.S. Declaration of Independence which need not be democratic. It might also be called a mass racial oligarchy.

In fact apartheid theory recognized that South Africa was not democratic. The entire purpose of the bantustan system, to strip Africans of their South African citizenship and make them citizens of an ostensibly independent ethnically defined nation, was to remove them as part of "the people" of South Africa. That they needed be excluded (from the NP point of view) means that they were part of "the people", but had no voice in the government.

NPOV in an article on Afrikaner or white politics would need to acknowledge that some South African whites believed the country was democratic (& apparently some still do). But NPOV in an article on South Africa as a whole, or a reference to that whole as in this article, is acknowledgement of the fact that by any generally accepted view of democracy, South Africa wasn't democratic until at least 1994 (one might argue that those elections were democratic but that the whole system became democratic only with the ratification of the new constitution created by the 1994-elected parliament cum constitutional assembly). Ngwe 07:42, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

Yes! South Africa before 1994 was in no way a democracy

I am relieved and gratified by your comments, Ngwe. I take pleasure in noting that your academic background eminently qualifies you to make them. Be that as it may, those who argued that South Africa was sort of a democracy before 1994 won the original debate you refer to because they were sadly in the majority. As I recall, only Ezeu supported me against a majority which held this strange view, and I was so disheartened that I stopped contributing to the Mandela page for some time. My viewpoint is unchanged: try selling the proposition that South Africa before 1994 was in any way a democracy to those who died, were tortured, detained without trial or otherwise suffered during the struggle against apartheid. The present wordng 'fully-representative democratic elections' is a whitewash, as Ezeu noted at the time, but I suppose we will have to live with it until a majority agrees to change it. Swissjames 09:47, 25 September 2006 (UTC)

References

There isn't proper references made to the sources of the information provided in this article. The facts provided in this article needs to be verifiable, and therefore the sources of information needs to be provided. Information obtained from blogs needs to be indicated accordingly. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 219.89.59.168 (talk • contribs) 23:20, 24 September 2006

• Provide references where Mandela publicly renounced violence. —Preceding unsigned comment added by NdlovuX (talk • contribs) 10:44, 28 September 2006

Mandela and Gandhi

I notice that in the talk archive there was discussion about whether Mandela was influenced by M. K. Gandhi. Someone said that a guerrilla leader couldn't be. In fact the ANC, as part of the Congress Alliance, pursued a Gandhian mass nonviolent direct action campaign in the early 1950s. the Defiance Campaign. The Congress Alliance included the South African Indian Congress, which certainly was influenced by Gandhi. One classic descriptive analysis from close to the time is Passive Resistance in South Africa by Leo Kuper.

South Africa presented an interesting test of Gandhian theory. The basic idea was that a nonviolent challenge would ultimately appeal to the conscience of an oppressing group or government, or work on their bad conscience. In South Africa in the 1950s this failed because the National Party government was completely convinced of its own moral rectitude. The Defiance Campaign was violently suppressed, thousands arrested, and Mandela and over one hundred others put on trial for treason.

The ANC only took the decision to turn to armed struggle in 1960, because they had reached the conclusion that the strategy of active nonviolent resistance had failed to move South Africa's leaders, except in the direct of repression. The fact of having pursued nonviolent methods for a long time, including Gandhian tactics, formed part of the justification they (and the PAC) offered for moving to sabotage and later guerrilla war.

Interestingly, one of the final turning points in F.W. de Klerk's movement to release a number of key ANC and PAC leaders and then Mandela, as well as to repeal many cornerstone apartheid laws, came in a sort of Gandhian moment in 1989. Black political leaders who were being detained without trial under the last State of Emergency went on a hunger strike, demanding to be charged or released. Prior to the hunger strike the State of Emergency appeared to be working; the mass political protests of the mid-1980s had been much suppressed by 1988 and I recall a friend comparing the mood in Johannesburg among apartheid opponents to Berlin in the 1930s.

In contrast to the 1950s, when faced with the hunger strike in the late 1980s and the prospect of detainees dying, the S.A. government blinked and released a number of the hunger strikers. They no longer had the confidence of their rectitude possessed by their predecessors, something reflected even earlier in the attempts to "reform" apartheid that led to the splitting of the Conservative Party from the National Party, which can be seen as in part a split of the true believers from those in or entering varying degrees of doubt.

With the hunger strike, system of semi-permanent detentions without trial collapsed, and mass protests started again -- one protest in Cape Town in 1989 was battled by police with water cannons shooting purple dye, leading to the immortal slogal "The Purple Shall Govern" (a play on the Freedom Charter). Though it cannot be divorced from other elements, this Gandhian moment was a piece of the shifting balance of forces that led de Klerk to act when and as he did. Ngwe 19:55, 25 September 2006 (UTC)

• Truly! Mandela and ANC pursued the Gandhi/King approach until they decided that it was (according to Mandela) "useless and futile" ... "to continue talking peace and non-violence against a government whose reply was only savage attacks against unarmed and defenseless people". They had to consider other methods. Mandela didnt starve to near death on a salt march like Ghandi, and neither did he embark on a defiant march like Martin Luther. The apartheid regime was more ready to use brutal methods (see Sharpeville massacre) than America's segregationalists or the colonial British in India. Mandela and ANC chose the most viable option; fight fire with fire – an option that did not achieve much. Fighting fire with fire díd little to kill Apartheid ... International sanctions (thanks to the fury against the imprisonment of Mandela) killed Apartheid.--Ezeu 21:13, 25 September 2006 (UTC)
  • Well, I'd argue that it was actually the regrowth of internal resistance that led the way, first in the shape of the Black Consciousness Movement & the earliest independent African trade unions in the 1970s and then as those developments evolved with greater re-entry into the country by the ANC, PAC & post-BCM formations like AZAPO. The outside sanctions movement pretty much followed internal developments, in my observation as a participant (this may be a bit truer for the U.S. than the UK or Canada or Scandinavia & W. Europe, I should concede). Sanctions pressure got a big boost during the "Soweto Uprising" & following protests in the late '70s, then died back; but meanwhile Botha & company decided because of the uprising that they had to "adapt or die" and tried to "reform" apartheid. The resulting monstrosity of a constitution led to renewed rebellion beginning late 1983 -- of which the Free Mandela Campaign was an important part. But it took three years in the U.S. for Congress to pass sanctions over Ronald Reagan's veto (in Britain the AAM faced Margaret Thatcher) and the pressure was definitely driven by what was happening inside S.A. You're right that the old S.A. government didn't lose militarily (except debatably perhaps in Angola to the Angolan-Cuban alliance). But it was the existence of the guerrilla camps that drew tens of thousands of youth out of the country after Soweto seeking to "fight back," and they also were the base for underground infiltration that played a part in organizing renewed internal resistance by the "Mass Democratic Movement" and its Black Consciousness and Pan Africanist counterparts in the 1980s. Sanctions themselves were mostly symbolic, but toward the end private "Western" businesses were no longer investing and starting to disinvest. That was indeed partly because of sanctions politics outside (in the U.S., when New York City stopped contracting with companies operating in South Africa it had more economic impact than all the university and church divestments combined -- but those struggles led the cities and states to start acting). But even more, companies were withdrawing because it looked like S.A. might be facing half a century of increasingly bloody grinding struggle. De Klerk realized that was no future and that settling sooner while the state was still relatively strong made sense for the NP's interests; the ANC faced the prospect of declining East Bloc material support (though probably didn't expect the collapse of the Soviet Union quite as it happened; who did?), and didn't want to inherit the corpse of a country. Mandela's character and skills helped bring that moment to fruition. Perhaps negotiating while the state was still strong came at some cost to ability for deep structural reforms (but what would the resources have been in the corpse of a country, never mind the human horrors of deepening civil war?). Sanctions were part of the ANC's strategy going back to the 1950s and did matter, but we should never forget that the main credit for forcing change goes to the South African people. Mandela has always portrayed himself as a man of the movement, not just a leader but a disciplined participant in collective action. I don't think it takes anything from his wonderful humanity, courage and the political deftness he showed in the 1990s to agree with him; he took strength from the people and they from him. Anyway, that's my take. Cheers, Ngwe 23:41, 25 September 2006 (UTC)
    • Yes. But off course my perspective is influenced by the fact that I was not i South Africa during Apartheid. My conclusions are based on, and biased by, observances by third parties (ie. the Western media). But I think the "striking" youth, ANC militarists and other others would probably agree with my assertion that it was the sanctions that ultimately brought down apartheid. But it was the victims of Sharpeville and Soweto, Biko, Winnie Mandela, Tutu, Boesak and others, who convinced the rest of the world that they too had a moral responsibility to act against apartheid. Ultimately they bore the heaviest burden, but the impact of the likes of Olof Palme, Julius Nyerere and Archbishop Trevor Huddleston in promoting a global awareness against apartheid, also helped. --Ezeu 01:34, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

Killed a herd of buffalo in 10 minutes?

I did a brief search of this discussion page and its archives, but could not find anything obvious about this. From the last line in the article's introduction: Mandela is also the only man to have ever taken on and have successfully killed an entire herd of buffalo within ten minutes. Perhaps I am not familiar enough with Mandela's personal history, but if this is not someone's prank, it seems like an extraordinary claim that may demand a citation of some sort. 66.31.47.143 04:37, 14 October 2006 (UTC)

That vandalism has been removed. --Ezeu 04:50, 14 October 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the quick correction. The vandal's action is apparently recorded here, should that be of any interest. His edit history appears to show another attempt at vandalism, so I have taken the liberty of reverting that as well. 66.31.47.143 06:40, 14 October 2006 (UTC)

Cultural depictions of Nelson Mandela

I've started an approach that may apply to Wikipedia's Core Biography articles: creating a branching list page based on in popular culture information. I started that last year while I raised Joan of Arc to featured article when I created Cultural depictions of Joan of Arc, which has become a featured list. Recently I also created Cultural depictions of Alexander the Great out of material that had been deleted from the biography article. Since cultural references sometimes get deleted without discussion, I'd like to suggest this approach as a model for the editors here. Regards, Durova 17:09, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

reason for revert on 22:28, 21 October 2006

I conducted a revert on 22:28, 21 October 2006 to revision 82613937 dated 2006-10-20 12:45:06 by 81.131.66.52 using popups because one of the later revisions on 21:47, 20 October 2006 by 70.26.211.104 although fixing some vandalism also added other vandalism. Since later edits where just reverts I reverted to a point before the vandalism by 70.26.211.104 and before the vandalism that 70.26.211.104 fixed. Brass shadow 22:50, 21 October 2006 (UTC)

Good article candidacy

There are only five references for this article. It seems underreferenced, especially for a long article. Firsfron of Ronchester 02:23, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

I do not believe this article meets the requirements for a Good Article. The text contains only five references. For an article of this length, I would expect more citations. As it is, I cannot in good faith call this a Good Article. Firsfron of Ronchester 04:48, 18 November 2006 (UTC)

NPOV again

While I'm not about to start arguing Mandela is Osama Bin Laden, I think the current tone of the article is a little too hagiographical. This is after all a man who steadfastly refused to renounce violence, even when it would have won his freedom. So calling him "steadfastly committed to nonviolence" and saying violence was his "last" resort is not just misleading it's outright dishonest. His own autobiography makes it fairly clear that the ANC switching tactics from nonviolence to violence was his idea.

And he was a man who could bring some pretty cold-blooded language to bear on the "collateral damage" of his revolution. Of the Church Street bombing, in which the ANC detonated a car bomb in downtown Praetoria during rush hour, killing 19 and injuring 200, he has said:

"The killing of civilians was a tragic accident, and I felt a profound horror at the death toll. But as disturbed as I was by these casualties, I knew that such accidents were the inevitable consequence of the decision to embark on a military struggle." Mandela, Nelson. (1994). "Long Walk to Freedom". Little Brown, and Company. p. 518

Can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs, eh?

Support for violent tactics was by no means universal among South Africa's liberationists (see Desmond Tutu, e.g.), so calling violence "an integral part of the overall campaign against apartheid" should probably read that it was an integral part of the ANC campaign against apartheid. Ford MF 01:09, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Saying Mandela was "steadfastly committed to nonviolence" through his whole life makes no sense, but I have no problem with the idea that he successfully urged the turn to a sabotage campaign as a "last resort" after the violent and repressive refusal of the South African government to respond to non-violent tactics in the 1960s. In the whole span of his life, of course, his "last resort" was to turn to negotiations, for which he came under considerable criticism from certain quarters.

The argument against "integral part of the campaign against apartheid" is badly reasoned -- of coure it was an integral part of the overall campaign. Suppose I were to claim that Tutu's (or Beyers Naude's) nonviolent approach was "an integral part of the struggle against apartheid" -- would I be wrong? No, and I do claim they were. But the same form of reasoning against saying that armed struggle was integral -- that someone else was pursuing a different strategy or tactic -- could be deployed agains the argument for nonviolent methods as integral, because major liberation organizations adopted armed struggle.

There might be a real question to be asked about how integrated or coordinated or internally coherent "the struggle" was as a whole. Many persons struggled in many ways and sometimes against one another. But if by "integral" is meant something like "central," "main," "key," or "crucial," the armed struggle fits the bill -- as do trade union organizing and strikes, marches, school boycotts, calls for sanctions, creation of alternative media, and many other methods, even Gatsha Buthelezi's maneuverings as a bantustan official.

Finally, reduction of the issue to "violence" vs. "nonviolence" elides a whole host of things. If the role of violent actions as a tactic within a strategy Mandela suppported needs clarification or elaboration, that's fine -- but to genuinely clarify one will have to do things like look at the context of state violence, including not only security force actions but the violence involved in forced removals and attendant deadly poverty in the bantustans, the choices of types of violence and targets, the arguments within the movement and organizations, especially when internal opposition re-emerged. Chris Lowe 03:49, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

All of which is fine with me. I was just saying that the article read (and still reads) less like a guy who did what he had to do under the circumstances, and more like oh boy aren't Mandela and Gandhi and Mother Theresa totally BFF. Ford MF 09:07, 20 December 2006 (UTC)

Harmful edits

Okay, this is getting confusing... Will someone clean this up? --Gray Porpoise_{Your wish is my command!} 01:11, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

Done, and blocked the vandal. --Ezeu 01:33, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

Mandela: The Authorised Biography

I am trying to expand this article, mainly focusing on the differences between this book and other accounts (books and otherwise) of Mandela's life and South Africa throughout this period. Any comments or suggestions are appreciated on the peer review page: "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Peer_review/Mandela:_The_Authorised_Biography" BillMasen 17:18, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

References

The references are a bit of a mess, especially the 'Cite URL' ones, which do not display correctly. I can't figure out what is wrong with them. Anyone? If nobody else knows what is wrong, I will eventually replace them with handcoded ones... MadMaxDog 13:19, 27 December 2006 (UTC)

Mostly fixed now, I think. Zaian 14:56, 30 December 2006 (UTC)

Assessment comment

The comment(s) below were originally left at Talk:Nelson Mandela/Comments, and are posted here for posterity. Following several discussions in past years, these subpages are now deprecated. The comments may be irrelevant or outdated; if so, please feel free to remove this section.

needs references plange 05:37, 30 July 2006 (UTC) 2 years later: now has references. Tom (talk) 16:04, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

Last edited at 16:04, 1 September 2008 (UTC). Substituted at 21:46, 3 May 2016 (UTC)