By Mick Krever, CNN
Nelson Mandela did not “create the culture” that ended
apartheid, a fellow freedom fighter told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Friday,
but he carried the cause to success than anyone else could have.
“People somehow make it sound that he was ‘Mister Nice Guy’
who brought us all together and got rid of hatred in our hearts and led our
country to freedom,” Albie Sachs said. “It just wasn’t like that at all.”
| Nelson Mandela |
“He was at the crest of a popular wave; something very deep
in our society,” he said. “And he articulated more beautifully – with more
exquisite dignity and precision and a mixture of great gravitas with lots of
humor – something that we were all aching of, and ultimately we achieved in our
new constitution.”
Sachs was in the 1960s one of the many white South Africans
who not hated apartheid, but struggled against it, often at great cost.
He worked with Mandela in the 1960s, and then spent six
painstaking years with Mandela drafting
a constitution that would become the cornerstone of the new South
Africa.
Mandela later appointed him to the Constitutional Court of
South Africa.
“Like so many South Africans, we met through the struggle,”
he said.
Sachs led “a group of four young white people to sit on benches
marked ‘non-whites only’ in the general post office in Cape Town.”
He was himself a political prisoner, where he was subjected
to torture, and he lost an arm and sight in one eye when he was the victim of a
car bomb while in exile in Mozambique.
“The hardest moments for me, in fact, were interrogation,
sleep deprivation, collapsing on the floor,” he said.
“The bomb was terrible; I lost an arm, but it was only an
arm,” he said. “They tried to kill me and I survived, and I felt somehow
immune.”
Years later, when Mandela approached the apartheid government
about negotiating an end to white minority rule, Sachs was there.
“It wasn't just the wonderful Mandela meeting the wise
[former President F.W.] de Klerk, sitting around the table and doing a deal,”
he said. “We had breakdowns; we have roving mass action; there were massacres.”
But they never lost sight of the end goal: A South Africa
where everyone could live together.
“We had to look into each other's eyes. We had to understand
each other very well. And we finally, we got this very comprehensive
constitution that's held up as a model to the world.”
Yes, South Africa has problems, he allowed, and no, the
constitution alone is not solving those problems.
“But it's giving us a foundation for doing that,” he said.
“The constitutional court is there; we have a very free press, a lively media;
we have strong civil society, political parties that engaged with each other,
elections that are free and fair.”
Those institutions live “beyond Mandela,” he said.
Now, as the world comes to grips with the reality that
Mandela has died, South African solidarity is higher than ever.
It is bolstered, he said, by the “thousands and millions” for
strove for freedom, of which he was “just part.”
“I think it's that solidarity that's expressing itself today,
this evening in South Africa, where people are celebrating and dancing and
singing when, in other parts of the world they might be with tears and dressed
in black.”
“South Africans are expressing a sense of joy that we are in
a country that produced Nelson Mandela, who's become a hero to the whole
world.”
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