71. Nelson Mandela Part 1- The History of Apartheid

**Monte Mader** (0:00)
Nelson Mandela was removed from the United States terrorism watch list on July 1st of 2008 He was 89 years old. He had been president of South Africa. He had won the Nobel Peace Prize 15 years earlier. Until the bill was signed, every visit he made to the United States required a specific waiver from the Secretary of State because the paperwork of the State Department classified him as a terrorist. The African National Congress was designated a terrorist organization by the United States government in the 1980s. It stayed on that list for more than 20 years after Apartheid ended. Margaret Thatcher called the ANC a typical terrorist organization in 1987 Dick Cheney voted against a congressional resolution calling for Mandela's release in 1986 and defended that vote as late as 2000 That word terrorist is the reason this will be a two-part series and it is the reason part one is not about Nelson Mandela at all. Because we cannot understand what was done to Mandela without understanding what was done to the country and the history leading up to it. We cannot understand what was done to the country starting in 1948, which is where most of the stories begin. Apartheid was not an aberration. It was a codification of 300 years of what people were already practicing. It was the moment a system had already stolen land and labor and cattle and language, and the names of people who lived there sat down, wrote the theft into a statute, gave it a name and blessed it in church. Part one, we're going to talk about the machine. We're going to talk about colonialism, history of South Africa, who built it, what it did to human beings, and the thread that runs all of it that leads us into apartheid. Part two is going to be about the man who helped break them free. One more thing before we really jump in because it's the spine of both of these episodes. Apartheid was a theology before it was a policy. The white men who designed it did not believe they were committing a crime. They believe they were obeying an instruction. Their churches taught them that God had divided humanity into separate nations and appointed the boundaries of their habitation, that this division was permanent and holy, and that erasing it was rebellion against divine order. They had a proof text, they preached it, and they legislated from it. It is very tied to the theology of the time, and it made its way into the legislation and the justification of the actions that would follow. Now, that is not Christianity. That is a form of Christian nationalism, a religion fused to a racial and political order until loyalty to the nation and loyalty to God become indistinguishable from each other, and the church becomes an organ of the state. That distinction matters, and this series will keep drawing it because the same Bible produced Desmond Tutu. And that's what this whole show is about, is about flipping tables, flipping narratives. Let's start talking about South Africa and Nelson Mandela in this two-part series on flipping tables.
Hello and welcome back to Flipping Tables. Welcome to all the new listeners. Thank you for the recent shares to the show, the recent reviews and comments I've been getting. So appreciate it. My name is Monte Maeder. If you stumbled upon me outside of social media, I am a former Christian nationalist who now tries to work to make the world better, more sane. I teach a lot about the Bible, a lot about history, so that we can all make better decisions that are not rooted in ancient prejudices or in really bad translations of the Bible or the abuse of other people. Not a fan of misusing that. A couple announcements before I jump in today.
The first is, again, thank you so much to my Patreon supporters. You're the reason that this show exists.
patreon.com/montemager has been a wonderful place for community. There's going to be some more pop-ups coming up in August.
If you've been following me on social media, you know that as of the time of this release, I will be doing the Women's Walk Across America, walking from Jefferson City, Missouri to St. Louis, Missouri, helping participate and rally support around a woman named Emily Wah, who decided she couldn't sit still in her home. And even though she's a mom of two, she needed to protest that what we are seeing is not normal in the world. So she created an extraordinary event to hopefully encourage ordinary people to get out of the house and move. You can follow my walk there or get involved with it, because this walk will go all the way till November 8th. You can go to womenswalkacrossamerica.com to find me there. I will be doing a Q&A meet and greet in Jefferson City and in St. Louis during those times. So if you're not familiar with my website, go to montemager.com, go to the contact page, and if you sign up for my newsletter, you will get all the up-to-date information about any events that I'm holding in the upcoming weeks. Also we just finished the Bible study series around how we got the Bible in the Old Testament. We went book by book. Where did they come from? When were they written? Who wrote it? Amazing series. I was so impressed with people being so attentive and so passionate about the topic. I'm taking a summer break from those Bible studies. As a reminder, the Bible studies are always free. Always, always, always. They will always be free to you.