72. Nelson Mandela Part 2

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Monte Mader** (0:30)
Last week we started in 1652 with the Dutch East India Trading Company picturing station at the Cape, a garden, a hospital, a hedge of bitter almond plants to keep the koi koi on the far side of it. That hedge is the whole country, but in miniature. The line drawn across the land somebody already lived on, and then 300 years of moving that line further and further back. We walk the nine frontier wars from 1779 to 1879, a century of the Xhosa losing ground, a river at a time. We covered the cattle killings of 1856 when a 15-year-old girl named Naga-Wusse prophesied that if the Xhosa destroyed their herds, the ancestors would rise and sweep the British into the sea, and a nation slaughtered 400,000 cattle and starved, and the survivors walked into the colony looking for work. We covered Blood River, December 16, 1838, roughly 470 vortruckers behind a logger of wagons, 3,000 Zulu dead and 3 vortruckers wounded. And the Vow, the Covenant the Treggers swore that if God delivered them, they and their descendants would keep the day holy forever. The theology that came out of that day, that the Afrikaner is chosen people of this land, and the land is a covenant grant and separation is divine instruction, is the foundation of the whole system that would become apartheid.
We covered the diamonds of the Kimberley, the gold of the Viteva Toursant, and what they required, the deep level mining and low grade ore in enormous volume, that arithmetic only works if you have a lot of labor, that you pay almost nothing. So the closed compound was invented at the Kimberley in 1885 Men fenced, contracted, searched, kept from their families for months, and the past system that moved labor where it was wanted and nowhere else, and the hut taxed forced men who had cattle into wage work they would otherwise have refused. And then there was the Statute Book, the Native Lands Act of 1913
7% of South Africa reserved for two-thirds of the population, and sharecropping criminalized overnight. And this is how Sol Platjie came to write that awakening Friday morning, June 20th, 1913 The South African Native found himself not actually a slave, but a pariah in the land of his birth. The National Party won the 1948 election on one word, and then legislated it fast. Mixed marriages, immorality, which put police in bedrooms. Population registration, which sorted every human being in the country onto a race card. Group areas, which zoned the cities, bulldozed the parts zoned wrong. 60,000 people out of Sofia Town, 60,000 out of District 6 Suppression of communism, defined broadly enough to cover any scheme aimed at political, industrial, social or economic change. Which is to say that anybody asked for anything. Bantu Education, Hendrik Werfurt, selling the Senate, there is no place for the Bantu in the European community above certain forms of labor. And PASS laws that consolidate under a statute titled, without irony, the Abolition of PASSes Act. We covered the vocabulary because the vocabulary becomes the operating system. Bantu instead of a nation, non-white, a population defined by an absence, endorsed out, influx control, black spot, separate development, terrorism, legally defined in 1967 to include any act that might embarrass the administration of affairs of the state, which made a leaflet a capital offense. And then Sharpeville, March 21, 1960, 69 dead and most shot in the back. Some of them were children. And that's the machine. Three centuries of it, engineered, intentionally legislated, blessed and so profitable. And now it's time for part two.
We put one man in the middle of this story.
Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela was born in 1918 in a mud hut in Bashe River, five years after the Land Act took the country away from his people on paper. He would die in 2013 in a house in Johannesburg, having been elected the president of that same country. Between those two rooms, he was a cattle herder, a runaway, a night watchman at a gold mine, a law clerk, a partner in the first black law firm in South African history, a banned man, a fugitive, the founding commander of a guerrilla army and a defendant facing the gallows, prisoner number 46664 and the negotiator who ended a system nobody thought could end without civil war. And today we're going to try to give the most comprehensive and most honest telling of Mandela's life, his work and his role in changing the history of South Africa. He founded and commanded an army. He trained in demolitions and small arms with Algerian revolutionaries who had just beaten France. And he was allied with communists his entire political life in the Youth League, in the underground, in the dock at Rivonia. And on the balcony the night he came out, and not once in 27 years of prison or five years of presidency, did he denounce them to buy himself a better press. He was not a saint. And that's actually kind of a great thing. Because a saint asks nothing of anybody. A saint gets painted on the wall, printed on the mug, quoted in a corporate onboarding deck by an institution that is at the moment doing things he spent his very life fighting. Revolution is messy and it often comes through imperfect people. The man asks a harder question and the question is what you are willing to lose. Today we're going to cover the story in life of Nelson Mandela, as well as Winnie Madikizela-Mandela along the way. And the story that changed the history of South Africa and ended apartheid once and for all.