Word: mandelas
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...decline of the ANC is all the more dramatic considering the moral heights it once occupied. In the years it was fighting apartheid, its mission was clear and its righteousness unassailable. ANC members were freedom fighters repressed by a regime whose racism recalled the worst of European imperialism. Mandela, locked up for 27 years only to emerge with forgiveness for his oppressors, was a secular saint. There was no equivocation here. With the ANC and Mandela on one side and apartheid on the other, South Africa was literally a question of black and white...
During those early years, with Mandela presiding as the founding father of what Tutu dubbed "The Rainbow Nation," diversity, it was said, was no longer a source of division, but one of strength, hope, even beauty. Mandela's embrace of the new vision hid the fact that many in the ANC rank and file were struggling to discard their old monochrome view of the world. The ANC was - and still is - confronting the same dilemma that faces all liberation movements once in power. Simply put: good revolutionaries often make bad democrats. Revolutionaries plot in secret, follow orders and serve...
...TIME's Nelson Mandela covers...
...example of a revolutionary movement lapsed into self-enrichment and autocracy. But because South Africa is the continent's biggest economy and natural leader, the ANC is a role model and has influence beyond South Africa's borders. That's not always been a good thing. Mbeki, who succeeded Mandela as President in 1999, tried to forge a middle way between revolution and democracy by calling on the ANC to embrace a "democratic revolution" in government. The approach proved schizophrenic. Mbeki the democrat adopted liberal economics, oversaw impressive growth and won plaudits as a consensus-building peace negotiator across Africa...
...blame for this poverty by arguing that blacks were free to do what they wanted in the homelands - but had proved unwilling or incapable of developing. It wasn't an argument that washed with their opponents. The Eastern Cape's poverty lit the flame of rebellion in Mandela and Mbeki, both born and raised near the dirt-poor Transkei city of Mthatha, and Steve Biko, who grew up in nearby King William's Town. Even today, both the ANC and COPE claim the Eastern Cape as their heartland...