Re: [Redbadbear] Mandela

 I have had many thoughts about Mandela over the years.

They differ somewhat from Hunter's because I have been in circumstances where I have had to consider and deal with some of the consequences of the real limits to what the movement could accomplish--and, also, to the real failures that Mandela's and subsequent administrations have had.

I never met the man, though some of my friends did. There is a heart-rending story or two in Ida Susser's book about how her parents (ex-ANC folks who fled to the US and became major public health researchers and AIDS folks) tried to educate the ANC about the AIDS threat and how to respond.) 

 I was at a meeting room at the end of the 2000 International AIDS Conference in Durban when he spoke and the crowd went into uproarious chanting of his name--but where even then he did not denounce the South African government's failures on AIDS.  (Which is no small thing--large percents of people in his country have the disease and millions have died from it.)  At the end, he walked out of the room and walked within five or six feet of me, and I remember this moment of deeply mixed emotions.  Mandela spoke at other later AIDS conferences in other countries, and always was acclaimed.

In any case, I have mixed feeling about him.

These come out in the following poems, I think.



To make homes for thechildren of Durban 
 
Isaac Asimov: “It’s the transition that’s troublesome”
 
As children surround me in the street,
begging,
wearing little,
faces dirty,
faces wasted,
I mull over their homelessness 
and likely fates,
and how simple it would be
to make them places to stay:
 
A room for each,
lovingly colored,
lovingly screenedlest mosquitoes infect,
to banish the dengue,
to stymie the ague,
rooms with water,water pure
both hot and cold,
pure to drink 
so feet will run butbowels will not,
pure to cleanse thecuts of happy running,
merry scrapes,
screens and water toabolish
the wasting away ofthe dying child.
 
Simple to imagine,
so simple to make—
a room, some paint,
some screens,
some rain,
some pipes,
so simple to make,
but who’ll pay the piper? the screener? the painter?
So simple to make,
but never to happen
given the greed
and the need for the greed,
given the bank vaults,
lined with flotillas and missiles,
the loyalties and ideas
both Stateside and here,
the thoughts and commitments
at top and at bottom,
displayed on our cars with their stars
and on houses with stripes,
the Union Jacked dishes
and the cups with the Queen,
the songs to Mandela, Mbeke, One Nation,
 
the 15-hour stints
at our daily routines.
 
Yes, a room for each child,
a few simple screens
and clean pure water,
so easy to make
if the piper is paid,
so easy to make,
 
so easy
 
if ...
            what?


 
Here is a poem I wrote on September 10, 2001. I had no ideawhat the next day and next decade would bring:
 
World Conference againstRacism, Durban, 2001
 
A year ago, during the Conference on AIDS,
I walked the same halls
where the powerful now orchestrate arrogance
over racism and slavery.
 
A year ago, I saw South Africans dying
abandoned to the virus
by leaders who know only power and growth.
Even the saintliest among them,
Mandela, best of all the rulers,
craved increasing trade,
craved investment and aid,
left AIDS to spread untrammeled
barely impacting
the leaders’ agendas,
nowhere affecting 
their actions,
their needs.
 
Today, I hear statesmen’s quibbles and squabbles 
about text doomed to archives,
blither and bluster by a convocation of vultures,
rulers who rail against past racist evils,
who flay by-gone slavery but stymie all action, 
who evict landless tenants at the whiff ofinvestment,
who ignore modern slavery, caste-power, and woe.
These rulers, all rulers,
named this conference “against racism,”
came mainly to stonewall,
or perhaps to point elsewhere 
to point at their rivals with fingers of blame, 
pointing with fingers
that shimmer with shame
as they protect profits and rule from
the thoughts of the workers,
as they play the race-card of power
by blaming the “other.”,
 
So these hallways of Durban
now resound with soundbites by rulers,
rulers denouncing racisms by-gone,
rulers whose needs feed new racisms’ flames,
while the streets of the city house thousands dyingwith AIDS,
Africans dying in a world shaped by gold.


 
African decades 
 
Decades
disempowered,
despised,
dominated
by thebullets and truncheons
ofwhite greed for black labour,
asdecades of babies
emerged,grew, and died,
asmarchers for freedom sank slaughtered
atSharpeville, with Mandela engaoled,
asresistance wilted, dispersed, then renewed
aspower grew conscious and workers said “no,”
whenworkers walked outwards
so machinerygrew silent,
soprofits grew losses
andMandela was freed.
 
Then,the racists, dismayed,
liveddismantled pretensions
thoughlounging in comfort,
but theparties of freedom
leftworkdays as labor,
so theblacks now in office
soughtfood and sought health
throughthe old do-nought machines,
so thevirus found freedom,
so thevirus found homes,
and thedreams and the laughter
transmutedto pain,
tochildren in Durban
near-nakedand begging
whilemothers died gasping,
diedweightless while waiting
forpills that would save them,
butpills still unbought
sincethose new now to power
cutbudgets,
cutlife.


 
Coffin Nails*   
 
I havesat inside this job for 27 years,
years longlike Mandela’s as he paced and toiled
onRobbens Isle.
Hissuffering stood witness,
shoredhis movement up,
helpedunseat a regime of
pureevil.
When hewent free, his failures unleashed
HIV
to seepthrough the veins and mines of his
nativeland,
perhapsaided by my enclosure within the
wallsof fighting HIV mainly with research
whileall my hard-built skills at fighting
capital
pacedup and down within the narrow bars that
stealmy time.
 
 
**TomHayden gave a talk at a National SDS conference in New York City in lateDecember, 1965, in which he described our parents’ generations’ jobs as coffinnails that held back activism.
 



 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Hunter Gray <[email protected]>
To: Redbadbear <[email protected]>
Cc: Bear Without Borders <[email protected]>; SycamoreCanyon <[email protected]>; marxist <[email protected]>; newgreencanada <[email protected]>
Sent: Fri, Dec 6, 2013 5:09 am
Subject: [Redbadbear] Mandela



  
    
                  

I have, as many of us, I'm sure,  some thoughts on Nelson Mandela and his passing.
 
While many of the accolades he's receiving are honest and from honorable people of a variety of political and socio-economic perspectives, it's interesting to hear his praises sung in this country by some of those whose political and socio-economic positions are directly antithetical to his.
 
In skimming  a few discussion lists, far and away from ours, I've noted very sharp criticisms of him from ostensible leftists.  It isn't enough that Mandela and his co-activists, mostly black but not all, were able to build a movement that accomplished a miracle -- bringing one of the worst racial dictatorships in humanity's history into broad political democracy, desegregation, and integration -- and via non-violence.  The "bitch" of the critics of whom I'm speaking, fault him heavily for not destroying capitalism.  Well, these things take some good time, even under the best of circumstances,. These critics strike me as living room types, whose radicalism is cerebral, and who haven't ever been in the streets under potentially lethal circumstances.  If they've been to South Africa, it's been as superficially observing tourist types.
 
Back in the days of the American civil rights movement, I very occasionally found myself speaking to groups outside of Dixie.  Almost all of the people present were sensibly empathetic.  Occasionally, there would be Birchy types, not unexpected -- but there were also, now and then, cloistered "leftists" who tried -- unsuccessfully, I should add -- to derail my "river of talk" on the Southern Movement by claiming we weren't doing enough to overthrow capitalism.  B.S., pure and simple.  My short and curt response to them was (and is) -- first things first.
 
It's a miracle, and a tribute to many, many thousands of dedicated civil rights activists in this country, that a vast amount of Good Change was accomplished nonviolently -- and with relatively little bloodshed.  In the last analysis, the South and other problematic parts of this country, are part of the United States with, however tattered, its politically democratic traditions.
 
We have an always unfinished country and world -- and the justice struggle goes on as it most certainly should. But for the longest time, a great many of us of varied views, felt that nothing would change in totally sovereign South Africa short of massively tragic and sanguinary violence.  That it did change substantially without that "price" is, obviously, a tribute to Mandela and his colleagues and a vast throng of black people, and their non-black allies.  To belittle them and their accomplishments is to wear the brand of fools.
 
Hunter Bear
 
HUNTER GRAY [HUNTER BEAR/JOHN R SALTER JR] Mi'kmaq / 
St. Francis Abenaki / St. Regis Mohawk 
Member, National Writers Union AFL-CIO
 
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