It seems so long ago, this history of today. Frozen moments, isolated vignettes, solitary thoughts. To look back now from the edge of tomorrow and remember the struggle of then. Is this not what history is about – reconciling the past with dreams of the future? If so, how ever with words do you re-capture the pernicious convulsion of the Civil Rights Movement and its anesthetized aftermath? For history is a ruthless dictator that discards the passions and feelings, the emotions and fervour of what is life and clings instead to the somber and vapid record of what is fact.
Nonetheless, we celebrate history – black history – in this shortest month of the year. The briefest of pauses to evoke the memories that many wish to forget. This black history, this celebration of survival, this tribute to perseverance and tenacity. A rich pause to contemplate the painful achievements of those denied the right to succeed, of those who triumph against all odds, of those who withstood the unrelenting assault on their dignity.
Should we really speak then of history, the inexorable chronology of memories better forgotten? Ought we instead speak of heritage, a nobler more splendid notion of a people? A notion which encompasses history and transcends the ordinary? How much more of life is heritage than history? Of ancient cultures rich in fullness and complete in grace. A symmetry and balance which embellishes a people filling them with the joy of themselves.
The heritage which we celebrate, this heritage of which Malcolm, Martin and Mandela are but an inextricable part, is the virtue, the goodness, the fundamental justness of humanity. And that is a heritage we should all share, a generosity of spirit that overcomes animosity and intolerance. A heritage much more embracive than merely history.
And that is because the history of black people has been one of unrelenting struggle to assert their dignity and equality, to obtain their freedom and justice from those who would deny the truth of humanity, from those steeped in prejudice, bigotry and racism. This is a history of black people, but it is also the history of whites. It is an unhappy history. Regrettably, it is a continuing one, and a living one. For the moral stain of slavery and colonialism, that the attendant belief in racial superiority, has had a profound and persistent impact on the attitudes and behaviours of subsequent generations of whites who have been unable to resist their subtle forms of unrecognized paternalism.
For black people, living under the steady assault on their self esteem, introspection of the society, the race, the person was inevitable because the inner sense of purpose and direction is challenged by the preoccupation with identity. For black people it was a search for meaning; a need for connectiveness.
With independence and the three decades or more of self-governance, Africa is content with its identity, its meaning, its connectiveness. The Africa in the Diaspora – particularly that in America and Britain – soldiers on in stoic numbness, ripped away from the Motherland and unwelcomed in the adopted land.
For the Black Diaspora, confronted with unwanted alienation, the notion of belonging, the notion of home, becomes all the more self-absorbing. And it is why Black History Month or preferably, Black Heritage Month exists. Because if a consciousness can be developed which links the shallow reality of today with the glorious legacy of the past, a people’s perception the importance of their lives, their reason for being, can truly be transformed. It is this connectiveness, this consciousness, this freedom to be free, that joins Malcolm, Martin and Mandela. And it is this consciousness we celebrate during Black Heritage Month.
For within them, we discover the value and importance of those who come to symbolise a certain power and meaning which clarifies for society its essence, its mission, its raison d’être. For when you search within a Malcolm, a Martin or a Mandela you come to understand the very soul of the society which produced them.
The freedom to be free, to live life in a true partnership with others, equal in dignity and self respect has been at the heart of the struggle for independence in Africa and the quest for justice in the United States. It has been a persevering crusade against social and psychological domination; a relentless campaign to avoid doubt and self-negation.
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If it is true that charismatic leaders emerge in times of turmoil, it explains more adequately than words, the discord that must have gripped America and South Africa to give us a Malcolm, a Martin and a Mandela.
Martin Luther King understood the soul of America’s black society. He understood the paradox of being separate yet inseparable from the fabric of American life. He understood the deep sense of alienation and despair in the black community, and he understood the continuing real manifestation of racism and inequality. His genius was that he challenged America’s morality; forcing the country to examine the very principals it held dear. In one of the greatest speeches ever given, he declared that:
“When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the constitution and the declaration of independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was the promise that all men, yes black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”
Martin was a minister, a man of peace who believed in integration. He understood that integration required a sincere acceptance by all Americans that it is just as good to be a black American as a white American. However, blacks live in a society in which to be unconditionally American is to be white and to be black…well, to be black is a misfortune. Such a notion was reprehensible to Martin, and reprehensible to thousands of other Americans both black and white, who came together in a most extraordinary movement for justice and equality culminating the formal eradication of legalised segregation.
In 1963 Martin Luther King had a dream. In 1968 he was dead, killed by an assassin for believing in that dream. Martin Luther King didn’t live to see full justice for black people, but he made it possible so that others might. He passionately believed that the equality of people was obvious and that a nation could not continue could not be maintained, if the essence of its morality was fundamentally questioned. Martin held out a tantalizing vision of an America which truly could exemplify justice, freedom and equality. His was a message of hope and promise to white America, a message he delivered on behalf of black Americans.
It is unfortunately, a message that has gone virtually unheeded. Nearly a quarter of a century later, race relations in the United States have never looked more bleak. In a recent nationwide survey of white racial attitudes, it was discovered that 78 percent of whites believed that blacks preferred to live off welfare ad are less likely to prefer to be self-supporting. Further, 62 percent said blacks are more likely to be lazy, while 56 percent said that blacks are violence-prone. Fifty-three percent of most whites said that blacks are less intelligent and 51 percent said that blacks are less patriotic.
These are the perceptions of the majority of whites in America today. And the reality for black people? Almost one in four black men between the ages of 20 and 29 is in jail or on parole. There are more black men in jail than they are in university. One in three blacks and almost half of the black children under 18 are living in poverty. Black men in the inner-city neighbourhoods are less likely to reach the age of 65 than men in Bangladesh one of the world’s poorest nations. Indeed, violent crime is the principal cause of death for most young black males.
It is therefore not surprising that in ever increasing numbers, young blacks grow daily more disenchanted with the promise of integration. And in its place the strident militancy of Malcolm X blares forth as vibrant and real today as it was at his death in 1967.
The message of Malcolm X was intended for black people and not whites. And his message was simply that blacks had to control their own destiny, and to do whatever was necessary by any means necessary to protect themselves. His message had an extraordinary appeal to seething, young blacks, trapped at society’s bottom by society’s best, because it forcefully articulated their growing anger and frustration and addressed their need to find a purpose and a meaning more relevant than integration.
And yet it was not so much Malcolm’s message that had appeal, rather it was the man himself. For Malcolm captured the tone and mood of defiant young blacks and thus came to represent a stronger, more virile symbol of blackness, a more radical sense of urgency. It is for this reason that today, the presence of Malcolm X looms larger than life in the despairing black communities across America.
If Martin Luther King understood the soul of black folks, Malcolm X understood the root cause of their anger. Where Martin believed in integration, Malcolm believed in separation. While Martin was a spiritual passivist, Malcolm was a revolutionary nationalist. While Martin embodied the middle class and the intelligentsia, Malcolm personified the lower class and the disenchanted. No two people could be further apart ideologically than Malcolm and Martin yet each legitimately represented black America. Each stood for a belief so at odds with the other yet both sought the same objective of freedom for freedom’s sake. And both were true and right and honest in the principals in which they believed.
Both sought to restore back dignity, but Malcolm sought to expand the parameters by embracing a much broader, more encompassing notion of blackness, one that would link the struggles of black Americans with those of black Africa. In this he was not unique because the seductive siren call of Africa has had an intoxicating effect on blacks literally from the moment they set food on the American continent. Malcolm was only following in the tradition of a long line of black nationalist who had advocated a return to Africa. Malcolm fused the struggle of black Americans and Africans into one common cause, arguing that the attitude of the Afro-American could not be disconnected from the attitude of the African. He once stated that:
The only way you can really understand the black man in America, and the changes in his heart and mind is to fully understand the heart and mind of the black man on the African continent; because it is the same heart and the same mind, although separated by four hundred years and by the Atlantic Ocean. There are those who wouldn’t like us to have the same heart and the same mind for fear that the heart and mind might get together. Because when our people in this country received a new image of Africa, they automatically united through the new image of themselves.
What Malcolm sought was a stronger bonding with Africa which would re-define a consciousness of self in black Americans. In his view it was absolutely essential that black people know their history and through their history, became aware of their cultural heritage. He was convinced that should this happen, it would at once give purpose, meaning and direction to black Americans while forging bonds of genuine brotherhood between Africans and black Americans.
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It is arguable that Malcolm had a far too romantic view of African and black American solidarity. And to some degree, it is questionable even now as to whether Africans see blacks in the Diaspora as indistinguishable from themselves. Yet one African has done more than any other to demonstrate the commonality of struggle.
Nelson Mandela, with his quiet dignity and regal bearing, unexpectedly stirred black America with a passionate intensity that overflowed in tumultuous welcome when he visited the United States shortly after his release from 27 years imprisonment. No black person in the history of America has ever been received in quite the fashion of Nelson Mandela. But then few men anywhere has sacrificed so much and been so uncompromising n his principles than has Mandela. This was no where better appreciated than on the cruel and unforgiving streets of America’s inner cities. In these places where respect is hard earned, Mandela was lionized, for he was seen as being synonymous with their own struggle for dignity and self respect.
And it is not surprising. The struggle for liberation in South Africa mirrored in so many ways the struggle for racial justice in America. In both countries black people were forced to live a schizophrenic existence: not free to be black; not wanting to be white. The appalling conditions of urban America replicated themselves in the violent townships of South Africa, where hundreds of lives are lost every week and the killing continues while peace withers on a bargaining table.
And if the times dictate the man, then Nelson Mandela is simultaneously South Africa’s Martin Luther King and its Malcolm X. For the essence of Mandela embraces both: a revolutionary as a youth, and now the elderly statesman. He believes in peace, but also believes in achieving freedom by any means necessary. And because he desired freedom at any cost, he spent more than a third of his life in jail. Ironically and inadvertently, his long incarceration proved the most effective stratagem possible in illustrating the horrors of apartheid and galvanizing international support.
Yet, there is a certain vulnerability about Mandela that has little to do with age. In a rather peculiar fashion, there is a loneliness about him that seemingly grows deeper by the day. The laborious negotiation process has effectively imprisoned and isolated him as much as did Pollsmoor, severing once again his vital link to his people. Nonetheless, within him is lodged the unmet hopes and aspirations of millions of black South Africans. He remains a revered figure above the squalor and pettiness of politics, a man whose strength is the cause he serves.
South Africa is one of the few societies in the world in which the past and future are unclear. The task before Mandela is far more herculean than any that faced Martin or Malcolm. To a large, and unfair degree, the dignity of black people everywhere depends on what Mandela must deliver – the removal of the last vestiges of degradation and servitude that have been a part of the black psyche for nearly five centuries. He will deliver, and as long as this earth has people, his contribution will be forever remembered in the annals of history both black history and white. But when that history is written, it will also recall the unity of purpose, direction and resolve demonstrated by black Americans and black South Africans in their collective struggle against repression and racial domination and the names of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X will be synonymous with that o Nelson Mandela.
History ultimately becomes heritage because the truth about the past is an invaluable treasure for the generations of the future. The vast melange of fables and legends, heroes and leaders weaves a lyrical rich tapestry of historical identity that no people can live without. And so Black Heritage month commemorates the unity of struggle with Malcolm , Martin and Mandela have so richly epitomized, because unity is the prerequisite of liberation and liberation is the true state of humanity.
Malcolm, Martin and Mandela. Three men on two continents with one objective: the restoration of black esteem. Black heritage is a celebration of conviction, character and commitment. A celebration of Malcolm, Martin and Mandela.