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When Barack Obama delivers Nelson Mandela's 16th annual conference in Johannesburg, on the occasion of the centennial of the birth of Nelson Mandela, anti-apartheid champion, the moment will be very personal for him. 39, former president.
His Obama spokesman said that Obama regarded it as the most important speech since his departure, and Obama wrote that his political awakening began with a speech against apartheid, the official policy of segregation South African racial: -the pre-war rally on the campus of Occidental College in Los Angeles in 1981 was "the first thing I did about a problem or policy or policy, "he said when the former South African president died on December 5, 2013. 19659003] But the speech will also have implications that extend well beyond beyond the staff. After all, the story of the struggles for racial justice in the United States and South Africa has been closely linked for more than a century.
Here is an overview of the evolution of the overlap between the anti-apartheid movement and the United States. The Civil Rights Movement and What to Know About the Context Surrounding Obama's Historic Speech
American Inspirations and Early Cultural Exchanges
The Stories of South Africa and the United States United States are closely related to the stories of one race trying to dominate another. In the first case, a minority of white colonial rulers exercised control over the black population of the region until the twentieth century, with the apartheid regime remaining after independence; in the latter case, slavery was followed by the adoption of state and local "Jim Crow" laws that imposed racial segregation in many places.
So it is not surprising that comparisons and exchanges between the two cultures have long been established
By the early twentieth century, missionaries and African-American artists visited the city. South Africa and black South Africans have begun to register in the United States. universities, both historically black colleges and universities as well as predominantly white schools. For example, John Dube, who was to become the first president of the African National Congress (ANC) in 1912, studied at Oberlin College in Ohio. He also wrote newspaper articles that informed black South Africans about what was happening with African Americans; Black American publications such as the NAACP's Crisis and Marcus Garvey's 1945-19007 were available in libraries, and African-American sailors who docked at ports such as Cape Town brought pop cultural influences. South Africans have come to idolize African-American actors and boxers like Joe Louis and Jack Johnson. (Mandela too, as an amateur boxer himself.)
This exchange has been going on for decades, and cultural and political exchanges have often overlapped; for example, the famous South African singer Miriam Makeba married Stokely Carmichael, founder of the Black Panther movement, and Langston Hughes introduced many Americans to the facts of apartheid by publishing the work of black South Africans who could not not be published at home.
As the black citizens of both nations struggled with discriminatory systems, progressive ideas spread between the two countries, even though the political activists who conceived them could not always be there to share them in person. In the 1920s, the South African government began to be increasingly cautious in allowing African Americans to enter the country, launching a crackdown that would last until the end of apartheid in the early 1990s. The University of Fort Hare was established in 1916 to educate black South Africans so that they did not go to America to be educated, censors banned the albums of Makeba and Harry Belafonte, and when Martin Luther King Jr. was invited to speak in South Africa by student groups in 1966, the government refused him a visa.
"The exchange that began in the 1890s made them nervous [the South African government]," says historian Robert Trent Vinson, author of The Americans Are Coming! : Dreams of African-American liberation in segregationist South Africa. "When blacks came to South Africa, they were missionaries, apolitical blacks or personalities of the show or sport for a special reason [who] were closely followed by the police."
as Malcolm X, made it a point to travel elsewhere in Africa and avoiding South Africa. Yet during this period leading up to the 1960s, even though a lot of work remained to be done in the United States, many South African activists found inspiration in what their counterparts in the United States accomplished.
"Black South Africans who could not go to America idealized the African American position to a certain level, and saw them as racial models born of hundreds of years of slavery and creating a some kind of advancement – [whether] as a sports hero or writer – despite Jim Crow, "says Vinson." Black South Africans were a generation behind in creating their own institutions. "[19659013] Nelson Mandela, Robert F. Kennedy and Civil Rights
In the 1960s, however, the modern era of American civil rights reached its most famous moments.
The Sharpeville Massacre marked a turning point when the South African police of 21 March 1960 fired 69 black protesters in the town 60 km south of Johannesburg, the government banned the ANC, which Mandela joined in 1944. of Africa d u South, there was a general feeling that a new strategy was in order, moving away from the American model of nonviolence associated with the leadership of Martin Luther King Jr. (Interestingly, King and Mandela have were inspired by the thought of Gandhi, whose time spent in South Africa helped shape his thinking about non-violence.)
"In this context, ANC leaders difficult decision to say: "We have tried all nonviolent manifestations in the last 50 years and have not done anything. In fact, things got worse. We have to go underground. Either we submit or we try to defend ourselves, "says Vinson. The following actions made the headlines: the car bomb that killed 19 people outside the Air Force Headquarters in Pretoria in 1983 and the explosion in a A bar in Durban that killed three people and wounded more than 60 in 1986. But in 1964, Mandela gave his speech "I'm ready to die," which even resonated with King, who wrote shortly afterwards. that he realized that the nonviolent resistance practiced in the United States was not really possible in South Africa. King had also warned shortly after the massacre that the "incident" should also serve as an alarm signal to the United States.
Even if their tactics sometimes diverged, American civil rights activists continued to link their struggle to the struggle of South Africans. Africans, to show that what was happening in the US South was just one of many black struggles for equality in the world.
The Non-Violent Student Coordination Committee (SNCC) declared its links with the "African struggle" at its founding conference. in 1960, a nod to the continent-wide decolonization movement, and in 1964, for example, he sponsored a protest at the South African Consulate to the United Nations in solidarity with Nelson Mandela and other members of the ANC tried for sabotage. to bring down the apartheid regime. Martin Luther King corresponded with the first Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Albert Lutuli, who won the award in 1960 and described him as "a devoted pilot of our struggle who found himself at the helm. while the movement of freedom went up in orbit.
The links between the two movements were strengthened in 1966. And at a time when many black political activists could not enter the country freely, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who became a white ally of the American civil rights movement, delivered his famous "Ripples of Hope" speech to white students at the University of Cape Town on June 6, 1966. "Whenever a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to ameliorate the fate of others, or strikes "He said," By crossing one million centers of energy and daring, these ripples build a current that can sweep the most powerful walls of the city. Oppression and Resistance. [19659003] And More American Civil Rights Activist Tactics also Influenced South Africa The Anti-Apartheid Activist Steve Biko "Developed the Movement of Black Conscience Directly from Black Power" , explains Peniel Joseph, director f the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at the University of Texas at Austin. Experts say the movement played a role in promoting a climate of debate that empowered students who protested against compulsory courses in Afrikaans, the language of their colonial oppressors, in what is now known as the Soweto uprisings of 1976. What started as one of hundreds of deaths all over the country, and the photography of violence mobilized international opposition to the regime
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The Anti-Apartheid Movement Progress Made
Among the White Americans, Awareness of the Inequality of the Apartheid Regime in Africa South rose in the 70s and 80s, as President Ronald Reagan was under increasing pressure to impose economic sanctions on South Africa. 1970, most of Africa is independent with the exception of South Africa, so South Africa seems strange. [People were thinking] did not we get rid of colonialism? Said Vinson.
Black activists urged Americans to boycott American companies doing business in South Africa. Young African-Americans were particularly galvanized by the death of Biko, who died in a prison cell in Pretoria after an assault by a white policeman. When Jesse Jackson went on to presidential elections in 1984 and 1988, he promised that as president, he would limit US investment in South Africa and increase foreign aid to African countries. Awareness increased further during demonstrations that began in front of the Embassy of South Africa in Washington in November 1984, and which, a year later, led to nearly 3,000 largely symbolic arrests. , including 23 members of the House of Representatives. The weather called "one of the longest continuous protests in American history." The protesters were joined by MLK's widow Coretta Scott King, Arthur Ashe and Harry Belafonte, and even the children of Robert F. Kennedy, Rory and Douglas. Rosa Parks demonstrated in front of the Embassy almost exactly 30 years after she became famous for refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus. "For black Americans, a response to South Africa is an answer to them," said Randall Robinson, anti-apartheid activist, at TIME in 1985. "This is a test of our own democracy."
pay back in October 1986, when Congress passed economic sanctions on South Africa. By the end of June 1987, more than 100 US companies had left the country in the previous two and a half years, TIME reported. The dismantling of the apartheid regime would officially begin in the early 1990s, when Mandela was released from prison and South African President FW de Klerk legalized political parties such as the ANC as long as they renounced violence as a tactic
. The regime officially ended with President Mandela's election in South Africa in 1994. His election, for some African Americans in the United States, ushered in a multiracial democracy.
"There is almost a reversal of the historical relationship. "Now, it is African-Americans who are turning to black South Africans like Mandela, who fought to overthrow the world's worst racial domination since Nazi Germany and replace it with a democratic, non-racial society. Mandela becomes a fine example of what African Americans could do.In America, we always try to work with the idea of multiracial democracy. "
Of course, the end of apartheid did not mean the end of racial problems. The transatlantic dialogue on how to work through them continues – Obama played a major role in this effort, the Mandela Washington Fellowship for Young African Leaders launched by the State Department of his administration in 2014 to the series This week's workshops and leadership trainings. 200 promising young people. And, as a former anti-apartheid activist who became the first African-American president of the United States, he is himself an incarnation of this story
"There is a struggle going on!" , He said in his first speech of 1981.] "There is an ocean away, but it is a struggle that affects each of us, whether we know it or not."
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