By GENE MUSTAIN and MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writers | Tuesday, May 3, 1994
JOHANNESBURG—Invoking the epic cry of another great liberation struggle, Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress proclaimed South Africa “Free at last.”
With only about half the ballots counted and the conclusion foregone, they claimed victory in the nation’s founding election, then vowed to roll up their sleeves immediately and begin improving the lots of millions of impoverished blacks.
“This is a joyous night for the human spirit, you have ended apartheid,” Mandela told a joyous throng of supporters at a downtown hotel. “Now is the time for all South Africans to join together to celebrate the birth of democracy.”
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Langston Hughes
A Facebook friend, John Burroughs, posted this searing Langston Hughes poem today:
Song for a Dark Girl
Way Down South in Dixie
(Break the heart of me)
They hung my black young lover
To a cross roads tree.
Way Down South in Dixie
(Bruised body high in air)
I asked the white Lord Jesus
What was the use of prayer.
Way Down South in Dixie
(Break the heart of me)
Love is a naked shadow
On a gnarled and naked tree.
Which brings to mind Billie Holiday’s hearbreaking song:
Billie Holiday, 1949
Strange Fruit
Southern trees bear strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.
Pastoral scene of the gallant south,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.
Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.
I would put a Youtube video of the song up except those links, over time, are not that reliable.
UPDATE: Alright, here’s the Youtube video. If it doesn’t play, doubleclick on the video to go to Youtube, then refresh until it plays:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4ZyuULy9zs[/youtube]
By GENE MUSTAIN and MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writers | Tuesday, May 3, 1994
JOHANNESBURG—This day was never supposed to come.
Nelson Mandela was never supposed to return from life imprisonment to divert South Africa from the ruinous path apartheid has laid for its peoples.
And blacks in this country were never supposed to vote in an election. Hendrik Verwoerd—one of architects of the apartheid system—guaranteed these things. Yesterday, he was proven spectacularly wrong, and Mandela was the one proven right.
He spoke from the heart and danced like a boy. It was a victorious day for all South Africans, he proclaimed, ever the unifier. “The people have won.”
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Zina Saunders‘ illustration for “Guantanamo at Home” in The Nation magazine in which Jeanne Theoharis, with the proposed closing of Guantanamo, takes a hard look at the harsh treatment of terror suspects in prisons on American soil.
Read the article here.
Zina Saunders did this piece to accompany an article in The Nation magazine. Ordinarily, it would carry her byline but I do not want attribute to her my own thoughts on this issue. My thoughts, such as they are, are unformed and unsophisticated, incoherent even. Try this:
Isn’t it time we men stop manifesting our anxieties about our mothers’, daughters’, wives’, and sisters’ sexuality by passing laws to govern what they can and cannot do with their own bodies, their own lives?
I don’t have an answer. I just know that man’s laws and decrees, especially when they try to govern what women do with their bodies, wreck lives instead.
By MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writer | Sunday, May 8, 1994
JOHANNESBURG—Zodwa Tshabalala, her left leg shattered at the knee, crawled through an open gate as neighbors who heard her screaming clustered around her.
“I’ll kill you if you are not gone by the time I come back,” her fiancé told her before he drove away.
Thembi, the fiancé, spent this March afternoon battering her, punching her face, kicking her prone, injured body. He then threw her and their eight-month-old daughter out of the home the couple bought when they decided to marry months earlier.
It has been two months since the attack.
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By MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writer | Sunday, May 8, 1994
JOHANNESBURG—South Africa’s new national assembly sits for the first time tomorrow, and the African National Congress, which holds 252 of the chamber’s 400 seats, will select Nelson Mandela, as president.
On Tuesday, he will be sworn in as the nation’s first president chosen democratically. The theme of the inauguration concert, with some 3,000 performers, is “Many Cultures, One Nation.”
The weight of history, of course, demands this.
Much of the world is coming to share in the celebration—and, perhaps, taste some of the smoked crocodile and ostrich dishes on the menu.
Delegations representing more than 125 nations, including 40 heads of state, plan to attend. The American contingent is headed by Vice President Al Gore.
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By MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writer | Wednesday, May 11, 1994
PRETORIA—Climaxing his journey from political prisoner to nation builder, Nelson Mandela assumed the office of president of South Africa yesterday vowing that “never again” would racial exploitation be tolerated.
In a joyous ceremony that marked the end of the country’s pariah status and celebrated the nation’s transformation into a beacon of racial reconciliation, Mandela proclaimed: “Let freedom reign.”
The American delegation included U.S. Vice President Al Gore, First Lady Hillary Clinton and Jesse Jackson. Gore said South Africa has sent a powerful message to the world that differences can be set aside for the sake of a nation.
Watched by international visitors including Vice President Gore, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, Palestinian Leader Yasser Arafat, and Cuban President Fidel Castro, Mandela spoke in deep, measured tones as he swore allegiance to the new republic and its constitution.
As he said, “So help me God,” shouts of “Viva” rang out from the huge, multi-racial crowd gathered at the foot of the Union Buildings amphitheater.
My recent journey to South Africa to witness its epic sprint to democracy plunged me, like a pebble flung into a stream, deep into memories of my childhood in Africa.
Beside unleashing bred-in-bone memories, my sojourn forced me to examine thoughts I had long held, especially about myself. By the time I left South Africa, my persona, carefully constructed as to be shorn of race, had been sorely tested, shaken and ultimately redrawn.
My story began 31 years ago in Accra, Ghana, West Africa, where I was born.
The strongest ripple of boyhood memory was of a night lit by the moon as my mother, Esther Lamiley Mills, sang sweet songs to me while I tapped on a drum. It was masquerade season, similar to Halloween, and we sat in a makeshift hut of palm fronds we had put up in a small compound that my grandfather shared with his children. I was 5 years old and my mother was 20.
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