NOTE: This brief write-up is a prologue to a longer article I intend to write sometime in the future about the variegated reaction of the African continent to the Israel-Palestine conflict over the decades.
Today, I post an abridged version of an interview of Nelson Mandela discussing various issues including the Israel-Palestine conflict. For those who might not know, Mandela was an important leader within the African National Congress (ANC), which became the ruling party of post-apartheid South Africa in 1994.
Recently, I dug out an interesting video from the deep bowels of YouTube. It features the late Nelson Mandela being interviewed by veteran American journalist Ted Koppel in 1990 about the stance of the African National Congress (ANC) on a variety of individuals that are extremely unpopular in the United States, including Yasser Arafat and Fidel Castro.
For those who don’t know, Cuban expeditionary troops fought alongside Angolan soldiers, SWAPO guerrillas and ANC irregular fighters during the South African Border Wars (1966-1990).
Cuban intervention—which began in 1975— helped the Angolans and their non-state guerrilla allies achieve the military stalemate that helped convince apartheid South Africa to end its illegal occupation of the Territory of South West Africa (now called Namibia) and begin earnest negotiations to dismantle the racial segregationist system within its own borders.
Apart from the Soviets and Chinese, several African countries including Algeria, Egypt, Nigeria, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Tanzania and Libya contributed money and weaponry to those fighting the apartheid South African state. This explains Mandela’s strident support for Gaddafi during the interview with Koppel.
Although officially against apartheid, Israel secretly collaborated with the apartheid South African regime in the development of nuclear weapons starting from 1975. Long before the Israelis began their collaboration with the apartheid state, the ANC openly identified with the Palestinians, seeing them as being in the same struggle for self-determination as the black South Africans.
Keep all of the above in mind, when you watch this relatively short video clip of a much longer town-hall style interview of Nelson Mandela by Ted Koppel:
Thanks. I really enjoyed that video, and will be stealing it.
Chima, your Uganda article does not appear on your page. And I clicked on the newsletter link, it took me to an error page.