Mandela: The Vertical Perspective

Koot van wyk (DLitt et Phil; ThD)

Visiting Professor

Department of Liberal Arts Education

Kyungpook National University

Sangju Campus

South Korea

Conjoint lecturer of Avondale College

Australia

The Media made Mandela and is determined to keep him there. They created an image of him which is like a sack made to catch a cat. The cat constantly wants to get out and it is a hard time for them to keep him in that image construction of theirs. Of course the items they selected can be found in him and to much of it he ascribed during the last part of his career. But, what the Media focused on was only their self-interests. Using information overseas as a template for problems in their own countries.

This focus of the Media is only horizontally orientated, from a pure humanistic level and no more. There is however, another focus that should be viewed here and that story I wish to highlight here.

Mandela was arrested for terrorism and intention to sabotage the country. It is interesting that a Jew taught them how to make explosives and it was a Jew who prosecuted them both and send them to jail. Mandela admitted about his deviating lifestyle orally.

The Afrikaner regime was run by people who were mostly Calvinistic Christians. Nearly 70% of the country were Christians, white and black and others.

Twelve years after Mandela was jailed, white pastors and white professors at Stellenbosch University,  like the famous Economy professor, and other Universities around the country, were preaching and publishing in the Afrikaner newspapers the main question: what about our black neighbors? The issue was preached about week after week and in many articles related to the topic of Christian duty to your neighbor, the issue was raised or hinted at. All these Christians knew, it would be the right thing to consider this point seriously.

The Prime Ministers, one after the other, with this moral political conscience on their Christian mindset, started already in 1976 and later to systematically carve on the legal system and judicial system paving the way for the turnover.

It was like a spiral that got bigger and bigger and the general mood of the country was the unwillingness to be unchristian to suggest the opposite.

Just before Mandela was released, a referendum was sent to the Christian voting people of South Africa, asking them whether they want a change in the constitution and whether blacks should be given a chance. Overwhelmingly, the Christian population voted in favor of the decision. They had their fears but they knew what was Christian and morally the right thing to do. They did it.

In the meantime, Mandela’s jail system had regular Christian services and Christian jail chaplains that served the inmates. Mandela also had opportunity for Christian recovery and conversion. He studied at the University of South Africa law and graduated with a legal degree. He became familiarize with the Roman-Dutch legal system.

Mandela, like all of us, drank at wells that he did not dig. Christianity was one of them.

There is another factor that Isaiah enlightened me on. In Isaiah 37:24-26 the Assyrian empire ruler Sennacherib came sometime in 689 BCE, not the Third Campaign but later, to Lachish to attack it and he sent his envoys to Jerusalem boasting that he is so able a statesman that all countries were subdued by him and their gods destroyed. Blaspheming God as useless against him, God sent a message to Isaiah for the king Sennacherib saying that all along, He, God, has since ancient times planned Sennacherib’s course for him. What the political statesman was doing, was nothing else but what God outlined for him and the battles he won, was with the help of the living God (the God of the Jews in the Bible of course). Since he was a dictator and since he was obstinate against the people of God, 185 000 soldiers contracted a plague disease sent by God, and died overnight. It is an enormous disaster that would have affected every single house in the Assyrian empire similar to the effect of Tsunamis, Typhoons and Earthquakes on modern countries. It just so happen that for the next years of Sennacherib’s life, no records are available until his assassination by his sons.

Where does Mandela fit in? What Mandela became in the jail, his decision to follow a peaceful road is in the folds of a Christian bed and living God’s influence, knowingly or unknowingly playing a shaping role, just like Sennacherib who happened to have not known it.

The future of South Africa after Mandela, can only be successful if the ruling party or rulers attempt to discover what role God has install for them to play within the boundaries of the biblical text and its ethics. Nothing short of this vertical view can safeguard success for the steps ahead.