Nelson Mandela Was neither a Political Prisoner, nor Imprisoned for Opposing Apartheid

           One of the main purposes of this blog is to promote good language.  The misuse or overuse of words dilutes their meaning.  When certain terms for evil acts are abused in such a manner, they make the evil seem less evil and the good seem evil, too.  An example is the term political prisoner.

            A political prisoner is one who is imprisoned for conscience.  In other words, a person who is jailed for exercising freedom of speech, press, assembly or religion is a political prisoner, as opposed to a person who is imprisoned for actions, is a “political prisoner.”

            Nelson Mandela was imprisoned because of his conviction for sabotage and was kept in jail for 27 years because of his refusal to renounce violence.  He had been part of efforts by the Marxist African National Congress to overthrow the government of South Africa violently and to replace it with a Communist regime – at a time when International Communism was advancing violently in southern Africa while the South African government, despite its oppression against its indigenous people and others, was the strongest bulwark against such a great tyranny.  Therefore, Mandela did not meet the definition of a political prisoner.  Indeed, Amnesty International, a left-leaning organization devoted to preventing human rights abuses by exposing them, never recognized him as one. 

It is also misleading to say that Mandela was jailed for opposing apartheid, the government-imposed system of racial segregation in South Africa.  Regardless of his political motivations, he was imprisoned for his violent actions, not his view opposing a particular policy or set of policies.  Saying that Mandela was imprisoned because of his opposition to apartheid is like saying that John Brown, who led a raid of the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry in 1859, was hanged for opposing slavery instead of for treason. 

We Americans are especially respectful of the right of people to take up arms against tyranny when there is no other recourse, but even we would not describe anyone caught in the act of rebellion as a “political prisoner” or as being “imprisoned for opposing” a particular policy.  When people are jailed for committing violent acts, they are imprisoned for various kinds of militancy, not purely for their political opposition.  

The fact that Mandela, to his great credit, helped heal South Africa’s wounds as its first post-apartheid President and respected representative government and liberty— in a post Cold-War period with a vigorous political opposition from diverse ethnic groups and the with the eyes of the world upon him, thereby preventing his country from turning into another Zimbabwe—does not rewrite the story of how he became a hero to the rest of the opposition in South Africa to the apartheid government and a symbol of that regime’s oppression in the first place.  

We should appreciate Mandela’s contributions and mourn his loss without burying good language along with him.