Nelson Mandela died. That seems a lot more important than the rest of this stuff, which I compiled first and am now vaguely embarrassed by.
Mandela spent twenty-seven years in prison, including eighteen years on Robben Island, an infamous penitentiary near Cape Town. He was forced to work for years in a lime quarry without sunglasses, which permanently damaged his eyesight. He later contracted tuberculosis from a damp cell. For companionship, he had most of the A.N.C.’s senior leadership, including Sisulu and Mbeki. An influx of new political prisoners arrived after the uprisings of 1976. Most of them had grown up with little knowledge of Mandela or the A.N.C., whose words, ideas, and even images were banned in South Africa. Robben Island became known as Nelson Mandela University. The confluence of activists of different generations, and the lively debates between them, created new alliances and, with the eventual release of some of the younger leaders, reinvigorated A.N.C. networks. In 1985, the regime offered to release Mandela if he would renounce violence as a political instrument. He replied that it was the government that needed to renounce violence, and he declined the offer, issuing a statement through his daughter Zindzi, saying, “Only free men can negotiate. prisoners cannot enter into contracts.”
Mother Jones, on the 1964 speech he thought would be his last:
“My Lord, I am the First Accused.” Those were Nelson Mandela’s opening words as he stood in the dock in the Palace of Justice in Pretoria, South Africa, on the morning of April 20, 1964—nearly half a century before his death December 5 at the age of 95. Mandela and eight other defendants had been charged with violating the Sabotage Act and the Suppression of Communism Act, accused of plotting violence against the apartheid government with the aim of overthrowing it. By fomenting “chaos, turmoil, and disorder,” the prosecutor explained, the accused hoped to achieve “liberation from the so-called yoke of the white man’s domination.” Mandela, who was already serving a five-year sentence for organizing a strike and leaving the country without a passport, assumed that they would be sent to the gallows.
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“The US killed my brother with a drone. I want to know why.”
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This compilation of historic photographs is genuinely moving.
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What Phish sounds like to people who don’t like Phish.
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You should read Ian Parker’s really long thing in The New Yorker about how hard it is to make a damn pill that will make you fall asleep without turning you into a firemonster.
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Here is a video montage of Katniss Everdeen killing many, many people (she’s even at the Red Wedding! AVOID IF YOU ARE NOT GAME OF THRONES CURRENT) to “Hit Me With Your Best Shot.”
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Haley Mlotek on the David Cronenberg exhibition at TIFF.
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I’m a big fan of WAM! (Women, Action & The Media) despite their contempt for the Oxford Comma, and here is their holiday auction, complete with some really great stuff. Original art from Alison Bechdel! Meet and greet for W. Kamau Bell’s live show in LA! VIP tix to Colbert! Oh, my God: a cross-stitched version of your favourite Feminist Ryan Gosling pic.
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Tags: feminism, link roundup, the internet
I also recommend Gawker’s longread on smarm, which both picks a fight with Dave Eggers and says some really powerful things about how smarm is used in defense of power.
I read that yesterday and liked it but I really wish it’d been edited tighter. It was pretty rambly.
Well, I still miss Moe Tcacik’s glorious reign in the gawkerverse, so I celebrate the ramble.
thank youuuu, I am loving it. LOVING. for ex., this paragraph:
It’s nearly impossible to keep smarm values at bay, though. Even well-meaning people fall into them. Publish a long, serious article and wait for the discomfiting benedictions to roll in from Longform and Longreads: Here is a piece of writing that has attained a certain length—a form that you can read, secure in the knowledge that someone did a lot of typing, and that you are doing a lot of reading. Everyone recognizes that there is virtue, or an approximation of virtue, in doing a lot of reading. Share it, this quantity of reading.
My absolute favorite Mandela quote:
“No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.”
A good thing to remember when you come across the more nonsensical, horrible reactions to his death, which thankfully are a very very small minority of the things I’ve seen, and can be washed away with copious doses of the good stuff. May he rest in peace and may we live up to his example.
There are so many Mandela quotes being posted now and they are all so beautiful.
This is my favourite. Theres so much truth here that it could never be a cliche. Ive heard it a thousand times and I still well up.
Apparently the theme of the compilation is “Photos to make you tear up at your desk”. Nicole! Why!
Great minds think* alike!
*Blink a lot at their desks and attempt to get lumps out of their throats
I can’t handle these, but I can’t stop, either. About to start sobbing at my desk.
I have been lucky enough to go on the tour of Robben Island. Since I got myself all worked up (emotionally) in the gift shop before boarding the boat, I was wondering how I’d do once I got there (in my defense, it was a very nice gift shop). I was steeling myself for a smack in the face regarding human beings’ capacity for brutality. You get a very different story on the tour, though. Your tour guide is one of the former prisoners there. Ours was one of those who was in the 1976 influx of young activists, and that’s what he told us about– how the prison was full of well-educated inmates who shared their knowledge with each other. He also told us about how they continued to fight apartheid from within the prison, since the same rules of segregation were applied there.
I had gone on the tour expecting to be horrified by the brutality of the place, but neither the tour nor the setting lent itself to that. Instead, it was all about refusing to accept the unacceptable. It was about finding a way.
The Folger recently hosted a small exhibit of the Robben Island Bible and some pictures that Mandela had done of the place, along with the following letter:
Today when I look at Robben Island I see it as a celebration of the struggle and a symbol of the finest qualities of the human spirit, rather than as a monument to the brutality and oppression of apartheid.
Robben Island is a place where courage endured in the face of endless hardship, a place where people kept on believing when it seemed their dreams were hopeless, and a place where wisdom and determination overcame fear and human frailty.
It is true that Robben Island was once a place of darkness, but out of that darkness has come a wonderful brightness, a light so powerful that it could not be hidden behind prison walls, held back by prison bars or hemmed in by the surrounding sea.
In these sketches entitled: My Robben Island, I have attempted to color the island sketches in ways that reflect the positive light in which I view it. This is what I would like to share with people around the world and, hopefully, also project the idea that even the most fantastic dreams can be achieved if we are prepared to endure life’s challenges.
–Nelson Mandela
I missed this exhibit, but it’s amazing! 30-odd prisoners at Robben Island signed the Shakespeare passage that spoke to them most, and you can see them all online. Click that link, people!
That’s really lovely. There was an interview on NPR this morning with a fellow prisoner who said that they found ways to smuggle in newspapers and radio to stay informed, how Mandela said they had to sort of “fight up” for equality – prisoners weren’t given equal amounts of food. The ones with more offered to give up their bread in protest/solidarity, but Mandela wanted them to keep what they had and fight for equality at that higher level, not give up what was already there. I thought that was wonderful, and not how I’ve heard these issues framed before.
Your experience also reminds me a bit of visiting a former prison complex used to hold and torture people during the Chilean dictatorship. The guide talked a lot about how the prisoners banded together – one thing that really sticks in my mind is how one woman was able to do laundry, but the others couldn’t. She would sneak in the other women’s underwear and wash it for them. A seemingly small thing but in that context and circumstance, really amazing.
Speaking of how non Mandela related comments seem a bit embarrassing now, the ads just suggested this YA novel to me:
“What if you were loved by your rock star crush but had said negative things about him online?
When Kristen finally meets and falls for him, should she confess?
That is the most modern premise for a YA I have ever seen. Then again I think I read a lot of 80s YA in the 90s.
Oh, Mandela. This is legitimately sad news. I feel lucky to have been alive at the same time as him.
Those historic photos are making me tear up at work. Thanks, Nicole. (The ones with the kids, I can’t handle them.)
oh my god, between mandela and those photos I am basically just a squirtbottle of tears today
Also interesting have been critiques of the New York Times’ obituary, which is kind of setting Mandela up as this beacon of non-violent resistance, thus negating the reality that apartheid could not really be overthrown without a certain measure of violence, hence the ANC and their actions. We could also talk more about how Reagan’s administration added the ANC to their list of terrorist organizations, which the GOP is being pretty quiet about during their “oh, yeah, Mandela, stand-up dude” love-fest. Mandela was amazing, and he was not this shrinking violet of a martyr figure. He got it done.
Much like how we pretend that MLK didn’t need Malcom X, actually.
Exactly! The media reframes these revolutionaries as “peaceful moderates” so they can celebrate them. Mandela was a revolutionary, a radical. So was MLK, who criticized the US role in the Vietnam , called for a restructuring of the system and said the US was “on the wrong side of the revolution.” http://fair.org/media-beat-column/the-martin-luth…
Wasnt there a controversy when he met Thatcher as she was against his violence and he was stating that it was necessary?
Its interesting that the media paint Mandela as a saint when he has quoted as being specifically against this:
“I am not a saint, unless you think of a saint as a sinner who keeps on trying.”
This is a pretty awesome timeline of Mandelas life: http://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013…
If you’re interested, here are some more powerful photographs…there are a few repeats, and some are really sad, fair warning! But there are some heartwarmers, too.
WHY
I haven’t read anything about Mandela today yet, because I have a lot of shit to do at work today and crying at my desk is not conductive unfortunately.
I feel trivial saying this too, but guys, that Cronenberg exibit – if you’re in or near Toronto you have to go. It is ridiculous. This year’s been pretty good for art exhibits in Toronto. So happy we got Ai Weiei, David Bowie, and Cronenberg within a 6 month radius of each other.
Wait wait wait, somebody has to let me know if I’m supposed use a serial comma before an ampersand. Have I been doing it wrong forever (slash the three times a year that might potentially come up as a grammatical and typographical issue)?
You’re probably fine. I just physically cannot skip the serial comma.
I have had no deep thoughts about Nelson Mandela’s passing– or rather, all of them– but I think it would have been just lovely to sit by his knee and listen to him talk.