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Wallis & Futana IsOn Mandela Day, Volunteer For 67 Minutes For Anti-Apartheid Leader's Years Of Service (IDEAS, TIPS)
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On Mandela Day, Volunteer For 67 Minutes For Anti-Apartheid Leader's Years Of Service (IDEAS, TIPS)
SOUTH AFRICA - JULY 14:
Nelson Mandela chuckles during the launch of a comic book called 'Prisoner in the Garden' at the Nelson Mandela Foundation.
(Photo by Media24/Gallo Images/Getty Images) | Getty
In honor of
this Thursday, activists and organizations are encouraging people to find ways to serve others. to share 67 minutes of their day giving back -- with 67 representing the years Mandela spent as an advocate, activist and leader making a difference and serving others.Richard Branson, the Clinton family, Desmond Tutu, the Dalai Lama, Morgan Freeman, Naomi Campbell, and other influential figures to support the values of compassion and altruism behind Mandela Day.In , former President Bill Clinton encourages viewers to find a way to help others."I ask you to celebrate by f by doing your best to help others with a full, happy, [and] grateful heart." Richard Branson also shared his support and compassion for giving in a "To mark Mandela Day, I will be giving 67 minutes of my time to mentor a group of wonderful young entepreneurs," he said. "I will also pledge to support at least 67 other young entrepreneurs this year in the spirit of making every day a Mandela Day. Please do join in on this special day and make the world a better place for all." Check out ways below to honor Mandela Day. And let us know in the comments below how you plan to volunteer!This Nelson Mandela Foundation sponsored campaign released
on Mandela's 95th birthday. The suggestions range from large-scale efforts such as beach cleanups, personalized offerings such as providing pro bono work, or even simply making a new friend. The campaign also
plan and share activities to commemorate the day on its website.The Foundation is accepting donations it will specifically earmark to continue the work of Nelson Mandela. The organization notes that 100 percent of the collected proceeds will go toward the Among other initiatives, this nonprofit organizes various lectures and assemblies to promote a dialogue addressing critical social issues. Richard Branson issued
asking people to donate either their time or money to help others on Mandela Day. Much like Clinton's initiative, do-gooders can donate money through Virgin Unit to Mandela's Centre of Memory. All of the funds will benefit Mandela's foundation.
Aside from donating money, Branson encouraged everyone to pledge their support for Mandela Day on . On this site, anyone can upload a video of what they plan to do on Mandela Day and also log how many hours they will spend volunteering.For local volunteer opportunities, check out or . Check out photos below from Mandela's past birthday celebrations.
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Thanks for your report!Mandela: reading The Courier on Robben Island
| United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization
The UNESCO Courier
In FocusAbout the Courier
Mandela: reading The Courier on Robben Island
Thirty years ago, on March 31 1982, prisoner number 466/64 of Robben Island was transferred to Pollsmoor maximum security prison (Cape Town), thus ending two decades of banishment to the worst outpost of the South African penal system.
During these years, The UNESCO Courier brought regularly news and ideas from the five continents to Nelson Mandela.
In November 1983, The Courier published an issue on Racism with a portrait of Nelson Mandela on the cover.
By Annar Cassam (Tanzania), Director, UNESCO Special Program for South Africa&
&Newspapers are more valuable to political prisoners than gold or diamonds, more hungered for than food or tobacco.& Nelson Mandela
Mandela and his fellow-political prisoners were condemned to life imprisonment in 1964 and their first years in jail were as intellectually and spiritually barren as the terrain on Robben Island itself, the prison authorities made sure of that. Newspapers, even local ones were not allowed. &The authorities attempted to impose a complete blackout, they did not want us to learn anything that might raise our morale or reassure us that people on the outside were still thinking about us&, Nelson Mandela says in his autobiography Long Walk to Freedom.
But prisoners &could apply to study for high school and university courses and thus order publications necessary for their studies. And so, together with publications on subjects such as accounting and economics, the prison administration also allowed in The UNESCO Courier magazine which arrived regularly from Paris for some time.
The prison authorities, mostly, if not exclusively Afrikaans-speaking, clearly considered the magazine to be harmless reading materiel for this class of prisoners who, after spending the day smashing stones in the limestone quarry, could retire to their cells in the evening and read its &insignificant& contents.
It was President Mandela himself who recounted this in September 1996 to the then Director- General Federico Mayor, in the President’s Office, Union Buidings, Pretoria, during the latter’s official visit to the new democratic South Africa.
The President explained how pleased he and his companions had been to read& The Courier through which they had learnt about so many subjects never before encountered, such as cultural diversity and mankind’s common heritage, African history, education for development and so on. All these subjects did not exist in the apartheid lexicon, let alone in the solitary confines of Robben Island.&
Reading The Courier was a way of learning about what was happening in the real world outside. Nelson Mandela wanted the UNESCO Director-General to know this.
I had the privilege of accompanying the Director-General on this visit and as I listened to the President’s words, my mind tried to take in their meaning and significance. The Courier, so aptly named, was the carrier-pigeon that flew regularly from Paris to a remote spot in the middle of nowhere in the southern Atlantic Ocean to bring news and ideas from the five continents to Mandela and his colleagues under the very noses of the watchful agents of the police state that was apartheid South Africa. Knowledge and ideas grow wings when necessary.
A &civilizing mission&
Robben Island was the South African Alcatraz, an island penitentiary from which there was no escape for the black common law convicts who were sent there for life. In the 1960s and 70s, as the struggle against apartheid strengthened and spread, the Island became the place where the racist government sent its most serious political opponents, also for life. In reality, the Island was a prison within-a-prison, for the principle lock-up, the main jail was mainland South Africa itself where the white minority settler community was locked inside its paranoia about its own racial superiority over the indegenous population. Every aspect of existence, both private and public, was governed by racist laws designed to oppress and denigrate the black majority for the benefit of the white minority population, privileged in every way.
In so doing, the ruling class claimed to be preserving and promoting &European values& in keeping with their self-styled &civilizing mission& in Africa. Ironically, they themselves were complete strangers to those values, for they had no understanding of concepts such as liberty, equality, democracy, fraternity, values for which the Europeans themselves had fought across the centuries.
Indeed, UNESCO and the entire UN system were born out of just such a struggle, a devastating war against Nazi racism which had brought the world to the edge of the abyss in the second world war. In 1945, the lesson was learnt that &never again& would the nations of the world allow such horrors to happen. At UNESCO, these countries decided deliberately &to build the ramparts of peace in the minds of men& by sharing and expanding human knowledge in all its aspects,especially through the areas of education, science and culture.
The apartheid regime, however, learnt a different lesson and chose to go the opposite way, to promote separation, exclusion, deprivation, humiliation and violence. For those citizens who dared to question and challenge this backward ideology, the punishment was banishment for life.
I like to think of Mandela and his colleagues leafing through the pages of the Courier, reading about the temples of Abou Simbel in Egypt, standing for thousands of years at the other end of Africa and now about to be saved from oblivion through the combined efforts of the world’s experts. At the height of the Cold War in 1960, UNESCO managed to bring together resources and expertise from East and West to make sure these timeless, ageless monuments would endure for they formed the &common heritage of mankind.& How strange it must have been to read this in a place where the wardens made Mandela and his co-prisoners wear shorts, sleep on the cement floor and answer to the call of &Boy!&.
Articles on racism on Robben Island
I see Mandela and his fellow freedom fighters smiling with satisfaction when reading the article on Racism written by John Rex, British sociologist and educationist in 1968 : &The most striking instance of racism today is that of the system of apartheid in South Africa. Apartheid is not, as some imagine, designed to provide equal but separate facilities for all races. It is segregation carried through by men with white skins to their own advantage and to the disadvantage of the black and coloured people of South Africa.& ().
Some years later, Mandela would read of the report made to the General Conference of UNESCO by its then Deputy Director-General, Mokhtar M’Bow of Senegal, on his tour of ANC exile institutions and refugee camps in Tanzania and Zambia in 1971. In this report he recommended two important initiatives: one, to provide educational assistance to all exiles being sheltered in these countries and two, to accord observer status to all African liberation movements recognised by the OAU (Organisation for African Unity). The General Conference accepted these recommendations and thus it was that UNESCO became the first UN agency to give such recognition, a step followed by the rest of the UN system soon after.
The Soweto massacre of school-goers in 1976 was a watershed in the history of the struggle for it brought to the streets an angry younger generation of fighters against apartheid revolted by the hideous Bantu Education Act which made it illegal to teach English, science and mathematics in black schools. It also made it obvious to the world outside that the racist government had no strategy except the use of brute force, even against unarmed school children. By this time South Africa had become an international pariah state, shunned by almost all people of the world if not by all governments.
In the following year, The Courier published its own special edition on racism in South Africa: . It was unlikely to have been allowed on Robben Island but by then the struggle had reached the world stage and it was beginning to dawn on some of the leaders in Pretoria that they would be needing Mandela… sooner or later. As the years went by, Mandela and his cause grew in strength and stature while the apartheid regime continued on its path of destruction and violence against its own black population and against neighbouring African states.
Mandela’s long period on the Island came to an end in the 1982 when he was brought back to the mainland to Pollsmoor Prison in Cape Town and then finally to house arrest and to relative ‘comfort ‘ in a cottage in Victor Verster prison outside Cape Town. During this phase in captivity, which lasted until 1990, Mandela spent hours &talking to the enemy&, as he puts it, by initiating dialogue and discussion with the more intelligent, less bigoted members of the regime in order to make them understand that state violence and military action would not resolve the growing unrest in the country, that the pressure for change, coming from all sides, including the international community, would have to be dealt with politically.
Finally, the day came which had to come and on Feb 11 1990, Mandela accompanied by his wife, Winnie, walked out of the prison gates and within days established himself as the moral leader of the country. A remarkable achievement for a man who was not only banished for nearly three decades but whose name, photograph and words it was a crime to publish ! In May 1994, after four years of gruelling negotiations with the De Klerk government, Mandela was elected the political leader of the new South Africa, the first President of a democratic, non-racist society where the ex-oppressors live in peace with the majority whom they humiliated for centuries.
Mandela’s &ten thousand days&
Mandela’s 27 years can be as a terribe sacrifice of the best years of a man’s life and a cruel price in absence and loss exacted from his family. This punishment is undeniable and immeasurable. But Mandela’s &ten thousand days& behind bars, to use his own expression, can also be seen o this is how long it took for him to convince the racists to free themselves of their own ideological and cultural chains, to accept that freedom and dignity for all South Africans ,whatever their colour or creed, were the ultimate qualifications of a civilised state.
The &white tribesmen& of Africa are lucky Mandela waited those long years, that he was there to the bitter end in order to lead them, peacefully and patiently, out of the prison gates of their own minds, out of the delusion of separateness and superiority to a land to which they can all belong and from which none can be expelled because of the colour of his skin.&
Robben Island became the first South African national site to join the World Heritage List in 1999. If ever there comes into existence a world heritage list to name those who have expanded and uplifted the collective conscience of mankind, Nelson Mandela will have pride of place on it.
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Nelson Mandela - Biographical
Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela was
born in Transkei, South Africa on July 18, 1918. His father was
Hendry Mphakanyiswa of the Tembu Tribe. Mandela himself was
educated at University College of Fort Hare and the University of
Witwatersrand where he studied law. He joined the African
National Congress in 1944 and was engaged in resistance against
the ruling National Party's apartheid policies after 1948. He
went on trial for treason in
and was acquitted in
After the banning of the ANC in 1960, Nelson Mandela argued for
the setting up of a military wing within the ANC. In June 1961,
the ANC executive considered his proposal on the use of violent
tactics and agreed that those members who wished to involve
themselves in Mandela's campaign would not be stopped from doing
so by the ANC. This led to the formation of Umkhonto we Sizwe.
Mandela was arrested in 1962 and sentenced to five years'
imprisonment with hard labour. In 1963, when many fellow leaders
of the ANC and the Umkhonto we Sizwe were arrested, Mandela was
brought to stand trial with them for plotting to overthrow the
government by violence. His statement from the dock received
considerable international publicity. On June 12, 1964, eight of
the accused, including Mandela, were sentenced to life
imprisonment. From 1964 to 1982, he was incarcerated at Robben
Island Prison, off Cape T thereafter, he was at Pollsmoor
Prison, nearby on the mainland.
During his years in prison, Nelson Mandela's reputation grew
steadily. He was widely accepted as the most significant black
leader in South Africa and became a potent symbol of resistance
as the anti-apartheid movement gathered strength. He consistently
refused to compromise his political position to obtain his
Nelson Mandela was released on February 11, 1990. After his
release, he plunged himself wholeheartedly into his life's work,
striving to attain the goals he and others had set out almost
four decades earlier. In 1991, at the first national conference
of the ANC held inside South Africa after the organization had
been banned in 1960, Mandela was elected President of the ANC
while his lifelong friend and colleague, Oliver Tambo, became the
organisation's National Chairperson.
From . The Nobel Prizes 1993, Editor Tore Fr&ngsmyr, [Nobel Foundation], Stockholm, 1994
This autobiography/biography was written
at the time of the award and later published in the book series
/. The information is sometimes updated with an addendum submitted
by the Laureate.
Short Clip
Watch a video clip of Nelson Mandela and Frederik Willem de Klerk receiving their Nobel Peace Prize medals and diplomas during the Nobel Peace Prize Award Ceremony at the Oslo City Hall in Norway, 10 December 1993.
Watch the Documentary
Selected Bibliography
By Mandela
Mandela, Nelson. Nelson Mandela
Speaks: Forging a Democratic, Nonracial South Africa.
New York: Pathfinder, 1993.
Mandela, Nelson. Long Walk to
Freedom. The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela. Boston
& New York: Little Brown, 1994.
Mandela, Nelson. The Struggle Is My
Life. New York: Revised, Pathfinder, 1986. Originally
published as a tribute on his 60th birthday in 1978.
Speeches, writings, historical accounts, contributions by
fellow prisoners.
Other Sources
Benson, Mary. Nelson Mandela, the
Man and the Movement. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994.
Updated from 1986 edition. Based on interviews by a friend of
Mandela since the 1950s.
de Klerk, Willem. F. W. de Klerk:
The Man in His Time. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 1991.
By his brother.
Gilbey, Emma. The Lady. The Life
and Times of Winnie Mandela. London: Cape, 1993. Most
comprehensive biography.
Harrison, Nancy. Winnie Mandela:
Mother of a Nation. London: Gollancz, 1985. Authorised
favourable biography.
Johns, Sheridan and R. Hunt Davis,
Jr., eds. Mandela, Tambo and the ANC: The Struggle Against
Apartheid. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Documentary survey.
Mandela, Winnie. Part of My
Soul. NY & London: Norton, 1984. Edited by Anne
Benjamin and Mary Benson.
Meer, Fatima. Higher Than Hope: The
Authorized Biography of Nelson Mandela. NY: Harper, 1990.
By family friend, with Mandela’s corrections. Foreword
by Winnie Mandela.
M Meredith, Martin. Nelson Mandela.
A Biography. New York: St, Martin’s, 1998. By an
authority on South Africa. Recommended reading.
Ottaway, David. Chained Together.
Mandela de Klerk, and the Struggle to Remake South
Africa. New York: Times Books, 1993. Critical treatment
by well-informed journalist.
Sparks, Allister. Tomorrow Is
Another Country: The Inside Story of South Africa’s
Road to Change. New York: Hill & Wang, 1995. By a
distinguished South African journalist.
Waldmeir, Patti. Anatomy of a
Miracle: The End of Apartheid and the Birth of a New South
Africa. London: Viking, 1997.
From , Peace , Editor Irwin Abrams, World Scientific Publishing Co., Singapore, 1999
This autobiography/biography was written
at the time of the award and first
published in the book series .
It was later edited and republished in .
To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.
For more updated biographical information,
Mandela, Nelson. Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of
Nelson Mandela. Little, Brown and Co., Boston, 1994.
Nelson Mandela died on 5 December 2013.
Copyright & The Nobel Foundation 1993
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