Tadesse biru biography of abraham lincoln

In the extensive mythologizing of Nelson Mandela’s life, we frequently encounter a flattened political figure without nuance or contradiction. In a memorial following his death, then US President Barack Obama described him as an heir to Gandhi and Abraham Lincoln, a figure who defeated apartheid through moral courage alone. Then there is the Mandela of T-shirts and television specials, the smiling grandfather, the Mandela of reconciliation and compromise.

These interpretations serve a variety of political purposes, but they all neglect the fact that Mandela’s intellectual and political development underwent a series of transformations over the course of his life. In Paul S. Landau’s latest book, Spear: Mandela and the Revolutionaries, we encounter an altogether different Mandela, one who is very much made by the company he keeps, the places he travels, and the books he reads. This is the Mandela of the anti-colonial era, preoccupied with military strategy, who makes marginal notes on Mao, and who debates the success of the Cuban revolution with his comrades.

Spear covers the period, roughly, from the Sharpeville massacre of 1960 to the Rivonia trial of 1963-1964. It marks a critical period in the history of the anti-apartheid movement, as state repression intensifies and as the space for aboveground political opposition diminishes. It tells the story of how Mandela, alongside other activists in the ANC and Communist Party, sought to channel popular anger into organized violence against the apartheid state, and in doing so perhaps create the possibilities for revolution. This is a period of significant personal and political turbulence in Mandela’s life. He moves from the anti-communism of his ANC-Youth League days to becoming a high-ranking member of the Communist Party. He challenges the non-violent principles of then ANC-president Albert Lutuli, undergoes military training in Ethiopia, and seeks aid from the Soviet Union and China. What emerges

MAKING MY WAY TO LA

The woman sitting on the aisle is a grandmother in her sixties, and the young man on my right in the window seat must be 17 or 18.  I can’t see their faces clearly at this point, a little over 48 years later, but we’re having a great time gettingto know each other on the TWA flight from St. Louis to Los Angeles that June day in 1964.  Not being experienced travelers, we haven’t yet learned, like Macon Leary in Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist, to open a book or feign napping to keep talkative seatmates at bay.  We don’t want to be insulated from each other!  We’ve got to talk about what an exhilarating experience it is to fly for the first time.  We’re still all revved up from that monster machine miraculously getting off the ground in the first place.  What makes our conversation so memorable isn’t what we said, which I can’t recall so many years later; it’s that you can’t hear a word we’re saying.  You see, the young man on my right is deaf, so my sixty-something seatmate has pulled a pad and pencil out of her purse, which we’re passing back and forth, having a ball.  Although I can’t remember anything we said – wrote – I dorecall that we had a lot to say since our conversation carried us most of the way to LA.  What did the grandmother do with the pad we filled?  Is it sitting in a box with other relics in an attic somewhere?  Where is that young man now?  Has he lived a happy, productive life?  I find myself these days now and then wondering what’s happened to someone I’ve crossed paths with over the course my six decades.  I guess it’s a function of age since I can’t recall such musings until fairly recently.  Strange to say, I really would like to know how these stories have turned out, maybe because I’ve been thinking – and writing – lately about my own story.

Is it possible I was ever so young and naïve?  As we taxi to our gate at LAX, I pull out the Peace Corps instruction sheet that’d  arrived at 313 South First Street in