Was Nelson Mandela a communist?
No he was not.He was a member of the African National Congress. The ANC and South African Communists were allied in the fight against Apartheid. But the ANC wasn't as far to the left as the Communists. Any help the ANC took from the USSR was solely to fight the Apartheid regime.After his release from imprisonment, Mandela visited many countries that had supported the ANC in their fight against Apartheid. Foremost among this was Cuba. Cuba was highly anti-Apartheid. So much so that they had sent troops to Africa during the Angolan Civil War after learning that the South African Defence Forces were conducting raids into Angola. In the larger scheme of things, the Cubans and Umkhoto we Sizwe (the ANC’s militant wing) were actually fighting a war as allies.In his autobiography, A Long Walk To Freedom, Mandela mentions that white communists were the first white people he’d met who treated black South Africans as equals. I think he used the term colour blind. He includes an incident that demonstrates this. When he was a young lawyer, just starting out in a law firm, he worked with a white South African communist. This man agreed to have lunch with him, something Mandela didn’t expect. During lunch he split his sandwich and shared half with Mandela explaining that “this is communism”. Mandela was impressed, but not enough to join the communist party.As President, Mandela initiated social welfare programmes that boosted literacy and some other indicators of prosperoty. But that doesn’t make him a communist. A socialist perhaps.
Was Nelson Mandela a Communist?
Nelson Mandela was a great man of peace. He was jailed by South Africa's Apartheid government for 27 years for speaking out against their violent and racist policies of oppression. He was NOT AT ALL like Che Guevara. He was an advocate of non-violence along the lines of Mohandas Ghandi and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Hero that is seen by some as a villain? In history? 'One man's Terrorist is another man's Freedom Fighter'?
Nelson Mandela - he is seen by the world as a freedom fighter and man to be respected and even reverred, yet by many he is still seen as a violent terrorist who authorised bombings etc. Ernesto "Che" Guavara - seen by many South America and in Africa as a freedom fighter who had become an icon, he is still seen by many others throughout the world as having been nothing but a communist terrorist. Franklin D Roosevelt - idolised by Americans [especially Democrats] as the greatest president. But recent revelations from Soviet KGB archives show FDR's administration was riddled with communist agents and sympathizers who ended up virtually directing US foreign policy during WWII. Roosevelt and Churchill prolonged the war and aided the Soviet advance into Eastern Europe by refusing to negotiate a surrender with Germany. In effect, Roosevelt defeated a lesser tyrant, Hitler, by allying himself to a far greater one - Stalin, who had killed tens of millions of people before 1939. At Yalta, Roosevelt and Churchill gave half of Europe to Stalin in payment for defeating Hitler. Pancho Villa - he was a Mexican revolutionary leader who advocated for the poor and wanted agrarian reform. But he was also a killer, a bandit, a revolutionary leader, yet many remember him as a folk hero. Pancho Villa was also responsible for a raid on Columbus, New Mexico in 1916, which was the first attack on US soil since 1812.