Seeking Mandela

The ongoing violence, despair and paralysis among Israelis and Palestinians resemble the gloomy period in South Africa during the late 1980s.

Acknowledgments Preface: Reflections on Moral Literacy Introduction: Political Travel Through the Holy Land Part I. Probing the South African Lessons 1. Controversial Issues on Overview 2. A Brief History of South Africa and Apartheid 3. The Problematic Israel-South Africa Analogy 4.

The death of Nelson Mandela, the great South African fighter for freedom, in December 2013 prompted several colleagues within the World Council of Comparative Education Societies community to come together to think about the significance of his life and his work for education. This book is the result of that coming together. The contributing authors reflect on what his life, the commitments he made and principally the values he took into the struggle for freedom in South Africa mean for education. The point of departure for the book is that of honouring the man. It begins with the argument that the values for which he stood, namely, the unconditional dignity of all human beings, respect for difference and principally his lifelong commitment to justice, have a special significance for how we as inhabitants of an increasingly connected and interdependent world conduct our personal lives, our relationships with one another and with the material and living space which surrounds us. It is an ecological approach. As the world moves into a twenty-first century where, paradoxically, we know so much and yet appear to understand so little, and so find ourselves struggling to create social lives in which all of us can feel respected, can offer respect to others and live lives free of fear and anxiety, the values for which he stood have specific relevance for how we do the important job of teaching and what we put into it. Mandela poses deeply provocative questions about the kinds of lives we seek for ourselves and for everybody else around us.

The I Know This to Be True series is a collection of extraordinary figures from diverse backgrounds answering the same questions, as well as sharing their compelling stories, guiding ideals, and insightful wisdom. Incarcerated for more than twenty-seven years, Nelson Mandela's enduring faith and rise to leadership remains an inspiration to all. With stories from his closest colleagues paired with his own words, this book explores the many challenges Mandela faced and the guiding principles that enabled him to lead a country away from violence to peace and democracy. • Anti-apartheid revolutionary Nelson Mandela devoted his life to ensuring liberation, equality, and justice for the people of South Africa • A moving and prescient reminder of the power of persistence, conviction, and forgiveness • The landmark book series brims with messages of leadership, courage, compassion, and hope Inspired by Nelson Mandela's legacy and created in collaboration with the Nelson Mandela Foundation, I Know This to Be True is a global series of books created to spark a new generation of leaders. This series offers encouragement and guidance to graduates, future leaders, and anyone hoping to make a positive impact on the world. • Mandela's legacy encourages every reader to find and nurture the leader within • Royalties from sales of the series support the free distribution of material from the series to the world's developing economy countries • Great for those who loved Letters of Note: An Eclectic Collection of Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience by Shaun Usher, Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela by Nelson Mandela, and Conversations with Myself by Nelson Mandela with a foreword by Barack Obama

Nelson Mandela, the first African politician to acquire a world following, remains in the 21st century an iconic figure. But what are the sources of his almost mythic appeal? And to what extent did Mandela self-consciously create the status of political hero that he now enjoys? This new and highly revealing biography examines these questions in detail for the first time. Drawing on a range of original sources, it presents a host of fresh insights about the shaping of Mandela's personality and public persona, from his childhood days and early activism, through his long years of imprisonment, to his presidency of the new South Africa. Throughout, Lodge emphasizes the crucial interplay between Mandela's public career and his personal or private world, showing how his heroic status was a product both of his leading position within the anti-apartheid movement and his own deliberate efforts to supply a form of quasi-messianic leadership for that movement. And as Lodge shows, Mandela's huge international appeal is a compelling and unusual cocktail. Of the sacred and the secular. Of traditional African values and global media savvy. And of human vulnerablilty, interwoven with the grand narrrative of liberation.

Nelson Mandela's death dominated our thinking at the close of 2013. These two short books provide informed, objective insight into the making of the man, and his unparalleled impact on our world. Tom Lodge's book presents a host of fresh insights about the influences that shaped the man.

Nelson Mandela stands out as one of the most admired political figures of the twentieth century. It was his leadership and moral courage above all that helped to deliver a peaceful end to apartheid in South Africa after years of racial division and violence and to establish a fledgling democracy there. Martin Meredith's vivid portrayal of this towering leader was originally acclaimed as "an exemplary work of biography: instructive, illuminating, as well as felicitously written" (Kirkus Reviews), providing "new insights on the man and his time" (Washington Post). Now Meredith has revisited and significantly updated his biography to incorporate a decade of additional perspective and hindsight on the man and his legacy and to examine how far his hopes for the new South Africa have been realized. Published as South Africa celebrates 100 years since its founding and hosts the 2010 World Cup, Nelson Mandela is the most thorough and up-to-date account available of the life of its most revered hero.

The dangers of political violence and the possibilities of non-violence were the central themes of three lives which changed the twentieth century--Leo Tolstoy, writer and aristocrat who turned against his class, Mohandas Gandhi who corresponded with Tolstoy and considered him the most important person of the time, and Nelson Mandela, prisoner and statesman, who read War and Peace on Robben Island and who, despite having led a campaign of sabotage, saw himself as a successor to Gandhi. Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Mandela tried to create transformed societies to replace the dying forms of colony and empire. They found the inequalities of Russia, India, and South Africa intolerable yet they questioned the wisdom of seizing the power of the state, creating new kinds of political organisation and imagination to replace the old promises of revolution. Their views, along with their ways of leading others, are closely connected, from their insistence on working with their own hands and reforming their individual selves to their acceptance of death. On three continents, in a century of mass mobilization and conflict, they promoted strains of nationalism devoid of antagonism, prepared to take part in a general peace. Looking at Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Mandela in sequence, taking into account their letters and conversations as well as the institutions they created or subverted, placing at the centre their treatment of the primal fantasy of political violence, this volume reveals a vital radical tradition which stands outside the conventional categories of twentieth-century history and politics.