patrick.net

I saw a beautiful picture this morning. It was a photo of President Obama sitting in Nelson Mandela's private office at the Nelson Mandela Memory Centre in Johannesburg. He is signing a copy of his book Conversations With Myself for Mandela. I pray that Madiba (Nelson Mandela) gets better so he can see this photo and the book that Obama signed for him. I wonder what the people who kept Mandela in jail for 27 years think and feel now. Are they ashamed? Do they feel sadness? It is a miracle that Mandela avoided the death penalty in 1963. The judge in his case was a member of the Unionist Party (basically pro-British) and not a member of the Nationalist Party (the Afrikaaners who brought in Apartheid.) I suspect that an Afrikaaner judge would have sent Mandela to the gallows along with several others involved in the Rivonia Road treason trial. Many years later the Nationalist Party would have faced much more militant and angry young black leaders. It would have lead to a violent and bloody civil war. That one judge changed the whole course of history and saved literally hundreds of thousands of live.

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