Talk:Nelson Mandela/Archive 3

message: * A concise history of Nelson Mandela
If you bother to check the link at the bottom of this page you will see that it takes you to the most comprehensive research on the web of the Griqua and native people from the Umtata region.
See: http://www.tokencoins.com/griqua.html
As Mandela comes from thsi area and clearly has Griqua blood I find it quite extraordinary that this link has been referred to as spam.
Please do your due dilligence before vandalising this page and removing links that have far more relevance that an obsession with Lockerbie which has nothing to do with SA history.
—Preceding unsigned comment added by 210.49.80.224 (talk • contribs) 3 April 2006
: 
Please do not add inappropriate external links to Wikipedia, as you did in :Nelson Mandela.  Wikipedia is not a mere directory of links nor should it be used for advertising or promotion.  Inappropriate links include (but are not limited to) links to personal web sites, links to web sites that you are affiliated with, and links that exist to attract visitors to a web site or promote a product.  See the external links guideline and spam policies for further explanations of links that are considered appropriate.  If you feel the link should be added to the article, then please discuss it on the article's talk page rather than re-adding it. See the welcome page to learn more about Wikipedia. Thank you.   Zaian 22:01, 3 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I am not the only person to have removed the link to your biography of Mandela. Several other experienced contributors also clearly believe it is not worthy of inclusion. Thank you for entering into this dicussion page though, as it gives us a chance to attempt to resolve this.  Please remain civil. Zaian 22:34, 3 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Links "Spam" 

message: The dab link to Mandela, Italy does not work. I've removed it!Phase4 19:35, 10 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Mandela, Italy

message: Would anyone object to me replacing the current table with a proper president infobox?  Something like this:
My biggest problem with the template is "vice president" (instead of "deputy president"). dewet|™ 12:10, 13 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Infobox 

message: does this link belong in this article?:
* Nelson Mandela explains the concept of Ubuntu
or should it be under the ubuntu article?
--mimithebrain 03:23, 6 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Ubuntu 

message: The passage "The 1955 Freedom Charter ... the Moscow line." seems to me to have a discernable political POV.  If there is no comment to the contrary, I will rectify this.  Too Old 06:23, 12 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  NPOV 

message: Created a Mandela (disambiguation) page, mostly to get rid of that damn eyesore of a book promotion.--Ezeu 17:58, 13 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  disambiguation 

message: This is the characterization of Mandela's birth.  I suppose "the" should just be "a", but "Thembu Xhosa" is a nonsense and is wrong.  His family was clearly Thembu, who are clearly an historically distinct people from the Xhosa, like the Mpondo, the Xesibe, the Bhaca and the Mfengu.  Their common language is called isiXhosa because of the history of its reduction to writing by missionaries & the evolution of the term "kaffir."  This was reinforced by the apartheid government's creation of what had been called "the Transkeian territories" of the old Cape Colony/province, with "the Transkei" as a shorthand, into the basis for a putatively independent bantustan.  
It is true that in the political conflicts with Inkatha/the Inkatha Freedom Party Mandela was characterized by the IFP & its key leader Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthezezi as "Xhosa," in the context of proganda characterizing the African National Congress as "a Xhosa organization" to put it on the same footing as the IFP, whose support was overwhelming among Zulu people.  But both of those characterizations were untrue.  
If I can figure out a way to change this other than just removing the "Xhosa" which is my initial inclination, am I going to be restarting some old controversy?  Ngwe 03:07, 4 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  "the Thembu Xhosa family" 

message: Since Nelson Mandela is now our African Collaboration of the month, I have done some edits on the "Early life" section, as well as correcting some connected links.  The Thembu, while said to speak isiXhosa for historical reasons related to which missionaries reduced the language to writing, are historically a distinct people from the Xhosa, a fact of considerable significance during the apartheid era in political struggles within the Transkei bantustan.  To call them Xhosa because they speak isiXhosa is like saying the Irish (or U.S. Americans, or Scots or Canadians or Jamaicans) are English because they speak English.  The earlier version was inconsistent in recognizing this; I have fixed it & also the Thembu entry (still incomplete but now somewhat expanded stub).  
I changed "kraal" to "homestead", which is now the conventional ethnographic and historical usage among scholars writing in English, including South African scholars; also edited the entry for kraal and created a new stub for homestead.  To say someone lives in a kraal is ultimately to say they live in a cattle-pen.  Actually they lived around the cattle pen, to protect it.  Even if one wanted to argue that white South Africans don't understand that or mean it that way, homestead is more NPOV for an article like this - white South African popular culture POV usage is not NPOV in a biographical article on an African nationalist leader.  I also clarified that when Mandela was born, the Transkeian Territories were part of the Cape Province of the Union, not the quasi-autonomous Transkei of mid & late apartheid.  
There is an inconsistency in the characterization of Jongintaba Dalindyebo, said once to have been the actual Thembu king, but then several times to have been the regent.  I think regent is right but need to check.  
I probably am going to change the statement that Mandela was "learning about Western culture" at Clarkebury, which is anachronistic in its cultural relativism & not at all what he would have been told he was learning by the missionary teachers in the early 1930s.  
I also want to raise again the point that the 1994 elections were in fact South Africa's first democratic elections.  I saw the debate in the archives on this, which is why I didn't just change it, but I think it should be changed back to that simple truth.  
The arguments in the earlier debate for prior elections having been democratic are mistaken I believe.  Wikipedia's own definition for democracy correctly says it means rule by the people.  No South African system of government or election prior to 1994 could fit that definition.  The arguments by analogy to the U.S. are mistaken.  When Washington was president the U.S. was pretty explicitly not a democracy, but a republic; in addition to disfranchisement of enslaved black persons (& free blacks mostly) and women, a number of states, maybe most, had property qualified franchises into the 19th century, the Senate was indirectly elected by state legislatures (& often state senates were indirectly elected as well, making national senate elections even less direct), and the president was elected by an electoral college conceived of as having much greater independence than it now does.  Although Jefferson's Democratic Republican Party argued that the country should be more democratic, a point made more vigorously in the era of "Jacksonian democracy" in the 1830s, the arguments reflect the fact that it wasn't.  The claim someone made that other countries recognized South Africa as a democracy is amazing and weird, though interesting if it reflects an illusion held by any substantial number of white South Africans.  It just wasn't so.  Sympathy with white South African explanations of why they ostensibly couldn't be democratic, which was pretty widespread in Europe and the Euro-diaspora in the age of (undemocratic) European colonial empires, was not the same as saying South Africa was democratic. 
Racial disfranchisement, whether in South Africa or the U.S., was a species of class disfranchisement (& in the U.S., the laws that ended the post-Civil War black vote in the ex-Confederate states also disfranchised many poor whites).   
The old Non-European Unity Movement (a political grouping in the Western Cape and to a lesser degree the Eastern Cape that brought together Coloured and African activists & was influenced by Trotskyism) developed a theory of the South African state as what they called a "Herrenvolk Democracy", meaning something like Overlord-People Democracy.  In other words, a system in which one people held other peoples in subjection, with its "democracy" restricted to the Herrenvolk.  From the point of view of South Africa's people as a whole, this was not democracy at all, reflecting nothing like "the will of the people" and not even "deriving its just powers from the consent of the governed" to take a phrase from the U.S. Declaration of Independence which need not be democratic.  It might also be called a mass racial oligarchy.  
In fact apartheid theory recognized that South Africa was not democratic.  The entire purpose of the bantustan system, to strip Africans of their South African citizenship and make them citizens of an ostensibly independent ethnically defined nation, was to remove them as part of "the people" of South Africa.  That they needed be excluded (from the NP point of view) means that they were part of "the people", but had no voice in the government. 
NPOV in an article on Afrikaner or white politics would need to acknowledge that some South African whites believed the country was democratic (& apparently some still do). But NPOV in an article on South Africa as a whole, or a reference to that whole as in this article, is acknowledgement of the fact that by any generally accepted view of democracy, South Africa wasn't democratic until at least 1994 (one might argue that those elections were democratic but that the whole system became democratic only with the ratification of the new constitution created by the 1994-elected parliament cum constitutional assembly).   Ngwe 07:42, 5 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Thembu, "kraal," democracy & other matters 

message: I am relieved and gratified by your comments, Ngwe.  I take pleasure in noting that your academic background eminently qualifies you to make them.  Be that as it may, those who argued that South Africa was sort of a democracy before 1994 won the original debate you refer to because they were sadly in the majority.  As I recall, only Ezeu supported me against a majority which held this strange view, and I was so disheartened that I stopped contributing to the Mandela page for some time.  My viewpoint is unchanged: try selling the proposition that South Africa before 1994 was in any way a democracy to those who died, were tortured, detained without trial or otherwise suffered during the struggle against apartheid.  The present wordng 'fully-representative democratic elections' is a whitewash, as Ezeu noted at the time, but I suppose we will have to live with it until a majority agrees to change it. Swissjames 09:47, 25 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Yes! South Africa before 1994 was in no way a democracy

message: I notice that in the talk archive there was discussion about whether Mandela was influenced by M. K. Gandhi.  Someone said that a guerrilla leader couldn't be.  In fact the ANC, as part of the Congress Alliance, pursued a Gandhian mass nonviolent direct action campaign in the early 1950s. the Defiance Campaign.   The Congress Alliance included the South African Indian Congress, which certainly was influenced by Gandhi.  One classic descriptive analysis from close to the time is Passive Resistance in South Africa by Leo Kuper.  
South Africa presented an interesting test of Gandhian theory.  The basic idea was that a nonviolent challenge would ultimately appeal to the conscience of an oppressing group or government, or work on their bad conscience.  In South Africa in the 1950s this failed because the National Party government was completely convinced of its own moral rectitude.  The Defiance Campaign was violently suppressed, thousands arrested, and Mandela and over one hundred others put on trial for treason.  
The ANC only took the decision to turn to armed struggle in 1960, because they had reached the conclusion that the strategy of active nonviolent resistance had failed to move South Africa's leaders, except in the direct of repression.  The fact of having pursued nonviolent methods for a long time, including Gandhian tactics, formed part of the justification they (and the PAC) offered for moving to sabotage and later guerrilla war.   
Interestingly, one of the final turning points in F.W. de Klerk's movement to release a number of key ANC and PAC leaders and then Mandela, as well as to repeal many cornerstone apartheid laws, came in a sort of Gandhian moment in 1989.  Black political leaders who were being detained without trial under the last State of Emergency went on a hunger strike, demanding to be charged or released.  Prior to the hunger strike the State of Emergency appeared to be working; the mass political protests of the mid-1980s had been much suppressed by 1988 and I recall a friend comparing the mood in Johannesburg among apartheid opponents to Berlin in the 1930s.  
In contrast to the 1950s, when faced with the hunger strike in the late 1980s and the prospect of detainees dying, the S.A. government blinked and released a number of the hunger strikers.  They no longer had the confidence of their rectitude possessed by their predecessors, something reflected even earlier in the attempts to "reform" apartheid that led to the splitting of the Conservative Party from the National Party, which can be seen as in part a split of the true believers from those in or entering varying degrees of doubt.  
With the hunger strike, system of semi-permanent detentions without trial collapsed, and mass protests started again -- one protest in Cape Town in 1989 was battled by police with water cannons shooting purple dye, leading to the immortal slogal "The Purple Shall Govern" (a play on the Freedom Charter).  Though it cannot be divorced from other elements, this Gandhian moment was a piece of the shifting balance of forces that led de Klerk to act when and as he did.   Ngwe 19:55, 25 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Mandela and Gandhi 

message: I did a brief search of this discussion page and its archives, but could not find anything obvious about this. From the last line in the article's introduction: Mandela is also the only man to have ever taken on and have successfully killed an entire herd of buffalo within ten minutes. Perhaps I am not familiar enough with Mandela's personal history, but if this is not someone's prank, it seems like an extraordinary claim that may demand a citation of some sort. 66.31.47.143 04:37, 14 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: That vandalism has been removed. --Ezeu 04:50, 14 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks for the quick correction. The vandal's action is apparently recorded here, should that be of any interest. His edit history appears to show another attempt at vandalism, so I have taken the liberty of reverting that as well. 66.31.47.143 06:40, 14 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Killed a herd of buffalo in 10 minutes? 

message: I've started an approach that may apply to Wikipedia's Core Biography articles: creating a branching list page based on in popular culture information.  I started that last year while I raised Joan of Arc to featured article when I created Cultural depictions of Joan of Arc, which has become a featured list.  Recently I also created Cultural depictions of Alexander the Great out of material that had been deleted from the biography article.  Since cultural references sometimes get deleted without discussion, I'd like to suggest this approach as a model for the editors here.  
Regards, Durova 17:09, 17 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[Cultural depictions of Nelson Mandela]] 

message: I conducted a revert on 22:28, 21 October 2006 to revision 82613937 dated 2006-10-20 12:45:06 by 81.131.66.52 using popups because one of the later revisions on 21:47, 20 October 2006 by 70.26.211.104 although fixing some vandalism also added other vandalism.  Since later edits where just reverts I reverted to a point before the vandalism by 70.26.211.104 and before the vandalism that 70.26.211.104 fixed. Brass shadow 22:50, 21 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  reason for revert on 22:28, 21 October 2006 

message: There are only five references for this article. It seems underreferenced, especially for a long article. Firsfron of Ronchester 02:23, 4 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I do not believe this article meets the requirements for a Good Article. The text contains only five references. For an article of this length, I would expect more citations. As it is, I cannot in good faith call this a Good Article. Firsfron of Ronchester 04:48, 18 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Good article candidacy

message: Okay, this is getting confusing... Will someone clean this up? --Gray PorpoiseYour wish is my command! 01:11, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Done, and blocked the vandal. --Ezeu 01:33, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Harmful edits 

message: I am trying to expand this article, mainly focusing on the differences between this book and other accounts (books and otherwise) of Mandela's life and South Africa throughout this period. Any comments or suggestions are appreciated on the peer review page: "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Peer_review/Mandela:_The_Authorised_Biography" BillMasen 17:18, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: [[Mandela: The Authorised Biography]]

message: The references are a bit of a mess, especially the 'Cite URL' ones, which do not display correctly. I can't figure out what is wrong with them. Anyone? If nobody else knows what is wrong, I will eventually replace them with handcoded ones... MadMaxDog 13:19, 27 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Mostly fixed now, I think. Zaian 14:56, 30 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: References

message: Substituted at 21:46, 3 May 2016 (UTC)
thread_title: Assessment comment