Here is a bit about Mandela's activities leading up to a 1961 arrest:
When people talk about Mandela, it is often as if he were the Martin Luther King, Jr. or Gandhi of South Africa. The reality seems to be that he was more like the Yasser Arafat of South Africa.Eventually, Mandela's arguments won over the ANC, which voted to establish a separate and independent military organ, Umkhonto we Sizwe, or "Spear of the Nation" (or MK, for short). In June 1961, Mandela sent to South African newspapers a letter warning that a new campaign would be launched unless the government agreed to call for a national constitutional convention. Knowing that no such call would be forthcoming, Mandela retreated to the Rivonia hideout to began planning, with other supporters, a sabotage campaign. The campaign began on December 16, 1961 when Umkhonto we Sizwe saboteurs lit explosives at an electricity sub-station. Dozens of other acts of sabotage followed over the next eighteen months. (Indeed, the government would allege the defendants committed 235 separate acts of sabotage.) The sabotage included attacks on government posts, machines, and power facilities, as well as deliberate crop burning.
Mandela spent much of the early months of the sabotage campaign at the Rivonia safe-house, where he went by the name of "David." At Rivonia, Mandela met with other leaders to shape strategy and plan a possible future guerrilla war against the South African government. His goal, he always said, was not to establish a government ruled by blacks, but to move to a multi-racial democracy that would abolish repressive laws that separated African families, restricted their travel, imposed curfews, and denied other basic human rights. In February 1962, Mandela left South Africa to garner support from foreign governments for the goals of the ANC and to receive six months of military training is Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Acting on a tip, probably from the CIA, South African officials arrested Mandela shortly after his return in October.
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To my knowledge, Mandela never renounced violence as a tool for effecting political change.
It goes without saying that the Apartheid regime in South Africa was oppressive and that its demise was almost certainly a good thing, just as the end of segregation in the U.S. was a good thing for our country.
If, however, Martin Luther King, Jr. had committed dozens of acts of sabotage and violence in his campaign to end segregation, would he have a holiday named in his honor today or would he have been tried and convicted as a violent criminal?
It's just peculiar to me that Mandela is treated as a saint by many when he always struck me as a wise and reflective person, but also as a ruthless politician who had a lot of blood on his hands.
It's ironic that in many parts of the world today, U.S. drones routinely incinerate very Mandela-like individuals.
Maybe Mandela just lived that rare life of a violent revolutionary who somehow came to stand for something other than violent revolution.
