ABSTRACT

The stories of Nelson Mandela and Jean Amery are interwoven through the interconnections between apartheid and Nazism. Madiba was his clan name, inherited from his father. In 1915 dissident Afrikaner politicians founded the National Party, vowing to protect white civilization, the Afrikaner worker's wage packet. A key political actor helping to deliver the results for British was another Afrikaner leader, Jan Christian Smuts. In his heyday Jan Christian Smuts was as big a name as Franklin Delano Roosevelt or Mahatma Gandhi. The word 'Congress' reflects the powerful influence on the ANC's founders exercised by the radical lawyer Mohandas Gandhi. Mandela joined the ANC when he realized his life goal of becoming a top barrister was being denied to him on racial ground. By 1951 he was president of the ANC's National Youth League. One way of summing up Mandela's achievements and putting them in context may be found in the midst of the collection of statues in London's Parliament Square.