Nelson Mandela: A Circumstantial Success
The anti-apartheid revolutionary and president of South Africa used family background, concerted cultivation, and extraordinary opportunity to become a success.
By Jocelyn Leafblad | Social Work Major
Nelson Mandela strides to the front of the Rivonia courtroom in Pretoria, South Africa in front of several judges and dozens of witnesses. It is October 30, 1963, and Mandela and several other members of the revolutionary African National Council are on trial for treason. They have been forced to come to terms with the fact that they will almost certainly be sentenced to death. Mandela has been called to defend the actions of the ANC, but instead he gives something no one in the courtroom expects: a speech. Not just any speech, but one that does not bother to defend himself. “If need be, I am prepared to die for [my cause]” (Richman, 2014). Mandela’s passion about the fight to abolish apartheid in South Africa in favor of democracy and non-racialism was so strong that nothing else mattered to him, not even his life.
Mandela cofounded the ANC Youth League in 1944, and had been working underground to further its mission for 20 years before he was finally caught and put on trial. Instead of being sentenced to death, he was sentenced to life imprisonment, which was nearly as bad for someone with as much vibrance and passion as Mandela. As the world watched and protested, the government decided that Mandela’s imprisonment was unnecessary, and he was released in 1990 after 27 years in federal prison. Soon after his release, he was able to vote for the first time as a black male, and he was elected South Africa’s first black president four years later (Mandela, 1998).
While Mandela’s adult life is the most well-known part of his story, it is his upbringing that gave him to the potential to reach success. Malcolm Gladwell, the author of Outliers: The Story of Success, claims that opportunities are the basis of success, and therefore everybody should have equal potential to reach success: “The people who stand before kings… are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot” (2008, p. 19). While Nelson Mandela’s success may seem like a given for a leader with his talents and convictions, he used the Gladwellian traits of family and cultural background, concerted cultivation, and extraordinary opportunity in order to achieve his success as a revolutionary and politician.
Nine-year-old Nelson turned from playing the dirt to hear chaos coming from inside his mother’s hut. His father, Gadla Henry Mandela, who “took turns visiting his wives and usually came… for perhaps one week a month,” had arrived several days early. Walking into the hut excited to see his father, Nelson heard violent coughing in place of Gadla’s usual quiet composure. Gadla lay on the floor silently for three days, after which it became clear that he would not recover from his illness. Nelson was allowed only a short time to grieve his father’s death, and then his mother told him that he would be leaving Qunu, the village where he was born and raised: the only home he had ever known (1994, p. 14–15).
He spent his adolescent years in a family that valued education and politics and had the resources available to give Mandela opportunities that he would not otherwise have had, shaping his formative years with experiences that developed him into a passionate and capable revolutionary.
Unbeknownst to young Mandela, he was on his way to the house of Chief Jongintaba Dalindyebo, the local chief and acting regent of Mandela’s tribe, the Thembu. Gadla had entrusted Nelson’s upbringing to Jongintaba before he passed, and true to his word, Jongintaba raised Nelson as his own son. In fact, Nelson was sent to the best boarding schools and universities available for blacks and allowed to attend tribal senate meetings as a child because the chief was grooming Mandela to become the chief counselor to the king (Demme, Menell, & Gibson,, 2009). He spent his adolescent years in a family that valued education and politics and had the resources available to give Mandela opportunities that he would not otherwise have had, shaping his formative years with experiences that developed him into a passionate and capable revolutionary.
Quang Trieu and Rukmalie Jayakody, two researchers from Pennsylvania State University, examined the effect of family background on the academic success of ethnic minority students in Vietnam. They found that young Thai students, who belonged to the second-largest ethnic minority group, reached academic achievement far below that of their ethnic majority peers. Several specific factors were found to negatively affect students’ ability to complete their education, including child marriage, family poverty, poorly-educated parents, and school access (2018, p. 37). As a member of an ethnically marginalized community in apartheid-era South Africa, Mandela likely would have been susceptible to many of these same factors had he not been adopted by Chief Jongintaba, who was economically and socially prosperous.
However, Trieu and Jayakody also found several factors that positively affected educational achievement, namely “having highly supportive parents, prestigious or highly-educated relatives, highly-educated peers, and a positive personal attitude towards education” (2018, p. 37). All of these factors were present to some degree in Mandela’s upbringing. Chief Jongintaba was himself prestigious and well-educated, and he sent Mandela to the best schools available for blacks, where he was surrounded by other well-educated youth and encouraged to educate himself. Additionally, authoritative parenting was found to be positively correlated with educational achievement, and Jongintaba’s parenting style was authoritative, as was consistent with the culture. For example, when Mandela was expelled from the University College of Fort Hare because of his involvement in a student protest, Jongintaba insisted that he come home and arranged a wife for him, even though Mandela did not want to be married. Mandela chose instead to run away because he knew that he would not have a choice if he came home (Demme, Menell, & Gibson, 1998). However, if Mandela had not been raised in a family with these values, he may not have been able to be as successful academically, and therefore would have had less potential to succeed as a politician.
Sixteen-year-old Nelson walks side-by-side with Chief Jongintaba into the office of Reverend Harris, the school governor of Clarkebury Institute. Clarkebury was the best secondary school in the region for blacks at the time, and Jongintaba himself had attended there when he was a teenager. “Hello, Nelson.” Rev. Harris steps forward to shake Nelson’s hand, the first and only white man to have done so in Nelson’s sixteen years. Jongintaba explains that Nelson “was being groomed to be a counselor to the king and that he hoped the reverend would take a special interest in [him].” After the interview, Jongintaba slips Nelson a pound note for pocket money and leaves him at the school with little fuss, knowing that he would be in good hands. “Goodbye, Nelson” (Mandela, 1998, 33).
One factor that Gladwell argues is inextricably interwoven with success is practical intelligence, but the bigger question is where practical intelligence comes from. Sociologist Annette Lareau conducted a study of parenting techniques among twelve families of third-grade children in order to answer this question, and came up with a phenomenon called concerted cultivation. She found that the wealthier families and parents were very heavily involved in their children’s lives, including their schooling and scheduling free time activities for them, in “an attempt to actively ‘foster and assess a child’s talents, opinions and skills.’” Poorer parents, on the other hand, tended to follow ‘a strategy of ‘accomplishment of natural growth’” (as cited by Gladwell, 2008, p. 104).
For the most part, wealthier parents’ involvement in their children’s lives is based on a sense of duty to help their children reach their full potential. Poorer parents, on the other hand, arguably take more risk in trusting that their children will reach their full potential in their own time based on their natural gifts and do not need to be guided in order to succeed. However, the end result is often that children of wealthier families learn better how to advocate for themselves and change their situation in order to benefit themselves, leading to greater success over their peers who are unsure how to “customize… whatever environment they were in for their best purposes” (as cited by Gladwell, 2008, p. 105).
In Mandela’s case, his parents were deeply invested in his upbringing and potential. In fact, his father was so committed to Mandela’s future that he convinced Chief Jongintaba to take him in. His mother followed through on this commitment, allowing little emotion in favor of rational prioritization of Mandela’s education and future. Once Mandela moved to Jongintaba’s house, he was brought to tribal council meetings and sent to the best schools available for blacks at the time. He always knew that he was being groomed to be a counselor to the king, and he was treated as such, even over Jongintaba’s biological children. Even after he became an adult and went off to college, Jongintaba tried to arrange a marriage for him (Demme, Menell, & Gibson, 2010). While this may seem controlling at first thought, Mandela’s childhood exposure to the world of politics and intentional upbringing gave him the education and connections that he needed to achieve success as a political revolutionary and later as president of South Africa.
Fifty-eight-year-old Mandela turns in his bare prison cell at Robben Island Prison to see Jimmy Kruger, the minister of prisons in the prime minister’s cabinet, in the doorway. Mandela knows why Kruger is there: to ask Mandela to retire quietly to the Transkei region of South Africa in exchange for a dramatically reduced sentence. Instead, Mandela uses the meeting as an opportunity to bring his concerns about prison conditions directly to the government official in charge of them. Unfortunately for Mandela, Kruger is ignorant of the historical facts of Mandela’s imprisonment and adamant that he and his fellow prisoners deserve to serve their sentence as criminals, even though they are political prisoners. Kruger returns a month later with a similar proposal, but Mandela is firm in his belief that “it is an offer only a turncoat could accept” (1998, p. 481–483).
On January 17, 2001, fifteen years later and halfway around the world, the Philippine Congress decided to ignore key evidence against President Joseph Estrada, essentially letting his corruption go unchecked. Angry at the decision, more than a million of Filipino protestors arrived at Epifania de los Santos Avenue, a major intersection in Manila, during the next few days. The swift and huge response was organized largely through social media and text messaging: almost seven million text messages were sent reading, “Go 2 EDSA. Wear blk” (Shirky, 2011, p. 28). Because of technology advances in the past thirty years, the average person has gained “greater access to information, more opportunities to engage in public speech, and an enhanced ability to undertake collective action. In the political arena, as the protests in Manila demonstrated, these increased freedoms can help loosely coordinated publics demand change” (Shirky, 2011, p. 29).
While social media had not yet become a widespread phenomenon when Mandela was imprisoned, his release was dependent upon the technological advances of the time. Primary media sources regarding Mandela were far and few between, largely because he was only allowed one visitor a year for much of his imprisonment. Additionally, security at the Robben Island prison was so strict that no one on the outside knew what Mandela looked like by the end of his imprisonment because it was nearly impossible to smuggle out a picture. In the outside world, it was against the law to carry images of Mandela, say his name or repeat any of his teachings. Even publishing books about him was forbidden, unless they portrayed him as a terrorist. However, the efforts of the government to erase Mandela’s name and words only made anti-apartheid activists more curious and reverent of him (British Broadcasting Corporation [BBC], 2013).
By the late 1960s, the ANC decided to take a different direction, launching a global campaign with Mandela as its face, called “Free Mandela.” According to BBC, the Free Mandela campaign “became one of the most effective global media movements” (2013). With the rise of cable television in the 1980s and the invention of the World Wide Web in 1989 (World Wide Web, 2019), the campaign spread around the world. It gained support from well-known celebrities such as Bruce Springsteen, Miles Davis, and Bill Cosby, and became popular among teenagers around the world. “The ANC allowed overseas satellite groups relative freedom to adapt their campaigns for their particular local circumstances, nuances, and protest movements,” which appealed to a wider audience than would have been possible without televised news and the internet (BBC, 2013).
As a result, the global Free Mandela campaign became so successful that John Vorster, the prime minister of South Africa, said that the world had come to see Mandela as the true leader of black peoples in South Africa by 1978. In early 1990, Mandela was able to negotiate a compromise between the government and revolutionary liberation movements, resulting in the institution of a constitutional democracy and Mandela’s release from prison on February 11, 1990 (Nelson Mandela Foundation [NMF], 2019). Had the government not felt so much pressure from the worldwide Free Mandela movement, they likely would not have been willing to compromise or release Mandela at all, and Mandela would not have been able to achieve the ANC’s goal or be elected president after his release.
Seventy-six-year-old Nelson Mandela walks up to a polling station at Ohlange High School, ready to vote for the first time in his life in South Africa’s first multiracial democratic election. Before entering, he takes a minute to honor John Dube, the first president of the ANC, who was buried nearby. As Mandela turns to walk inside, his mind is not on his personal victory in voting for the first time, but “on the heroes who had fallen so that [he] might be where [he]was that day, the men and women who had made the ultimate sacrifice for a cause that was now finally succeeding” (1998, p. 617). In the four years since Mandela was released from prison, he had been awarded a Nobel Peace Prize and been elected ANC Deputy President, but these experiences pale in comparison to the joy that spreads across his face as he drops his ballot in the box. Little does he know, this is the very election in which parliament will elect him as the first democratic president of South Africa (1998, p. 620).
As Gladwell points out, those who are successful are “products of history and community, of opportunity and legacy… The outlier, in the end, is not an outlier at all” (2008, p. 285).
“When a man has done what he conceived to be his duty to his people and his country, he can rest in peace. I believe I have made that effort, and that is therefore why I will sleep for the eternity” (Demme, Menell, & Gibson, 2009). No one would argue that Mandela’s life and career was not meaningful, but he was also the beneficiary of his family background, concerted cultivation, and extraordinary opportunity. As Gladwell points out, those who are successful are “products of history and community, of opportunity and legacy… The outlier, in the end, is not an outlier at all” (2008, p. 285). Everybody is a product of their circumstances, but what is more important is taking advantage of the assets of one’s background to make meaningful success seem as natural as Nelson Mandela’s.
REFERENCES
Demme, J. et. al. (Producer) & Menell, J. and Gibson, A (Director). (2009). Mandela: Son of Africa, Father of a Nation [Motion Picture]. South Africa: Universal Island Records.
Gladwell, M. (2008). Outliers. New York, New York: Little, Brown, and Company.
History of the Web. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://webfoundation.org/about/vision/history-of-the-web/
Mandela Death: How a Prisoner Became a Legend. (2013, December 07). Retrieved from https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-25256818
Mandela, N. (1994). Long Walk to Freedom : The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela. (1st ed.). Boston: Little, Brown.
Richman, D (host). (2014). The Day Nelson Mandela Became Nelson Mandela. Radio Diaries. [Audio Podcast]. Retrieved from http://www.radiodiaries.org/the-day-nelson-mandela-became-nelson-mandela/
Shirky, C. (2011). The Political Power of Social Media: Technology, the Public Sphere, and Political Change. Foreign Affairs, 90(1), 28–41. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.bethel.edu/stable/25800379
Timeline — Nelson Mandela Foundation. (2019). Retrieved from https://www.nelsonmandela.org/content/page/timeline
Trieu, Q., & Jayakody, R. (2018). Ethnic minority educational success: Understanding accomplishments in challenging settings. Social Indicators Research, , 1–39. doi:http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy.bethel.edu/10.1007/s11205-018-1900-9
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jocelyn Leafblad, a freshman from Inver Grove Heights, Minn., seeks an internship in child protection to help her realize her dream of working as a social worker in international child protection. Leafblad likes long walks with her yellow lab, hammocking in the sun, and authentic North Carolina barbecue.
WHAT I’VE LEARNED
Life is more fun when you have a choice. Book clubs are more fun when you choose the book instead of the club. Spaghetti sauce tastes better when you have dozens of varieties to choose from.
There’s no shortage of information about Nelson Mandela on the internet, but none of it is as interesting as what he wrote about himself.
An eight-page paper is somehow both easier and harder to write when you write it in two weeks instead of four hours.
It is possible to explain why anybody and everybody is successful, unless their life’s work doesn’t fit your definition of success.
Writing for class stops becoming a chore when you’re allowed to break the rules.
It is possible to learn from anybody if you dig deep enough.
If you tell me I have to write a paper on who I agree with when I don’t agree with anybody, I’ll tell you I don’t agree with anybody, I’ll tell you why, and I won’t apologize for it.
Everybody thinks it’s awkward to take a selfie for your professor when you’re doing group work, so you might as well just get it over with.
It’s a lot easier to discuss a book when you write down your thoughts and questions as you read instead of trying to dig them back up two days later.
Even required general education courses can be interesting if you make them interesting.
I learn more and easier and better from doing things than from watching somebody else do them.
Giving a speech to the whole class is a lot easier when you go on a walk and give it to one person first.
If Scott asks you a question that seems simple, he’s probably tricking you.
If you can’t apply your classwork to your real life, you’re doing something wrong. Wrong school, wrong major, or wrong attitude, if you get creative and make your education work for you, it will.
(Editor’s note: This paper was written as part of a GES160 Inquiry Seminar class at Bethel University in St. Paul, Minn.)
