South Africa: Being Man, and Poet, At the Mandela Secretariat

18 December 2013
opinion

When I was elected secretary-general of the students union at the University of Benin in 1987, I headed a secretarial named after Mandela. I do not know when the decision was taken to make Mandela the tutelary patron of our union whose struggles were mundane by comparison to the race-wide, all-of-humanity-embracing, cause that kept him underground for several years and eventually in prison for twenty-seven more.

The honour, which was our union's, served to remind us, student activists almost all born after the apartheid hate machine had jailed Mandela, of the highest aspiration of our youth: to be conscious citizens, to know what is right and to have always the courage of our convictions. But it wasn't much of a secretariat: a few wood-panelled cubicles partitioned off the first floor gallery of the main cafeteria building. All of its grandeur lay in the name alone. Happily, several battles after, peaking with the nationwide anti-SAP protests of 1989, the UNIBEN students union got a house of its own.

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