Nelson Mandela on Resistance

In one line

Mandela's argument is that non-violence is a tactic rather than a principle, that a government which answers peaceful protest with force and closes every lawful channel leaves its opponents no other means, and that the responsibility for the turn to force lies with the government that closed the channels.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: Nelson Mandela defended the decision to abandon exclusively non-violent methods on the ground that fifty years of constitutional and peaceful struggle had produced only more repressive legislation and fewer rights; that the government met peaceful demands with force and outlawed the organisations pressing them; that in those conditions continued non-violence would have been a passive submission to a permanent state of inferiority; and that violence directed at property and at the machinery of the state, and calculated to avoid loss of life, was the least destructive of the alternatives remaining.

The situation

Mandela was tried at Rivonia in 1963 and 1964 with others, on charges arising from sabotage and from the activities of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the organisation formed to carry it out. He faced the death penalty. Rather than deny the acts, he made a long statement from the dock in which he set out why the decision had been taken and accepted personal responsibility for it. He was sentenced to life imprisonment and served twenty-seven years.

The context that matters for this topic is the legal one. Apartheid was not lawlessness. It was a comprehensive body of legislation: statutes classifying people by race, allocating land by race, requiring passes, prohibiting mixed marriages, reserving occupations, and removing the franchise. That is what makes the case central to a module on unjust laws. Everything Mandela objected to had been validly enacted by a parliament.

The argument, in five steps

1. The struggle began, and long remained, non-violent. Mandela's account emphasises that the movement had for decades used petitions, deputations, strikes, boycotts and defiance campaigns in which volunteers deliberately broke unjust laws and submitted to arrest, which is exactly the technique of the two previous chapters.

2. Peaceful methods were met with force and with more law. Demonstrations were fired on; leaders were banned, restricted and imprisoned; and the response to each campaign was fresh legislation making the next one an offence. The organisations themselves were declared unlawful, which removed even the possibility of lawful political activity.

3. Non-violence was a tactic, not a creed. This is the point on which Mandela differs from Gandhi and the point an answer must state clearly. For Gandhi, non-violence is a principle bound up with truth and with the relation of means to ends. For Mandela it was a method, adopted because it was thought effective, and to be reconsidered when it ceased to be. When the government's response made peaceful protest impossible, continuing it would have been not a moral stand but an acceptance of permanent subjection.