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Clinton Brings Rhetorical Gifts to Mandela's Party
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As Clinton recalled, Mandela didn't merely speak of a multiracial society, he incorporated former apartheid leaders into his cabinet, he forgave the prosecutor who once tried to have him executed, he drank tea with the wife of the former South African president who kept him jailed. And in an enduring masterstroke still remembered keenly by white South Africans, he took to the field after the 1995 World Cup of rugby -- traditionally a sport of Afrikaners, the architects of apartheid -- and donned a team jersey.
Clinton suggested that this approach offered a model for other African nations, where divisions of tribe -- if not race -- remain enduring sources of tension.
"You get better leaders if you live in a country where your democracy was more than majority rule. It's also minority rights and fair process. That was this man's genius," Clinton told the packed theater.
"Everybody thought it was so great he brought his jailers to his inauguration," Clinton said. "A clever politician could have done that. You have to be much more than a clever politician to put your oppressors in your government."
Clinton did not miss a chance to weigh in on the hottest issue on the continent -- the government demolition of housing and markets across neighboring Zimbabwe that has left, according to United Nations estimates, more than 500,000 people homeless during the coldest months of the year.
Clinton's criticism of Zimbabwe President Robert G. Mugabe for this, made in a private function Monday night, made the wires here.
"It was wrong for those neighborhoods to be plowed up in Zimbabwe," Clinton said in an interview Tuesday before the Mandela celebration. "The difference in the Mandela approach and the Mugabe approach in governing a formerly apartheid, black-majority society couldn't be more stark."
Then, as Clinton headed for the stage, a man with a point-and-shoot camera begged for a picture. With a friendly smile, Clinton put his arm around the stranger and posed as if they were lifelong friends.
