This article provides a fresh decolonial reading of Nelson Mandela’s political life and legacy as an embodiment of critical decolonial ethics of liberation that is opposed to imperial/colonial/apartheid paradigm of war and its logics of racial profiling, classification, and hierarchization of human beings. The paradigm of war is underpinned by the paradigm of difference and working in combination, they enabled the denial of the humanity of black people, their enslavement, conquest, colonization, dispossession, exploitation, and notions of impossibility of copresence of human races. Mandela emerges at the center of this imperial/colonial/apartheid milieu vehemently opposed to the paradigm of war, logic of racism, and coloniality. After enduring 27 years of incarceration at the notorious Robben Island, Mandela avoided bitterness and preached the gospel of racial harmony, reconciliation, and democracy. His leadership during the transition from apartheid to democracy inaugurated a paradigm shift from Nuremberg paradigm of justice to a new paradigm of political justice privileging political reform and social transformation. As the first black president of South Africa, Mandela practically and symbolically made important overtures to the erstwhile white racists aimed at hailing them back to a new, inclusive, nonracial, democratic, and pluriversal society known as the rainbow nation.
AhluwaliaP. (2001). Politics and post-colonial theory: African inflections. London and New York: Routledge.
2.
AhluwaliaP. (2003). The struggle for African identity: Thabo Mbeki’s African renaissance. In ZegeyeA. & HarrisR. L. (Eds), Media, identity and the public sphere in post-apartheid South Africa (pp. 27–39). Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill.
3.
AminS. (1989). Eurocentrism. New York: Monthly Review Press.
4.
BlautJ. M. (1987). The coloniser’s model of the world: Geographical diffusionism and eurocentric history. New York and London: The Guilford Press.
5.
CampbellH. (2013). Ubuntu and the emancipation of human everywhere: Mandela and the African liberation struggle. Counterpunch. Retrieved February282014, from http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/12/12/mandela-and-the-african-liberation-struggle/print
6.
CesaireA. (1955). Discourse on colonialism (Trans. PinkhamJ.). New York: Monthly Review Press.
7.
CugoanoA. (1999/1789). Thoughts on the evils of slavery and other writings. New York: Penguin Books.
8.
Du BoisW. E. B. (1965). The world and Africa: An inquiry into the part which Africa has played in world history. New York: International Publishers.
9.
Du BoisW. E. B. (1903/1982). The souls of black folk. New York: New American Library.
10.
DusselE. (1989). Philosophy of liberation. New York: Orbis.
11.
DusselE. (2008). Twenty theses on politics (Trans. Ciccariello-MaherG.). Durham and London: Duke University Press.
12.
DusselE. (2011). Politics of liberation: A critical world history (Trans. CooperT.). London: SCM Press.
13.
EllisS. (2013). External mission: The ANC in exile. Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers.
14.
EllisS., & SechabaT. (1992). Comrades against apartheid: The ANC and the South African communist party in exile. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
15.
FalolaT. (2001). Nationalism and African intellectuals. Rochester: University of Rochester Press.
16.
FanonF. (1968). The wretched of the earth. New York: Grove Press.
17.
FreireP. (1970). The pedagogy of the oppressed. New York and London: Continuum.
18.
GordonL. R. (1995). Bad faith and antiblack racism. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press.
19.
GrosfoguelR. (2007, March/May). The epistemic decolonial turn: Beyond political-economy paradigms. Cultural Studies, 21(2–3), 211–223.
20.
GrosfoguelR. (2011). Decolonizing post-colonial studies and the paradigms of political-economy: Transmodernity, decolonial thinking, and global coloniality. Modernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 1(1), 1–39.
21.
JamesC. L. R. (1963). The black jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo revolution (2nd ed.). New York: Vintage Books.
22.
HalisiC. R. D. (1999). Black political thought in the making of South African democracy. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
23.
KantI. (1996). An answer to the question: What is enlightenment? In SchmidtJ. (Ed.), What is enlightenment? Eighteenth-century answers and twentieth-century questions (pp. 58–64). Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press.
24.
KaundaK., & MorrisC. M. (1966). A humanist in Africa: Letters to Colin M. Morris from Kenneth D. Kaunda, President of Zambia. New York: Abingdon Press.
25.
LuthuliA. J. (1961). Nobel peace prize acceptance speech. Retrieved December11, 1961, from http://www.anc.org.za/show.php?id=4296
26.
LodgeT. (2006). Mandela: A critical life. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
27.
Maldonado-TorresN. (2007, March/May). On the coloniality of being: Contributions to the development of a concept. Cultural Studies, 21(2–3), 240–270.
28.
Maldonado-TorresN. (2008a). Lewis Gordon: Philosopher of the human. CLR James Journal, 14(1), 103–137.
29.
Maldonado-TorresN. (2008b). Against war: View from the underside of modernity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
30.
MamdaniM. (1991). Social movements and constitutionalism in the African context. In ShivjiI. G. (Ed.), State and constitutionalism: An African debate on democracy (pp. 236–237). Harare: SAPES Books.
31.
MamdaniM. (2013a, March18). Beyond Nuremberg: The historical significance of the post-apartheid transition in South Africa. Unpublished 2013 annual inaugural lecture delivered at Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection, University of Witwatersrand.
32.
MamdaniM. (2013b, November7). The logic of Nuremberg. London Review of Books, 35(21), 33–34.
33.
MamdaniM. (2013c). Define and rule: Native as political identity. Johannesburg: Wits University Press.
34.
MandelaN. (1994). Long walk to freedom: The autobiography of Nelson Mandela. London: Little, Brown.
35.
MbembeA. (2013, Spring). Frantz Fanon’s oeuvres: A metamorphic thought. Journal of Contemporary Art, 32, 8–17.
36.
MendietaE. (2008). Foreword: The liberation of politics: Alterity, solidarity, liberation. In DusselE. (Ed.), Twenty theses on politics (pp. vii–xiii) (Trans. Ciccariello-MaherG.). Durham and London: Duke University Press.
37.
MignoloW. D. (1995). The darker side of renaissance: Literacy, territory, and colonization. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
38.
MignoloW. D. (2000). Local histories/global designs: Coloniality, subaltern knowledges, and border thinking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
39.
MignoloW. D. (2007, March). Introduction: Coloniality of power and de-colonial thinking. Cultural Studies, 21(2–3), 155–167.
40.
MignoloW. D. (2011). The darker side of western modernity: Global futures, decolonial options. Durham, DC and London: Duke University Press.
41.
MugabeR. G. (2001). Inside the third Chimurenga. Harare: Department of Information and Publicity.
42.
Ndlovu-GatsheniS. J. (2009a). Africa for Africans or “natives” only? New nationalism and nativism in Zimbabwe and South Africa. Afrika Spectrum, 1, 61–78.
43.
Ndlovu-GatsheniS. J. (2009b). Making sense of Mugabeism in local and global politics: So Blair keep your England and let me keep my Zimbabwe. Third World Quarterly, 30(6), July, 1139–1158.
44.
Ndlovu-GatsheniS. J. (2013a). Empire, global coloniality and African subjectivity. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books.
45.
Ndlovu-GatsheniS. J. (2013b). Coloniality of power in postcolonial Africa: Myths of decolonization. Dakar: CODESRIA Book Series.
46.
Ndlovu-GatsheniS. J. (2013c). The entrapment of Africa within the global colonial matrices of power: Eurocentrism, coloniality, and deimperialization in the twenty-first century. Journal of Developing Societies, 29(4), 331–353.
47.
Ndlovu-GatsheniS. J. (2016). The decolonial Mandela: Peace, justice and politics of life. New York & Oxford: Berghahn Books.
48.
NetshitenzheJ. (2012). Second keynote address: A continuing search for identity: Carrying the burden of history. In LissoniA., SoskeJ., ErlankN., NieftagodienN. & BadshaO. (Eds), One hundred years of the ANC: Debating liberation histories today (pp. 13–27). Johannesburg: Wits University Press.
49.
Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1993). Moving the centre: The struggle for cultural freedoms. Oxford: James Currey.
50.
Ngugi wa Thiong’o (2009). Re-membering Africa. Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers Ltd.
51.
NietzscheF. (1968). The will to power. New York: Vintage Books.
52.
NietzscheF. (1909/1990). Beyond good and evil. New York: Penguin.
53.
NkrumahK. (1964). Concienscism: Philosophy and ideology of liberation. New York: Monthly Review Press.
54.
NyerereJ. K. (1968). Freedom and socialism. New York: Oxford University Press.
55.
QuijanoA. (2000). The coloniality of power and social classification. Journal of World Systems, 6(2), Sumer-Fall, 342–386.
56.
QuijanoA. (2007). Coloniality and modernity/rationality. Cultural Studies, 21(2–3), March/May, 186–178.
57.
RabakaR. (2010). African critical theory: Reconstructing the black radical tradition, from W.E.B. and C.L.R. James to Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral. Lenham and Boulder: Lexington Books.
58.
RamphelaM. (2008). Laying ghosts to rest: Dilemmas of the transformation in South Africa. Cape Town: Tafelberg.
59.
SchechterD. (2013). Madiba A to Z: The many faces of Nelson Mandela. Johannesburg: Jacana Media.
60.
SemeP. I. (1906, April5). The egeneration of Africa. Retrieved March28, 2014, from http://www.anc.org.za/show.php?id=4342
61.
SenghorL. S. (1967). Socialism is a humanism. In FrommE. (Ed.), Socialist humanism: An international symposium (pp. 50–62). London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press.
62.
SuttnerR. (2007). (Mis)Understanding Nelson Mandela. African Historical Review, 39(2), 107–130.
63.
WildersonF. B. (2010, February2). Obama and Mandela: The parallels and the differences. Unpublished Paper Presented at the Concerned Citizens of Laguna Woods Village.
64.
ZelezaP. T. (2003). Rethinking Africa’s globalization: Volume 1: The intellectual challenges. Trenton: Africa World Press.
65.
ZelezaP. T. (2013). Mandela’s long walk with African history. CODESRIA Bulletin, No. 3&4, 10–13.
66.
ZizekS. (2013, December6). Mandela’s socialist failure. New York Times.
