By John Battersby
When dawn breaks in Glasgow on Friday 18th July the spirit of the
late Nelson Mandela will live again in the city that became the first in
the world to bestow its freedom upon him at a remarkable ceremony back
in 1981.
The City will host a series of events to honour the memory of Mandela
on the first International Mandela Day since the iconic leader died on
5th December last year aged 95.
The events will include a ceremony in Mandela Place and a music
concert at the Kelvin Grove Library in the evening, one of nine “live
zones” during the Commonwealth Games, followed by another open-air
concert going late into the night.
As the South African team limbers up on the eve of the Commonwealth
Games due to open on 23rd July, the focus of the competing teams will
pause to reflect on the life and example of Nelson Mandela who inspired
the world with his courage, commitment and forgiveness.
The decision to bestow the Freedom of the city on Mandela in 1981 was
at the time an act of extraordinary vision and courage driven by the
Scottish anti-apartheid movement and one which flew directly in the face
of the British Government of the day and went counter to official views
in most of the then G7 group of nations.
Following his release, President Mandela acknowledged that the
gesture by Glasgow had played a major role in mobilising international
opinion against apartheid and focusing global attention on his continued
incarceration which had become the focus of the anti-apartheid campaign
of the African National Congress.
But public opinion was beginning to change and the London-based
Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM) spearheaded that change leading protest
marches, organising boycotts of South African goods and raising
awareness of the plight of those living under apartheid.
Nowhere was the campaign stronger than in Scotland where Brian
Filling, now South African honorary consul for Scotland, had become the
first chair of the Scottish Committee of the AAM in 1976.
In October 1993, three years after his release and after a year of
protracted and painstaking negotiations facilitated by Filling, Mandela
visited Glasgow to receive the freedom of nine British cities including
three others in Scotland, four in England and one in Wales.
Three delegates of each of the nine cities made their presentations
to Mandela before the late Archbishop Trevor Huddleston made the
collective presentation before Mandela addressed a huge crowd in George
Square and paid tribute to them for bestowing on him the freedom of
their city.
“It was a great honour for me personally,” Mandela said. “But it was
also of great symbolic significance for you were granting to me the
freedom of your city when the apartheid regime was imprisoning us and
all our people in the land of their birth.”
As Filling notes in his 2011 book entitled the Glasgow Mandela Story,
a highlight of the day was when the South African singer Mara Louw, who
returned to Glasgow this year for the opening of the book fair Aye
Write, asked Mandela to dance.
- The Mitchell Library will be
exhibiting the Collected Works of Shakespeare known as the Robben Island
Bible which Mandela dated and signed in the mid-1970’s during his
incarceration on Robben Island. On the afternoon of Saturday 19th July,
there will be a performance of the Robben Island Bible by Matthew Hahn
in the Mitchell Library Exhibition Hall. The staged reading is based on
the chosen verses of 30 of the most important political prisoners on the
island prison who went on to lead South Africa after the fall of
apartheid and the first democracy elections in 1994. A panel discussion
will follow the reading.
- The cultural program on Mandela
Day and at the South African national house – ekhaya – in the Trades
Hall in the Merchant City of Glasgow – is a project of the South African
Seasons, a two-year arts and culture collaboration between South Africa
and the UK headed by SA Seasons Commissioner-General Bongani Tembe in
conjunction with the SA department of Arts and Culture and assisted by
Brand South Africa under the overall direction of the Department of
Sports and Recreation.
