BY DANIEL WESANGULA AND AGENCIES

As the world mourns and celebrates the life of Madiba, few individuals can hold a candle to the achievements that Nelson Mandela made as a statesman. His selflessness and soberness in dealing with the thorny issues of race and segregation that had dogged his native land for decades left him head over shoulders among many of his peers – past, present or future. However, a few, through their selfless deeds, come close to capturing the hearts of humanity as the African icon did.

MOTHER TERESA

(August 26, 1910- September 5, 1997)

From as young as 12 years Mother Theresa, nee Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu in Macedonia, knew she had to be a missionary to spread the love of Christ. At the age of 18 she left her parental home in Skopje and joined the Sisters of Loreto, an Irish community of nuns with missions in India. After a few months’ training in Dublin she was sent to India, where on May 24, 1931, she took her initial vows as a nun.

From 1931 to 1948 Mother Teresa taught at St. Mary’s High School in Calcutta, but the suffering and poverty she glimpsed outside the convent walls made such a deep impression on her that in 1948 she received permission from her superiors to leave the convent school and devote herself to working among the poorest of the poor in the slums of Calcutta. She started an open-air school for slum children. Soon voluntary helpers joined her, and financial support was also forthcoming. This made it possible for her to extend the scope of her work.

On October 7, 1950, Mother Teresa received permission from the Holy See to start her own order, “The Missionaries of Charity”, whose primary task was to love and care for those persons nobody was prepared to look after. In 1965 the society became an International Religious Family by a decree of Pope Paul VI.

This society of missionaries started by Mother Teresa has spread all over the world, including the former Soviet Union and Eastern European countries. They provide effective help to the poorest of the poor in a number of countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and they undertake relief work in the wake of natural catastrophes such as floods, epidemics, and famine, and for refugees. The Missionaries of Charity throughout the world are aided and assisted by co-workers who became an official International Association on March 29, 1969. As the fates finally conspire to blow Mandela’s candle out, the flame that he and others of his stature lit through their struggles and devotion will continue to burn in the hearts of the millions that look up to them for inspiration.

MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR,

(January 15, 1929-April 4, 1968)

The civil rights leader was born Michael Luther King, Jr, but later had his name changed to Martin. His grandfather began the family’s long tenure as pastors of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, serving from 1914 to 1931; his father has served from then until the present, and from 1960 until his death Martin Luther acted as co-pastor.  In 1954, Martin Luther King became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Always a strong worker for civil rights for members of his race, King was, by this time, a member of the executive committee of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, the leading organisation of its kind in the nation. He was ready, then, early in December 1955, to accept the leadership of the first great black nonviolent demonstration of contemporary times in the US, the bus boycott.

The boycott lasted 382 days. On December 21, 1956, after the Supreme Court of the US had declared unconstitutional the laws requiring segregation on buses, Negroes and whites rode the buses as equals. During these days of boycott, King was arrested, his home was bombed, he was subjected to personal abuse, but at the same time he emerged as a Negro leader of the first rank. In 1957 he was elected president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organisation formed to provide new leadership for the now burgeoning civil rights movement.

The ideals for this organisation he took from Christianity; its operational techniques from Gandhi. In the eleven-year period between 1957 and 1968, King travelled over six million miles and spoke over 2,500 times. In these years, he led a massive protest in Birmingham, Alabama, that caught the attention of the entire world, providing what he called a coalition of conscience and in front of an estimated crowd of 250,000 people he delivered his famous “l Have a Dream” speech. In 1963 he was named Man of the Year by Time magazine.

At the age of 35, Martin Luther King, Jr, was the youngest man to have received the Nobel Peace Prize and announced that he would turn over the prize money of $54,123 to the furtherance of the civil rights movement. On the evening of April 4, 1968, while standing on the balcony of his motel room in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was to lead a protest march in sympathy with striking garbage workers of that city, he was assassinated. He is widely thought to be the leader of the civil rights movement.

MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI

(October 2 1869-January 30 1948)

Gandhi was born in Porbandar, the capital of a small administrative region in what is today the state of Gujarat in Western India. In the second half of the 1880s, Gandhi went to London for law studies.

After his studies, he first went back to India to work as a barrister, and then, in 1893, to Natal in South Africa, where he was employed by an Indian trading company. In South Africa Gandhi worked to improve living conditions for the Indian minority. This work, which was especially directed against increasingly racist legislation, made him develop a strong Indian and religious commitment, and a will to self-sacrifice.

With a great deal of success he introduced a method of non-violence in the Indian struggle for basic human rights. The method, satyagraha – “truth force” – was highly idealistic; without rejecting the rule of law as a principle, the Indians should break those laws which were unreasonable or suppressive. Each individual would have to accept punishment for having violated the law. However, he should, calmly, yet with determination, reject the legitimacy of the law in question. This would, hopefully, make the adversaries – first the South African authorities, later the British in India – recognise the unlawfulness of their legislation.

When Gandhi came back to India in 1915, news of his achievements in South Africa had already spread to his home country. In only a few years, during the First World War, he became a leading figure in the Indian National Congress. Through the interwar period he initiated a series of non-violent campaigns against the British authorities.

At the same time he made strong efforts to unite the Indian Hindus, Muslims and Christians, and struggled for the emancipation of the “untouchables” in Hindu society. While many of his fellow Indian nationalists preferred the use of non-violent methods against the British primarily for tactical reasons, Gandhi’s non-violence was a matter of principle. His firmness on that point made people respect him regardless of their attitude towards Indian nationalism or religion. Even the British judges who sentenced him to imprisonment recognised Gandhi as an exceptional personality. His continuous efforts made him a front-runner for the Nobel Peace Prize on multiple occasions but Gandhi had many critics in the international peace movement.

Although he was nominated for the 1937, 1938 and 1939 Nobels, 10 years were to pass before his name came up for nomination again. In support of his candidacy the committee said: “Recommend for this year Nobel Prize Mahatma Gandhi architect of the Indian nation the greatest living exponent of the moral order and the most effective champion of world peace today.