Brothers in the struggle

By Richard B. Muhammad | Last updated: Dec 10, 2013 - 9:59:24 AM

(FinalCall.com) - The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan and President Nelson Mandela of South Africa met in 1996 in Johannesburg at the African leader and former political prisoner’s home. The Minister and a Nation of Islam delegation was greeted by President Mandela during a stop of a 28-nation World Friendship Tour after the successful Million Man March.

During the struggle against apartheid, the late South African leader was befriended by the late Yasser Arafat of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the late Col. Muammar Gadhafi of Libya, and President Fidel Castro of Cuba. He refused to forsake these friends and allies despite pressure from the United States and western nations who backed White-minority rule in South Africa.

Mr. Mandela was also outspoken about U.S. warmongering, declarations that opponents to oppression were terrorists, the war on terror, workers’ rights and the problems of poverty and suffering in the world.

When he met with Min. Farrakhan in 1996, the beloved African statesman said there was nothing on which they disagreed.

As thinkprogress.org noted, “Mandela called out racism in America. On a trip to New York City in 1990, Mandela made a point of visiting Harlem and praising African Americans’ struggles against ‘the injustices of racist discrimination and economic equality.’ He reminded a larger crowd at Yankee Stadium that racism was not exclusively a South African phenomenon. ‘As we enter the last decade of the 20th century, it is intolerable, unacceptable, that the cancer of racism is still eating away at the fabric of societies in different parts of our planet,’ he said. ‘All of us, Black and White, should spare no effort in our struggle against all forms and manifestations of racism, wherever and whenever it rears its ugly head.’”

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