Mandela meets the press: Monitor coverage after his prison years

The Monitor’s correspondents in South Africa followed Nelson Mandela closely throughout the 1990s, as he transitioned from world’s most famous political prisoner to president of a new nation to a continent’s elder statesman. Here are some snapshots of their reports from that period. 

4. 'We have to normalize': Mandela retires

Peter Main/The Christian Science Monitor/FILE
Nelson Mandela visits the Christian Science Church plaza in this 1990 file photo.

In 1999, Mandela made history again, this time by stepping down after only one term as president. The decision set the stage for a second peaceful transition in South Africa, from one democratically elected government to another. As Monitor writer John Battersby wrote of his presidency

Mandela's unique style in reaching out to whites while stressing the need for black empowerment has been key to a relatively peaceful transition from apartheid to black majority rule.

In balancing these potentially explosive forces, Mandela has laid the foundation for the next stage of the transition - a real transfer of economic power to blacks and a more rapid Africanization of the civil service and other institutions.

But the end of his presidency also marked a moment of crisis for Mandela the man, Battersby wrote.  

The question that has always fascinated me is: Who is Nelson Mandela? I once was alone with him on his private jet to Durban. After gazing out the window for a time, he began to speak about himself with a sense of detachment. It was as though he, too, wanted to know who this Nelson Mandela was, and what would happen to him when he relinquished his post as president of the country and the ANC.

For South Africa too, it was a fraught moment. "Nelson Mandela is a saint. But in a weird sense, it will be a relief when Mandela leaves," a political analyst told the Monitor in 1999. "For too long we have been treated as this abnormal nation with this great, moral leader, this icon.  But we have to normalize." 

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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