Leid Stories - 12/13/13

Mandela: A Reluctance to Tell the Whole Story

 

Media coverage and, therefore, public discourse about and opinion of Nelson Mandela, have neatly excised centuries of racist invasion, plunder and brutal subjugation of a people from the story of the heroic figure. We encounter Mandela at the near end of a cataclysmic era in South Africa, but certainly not unique to it. That history had been replicated all over the black world.

Leid Stories discusses the clear discomfort the media and shapers of opinion have in telling the whole story -- not the hurried, sanitized version that starts with “apartheid” and casts a centuries-old war for reclamation of indigenous natural rights essentially as a higher-octane version of the U.S. civil-rights struggle that ended with Mandela bringing about kumbaya “reconciliation” in 1994.

There is a reason they won’t tell the whole story.