Albertina Sisulu is, after Winnie Mandela, the best known woman in South Africa. She is the co-president of the United Democratic Front, the largest opposition coalition in South Africa, and the matriarch of a family known for decades of resistance to apartheid.
Sisulu's husband, Walter, is serving a life prison term with Nelson Mandela and other leaders of the outlawed African National Congress (ANC). She has not seen her husband outside of prison for 25 years. Two of her children are in exile, and an adopted son is in prison on treason charges. Another son, Zwelakhe Sisulu, is a young newspaper editor widely recognized as an emerging theoretician of black resistance who was detained in June under South Africa's state of emergency decree.
Sisulu herself has been in and out of jail and has suffered many restrictions, including being placed under house arrest for 10 years. Both at her home, and at the medical clinic where she works, Sisulu keeps bags packed with changes of clothing and toiletries, ready for when she is detained.
In a newspaper interview, she was asked if she ever despairs when her children, like her husband before them, are taken off to prison. "That is what we live for, to struggle for freedom. It does not worry me at all. In fact, I'm happy that my children understand why we are struggling." But are there ever doubts, she was asked. "No," she said emphatically, "I'm very hopeful."
Isaac was 14 years old when I met him three years ago in the little town of Jalapa in Nicaragua's northern frontier. Though only a young teenager, Isaac was very articulate about his country's struggle.
One member of our Witness for Peace team asked him, "Isaac, what do you most want for the future?"
He replied, "I want my children not to be marginal."
At the age of 14, Isaac believed he was already struggling for the children he knew he would have some day.
THE TIME HAS COME for all of us to become more like Albertina Sisulu and Isaac. They have learned to live with a more long-range perspective than most of us have. They, and thousands of others in their countries, have settled into a long-haul struggle for freedom, for justice, and for peace. The people of South Africa and Nicaragua have endured many setbacks and disappointments. They have already known enormous sacrifice and suffering, and they will certainly know more after the events of the past summer.
I was in England, Scotland, and Wales on a month-long preaching and speaking tour when the state of emergency was imposed by the South African government. By mid-summer an estimated 5,000 people had been detained, total press censorship enforced, a virtual police state imposed, and numbers of people killed. Hundreds were imprisoned when two entire congregations were arrested in their churches for holding memorial services for the dead.
It was almost impossible to find out what was occurring in the black townships or in South Africa's jails. The white South African government became the only legal source of information about what was happening inside the country. In Rev. Allan Boesak's words, the world could only get "information about the crime from the criminal." Bishop Desmond Tutu simply asked, "What is the world waiting for now?"
Quite naturally, South Africa loomed very large over my tour throughout Britain. We spoke of it every night, praying for justice and mercy.
One day I read in the newspaper about the South African government's regulations for detainees. One of them was a rule forbidding singing by prisoners. Because singing had been made illegal in South Africa, we decided to sing with and for our brothers and sisters there. We ended almost every evening meeting by crossing our arms and joining our hands and voices to sing "We Shall Overcome" as a prayer for South Africa and for all of us.
Thousands marched in the streets of London, just as thousands have marched and been arrested in the United States. The majority of the British Commonwealth nations called for economic sanctions against South Africa. But once again the Reagan and Thatcher governments refused to take strong actions against the South African government. Washington and London have now become the chief obstacles to freedom in South Africa.
In failing to place their enormous power in South Africa on the side of justice, the United States and British governments have again postponed the coming of peace and are thus complicit in the bloodshed that inevitably will result. In the face of the most racist and totalitarian government on earth today, Ronald Reagan is trying to do as little as possible.
IN SHARP CONTRAST with its policy of "constructive engagement" in South Africa, the Reagan administration has all but declared war on Nicaragua. After a three-year battle, the Congress of the United States gave in to the continual and intense pressure of the Reagan administration and approved $100 million in contra aid, even though public opinion consistently has run against the contra war. Ronald Reagan and his administration are obsessed with Nicaragua, and the president's anti-communist rhetoric, manipulation, and threats finally forced enough members of Congress into cowardly submission.
It soon became public that, in addition to the $100 million, the contras will have access to $400 million more worth of CIA intelligence, training, communications, and logistical support, as well as additional "discretionary funds." The White House has now publicly announced that the CIA will direct the entire day-by-day contra war to overthrow the Nicaraguan government. Even the pretenses of the contras being an indigenous Nicaraguan insurrection are disappearing as the true nature of the conflict becomes more and more obvious--a proxy war against Nicaragua conceived and carried out by the U.S. government.
News of the contra aid vote in the House of Representatives came to me near the end of my tour in Britain, as did the reports of hundreds arrested around the United States in protest. A few days after I returned, the meaning and future consequences of the vote became clear as 32 Nicaraguans were killed by a U.S. M-15 contact land mine, exploded by the contras in northern Nicaragua.
Typical of the contras' pattern, all the victims of the attack were civilians: 12 women (some pregnant), 12 children, and eight men. A similar terrorist attack in the Middle East sponsored by Libya or Syria would be a lead news story, but the U.S. media paid virtually no attention to it, thereby mimicking the cowardly subservience of their congressional colleagues.
In response to the contra vote, the Sandinistas closed La Prensa, the anti-government newspaper. Then they exiled Nicaraguan Bishop Pablo Antonio Vega for publicly supporting the contras and legitimizing a potential U.S. invasion on the day the 32 civilians were killed, and banned Fr. Bismark Carballo, the chief spokesperson for Cardinal Obando y Bravo, who is the government's leading critic. All of these actions simply made matters worse and will contribute to an even further hardening of the situation in both Nicaragua and the United States.
That is, of course, exactly what the Reagan administration wants to occur in order to justify its further aggression. The curtailing of human rights is often the response of a government that is under attack, and it always has far deeper and more dangerous consequences than most governments can see.
Through economic strangulation, political isolation, and military aggression, the U.S. government is trying to destroy the Nicaraguan revolution. The contras cannot win themselves, but the "low-intensity war" is designed to bring a slow and painful death and to lay the foundation for direct U.S. military intervention. Things will continue to get worse in Nicaragua, then the United States will use the worsening situation to justify its escalating war.
In both South Africa and Nicaragua, U.S. policies are a formula for more bloodshed and intensified human suffering. There will be no real prospects for change or for peace any time soon. That is the harsh and painful reality. That fact will require from us perseverance and steadfastness and a hope that is not based on success or results, but that can only come from a deeper faith. That lesson is already being learned by our brothers and sisters in South Africa and Nicaragua. It is time for us to learn that lesson ourselves.
Jim Wallis is editor-in-chief of Sojourners.
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