When Germany changed its mind about Nelson Mandela

With political ties to apartheid South Africa, West Germany long dubbed Nelson Mandela a terrorist. It wasn’t until shortly before the activist’s prison release in 1990 that the recently reunified federal republic would join the chorus and name him an international hero. In honour of Nelson Mandela Day on July 18, we look at Germany's complicated relationship with the anti-apartheid activist, politician, and statesman. 

Bonn aids the prosecution against Nelson Mandela

“[W]e intend, also in the future, with consideration for the good relations and the large German minority in South Africa, to avoid expressing public criticism of South Africa's domestic relations." Written in the West German Foreign Ministry records of 1961, this internal notice only scratches at the surface of the Bundesrepublik’s enduring vocal and economic support for South Africa’s apartheid government.

South Africa's population had been racially segregated since 1950 when the Groups Area Act was passed and the Communist Party banned. With a special German-Afrikaans relationship established in the 1930s, the Cold War saw West Germany reach to form a pro-Western cultural alliance with South Africa in 1955. 

South Africa’s Treason Trial came a year later in 1956, when 156 members of the anti-apartheid Congress Alliance, including Nelson Mandela, were accused of planning an international communist-inspired plot to overthrow the South African government. 

The South African government's prosecution was weak and it looked to its new alliance with Bonn for help. Then in the process of banning the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), the West German government forwarded documents detailing proceedings against the KPD which are thought to have provided state prosecutors with “invaluable insight”, according to Harald Bielfeld, a Pretoria court reporter.

While the African National Congress (ANC) liberation movement was successfully banned, insight from the Bonn documents ultimately proved insufficient in the Treason Trial and the defendants were found innocent in 1961. But many of them would return to the courtroom in 1963 as part of the Rivonia Trial. When the trial ended in 1964, Mandela, now heading the ANC's underground, military wing, and seven other defendants were charged with sabotage and given life prison sentences.

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Germany invests in apartheid amid Cold War

In the late 1950s, West Germany had already established itself as the third most important importer to South Africa. But international pressure against the South African government was beginning to mount, and boycott movements bloomed in the UK, France and Sweden.

The Sharpeville Massacre in 1960 brought a turning point for international politics when state brutality was laid bare. Police opened fire and murdered or wounded around 250 Black South Africans demonstrating against the pass law, which required all people of colour to carry identification documents. International governments had another opportunity to assess their South Africa stance.

As international investors withdrew, share prices on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange plummeted. With the West German government still staunch to its alliance with South Africa, German banks, including Deutsche Bank, Dresdner Bank and Commerzbank, stepped in.

In 1962 the United Nations General Assembly passed a non-binding resolution calling for economic and other sanctions on South Africa’s apartheid policies and the UN Special Committee Against Apartheid was formed. But West Germany’s investments would continue until the 1990s. According to nd, “From 1978 to 1993 alone, German investors invested 70 billion marks in South Africa. On average, they achieved profits of 8,6 percent per year”.

On the other side of the Iron Curtain, the opposing approach was being taken. The GDR Committee of Solidarity with the Peoples of Africa, directly linked to the ruling SED, was founded in 1960. Until the committee wound up in 1990, it would collect millions of marks of donations for the ANC, with 207 million Deutsche Mark donated in 1982 alone. The liberation movement was also designated a printing office in East Berlin.

German public opinion begins to change and the apartheid boycott spreads

As the 1980s rolled on, West German money flowed into the South African public sector backstage. The Mercedes-Benz Group and Rheinmetall - among other companies - supplied arms to help suppress opposition to apartheid, but public opinion was beginning to sway. 

Activists, students and church groups began boycotting food imported from South Africa and by the end of the decade, many international companies in Germany pulled out of South Africa and moved offices to nearby African countries like Zimbabwe.

The Bonn government began to publicly distance itself, but never formally joined the boycott movement. In 1990 Germany was reunified, the Soviet Union collapsed, socialist politics was on the decline and Mandela was released. To celebrate, Mercedes Benz gifted the freedom fighter a red S-Class car.

Four years later he would become South Africa’s first Black president, but was restrained by fellow ANC members from adopting socialist economic policy in South Africa’s new democracy. One of his first tasks was to pay off South Africa’s debt to German banks, none of which were written off.

Video credit: Tagesschau / Tagesschau.de

Germany celebrates Nelson Mandela as freedom fighter

After his release but before his election, Germany was still sceptical towards the revolutionary. "When Mandela came to Germany for the first time [in 1990] he wasn't even received by Helmut Kohl," Gottfried Wellmer, an author specialising in southern African politics, told The Local after Mandela died in 2013. "It was only when it was clear he was going to be elected that he was invited to make a speech in parliament”. 

Before his speech began, Bundestag members thanked Mandela for what he had “suffered and achieved for your country and its people, and what you have created for tomorrow”. The then German president, Rita Süssmuth (CDU), appealed to Mandela, “Let us work together to make hate, contempt, war and terror disappear from our countries and continents”.

Having abandoned more violent tactics previously used by the ANC, Mandela was now known the world over for his negotiation tactics and promoting peace. Taking to the Bundestag floor in Bonn, the then 77-year-old praised Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s dedication to developing South African-German relations.

On his Bonn trip, Mandela also attended an industry and commerce conference to find German investors for South Africa. Attendees offered a less grand reception than in the Bundestag, "Well, I've seen pictures of him and the cheers of the Black people on his release on TV. He seems to be a really big deal," one attendee told Berliner Zeitung.

As in most western countries, Mandela’s presidency would see Germany finally cement his status as a world hero. "It was a very moving moment for me to experience Nelson Mandela and speak to him," Angela Merkel said when she first met the leader in 2007, once he was already in retirement.

Upon his death in 2013, Germany’s longest-running chancellor called Mandela a “giant of history”, asserting that Mandela’s imprisonment “never made him bitter, quite the opposite, it only made him more determined to overcome the injustice of apartheid”. 

Thumb image credit: Nielen de Klerk / Shutterstock.com