Harvard criticises Ronald Reagan and Maggie Thatcher regimes

South Africa experts Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, both professors of African and African American studies and of anthropology at Harvard, were in Cape Town leading a Harvard Summer School program in June, when Mandela fell ill. The Gazette spoke to them about Mandela’s legacy, the modern South Africa he helped create, and the future of the nation where they both grew up.
GAZETTE: Between the ending of apartheid, truth and reconciliation, and the establishment of democracy, is it possible to talk about any one thing as his greatest legacy?

JOHN COMAROFF: Clearly when he was head of the ANC [African National Congress] Youth League in the ’50s, and later when he graduated to the senior echelons of the movement, he was one of its great thinkers and leaders. He played a key role in the writing of the Freedom Charter and in the deliberations around the question of the armed struggle; his incarceration, and of course his famous speech from the dock at his trial, were both inspirational and substantive in giving direction to the anti-apartheid struggle. It was he, for example, who, against the rather different position of the black power movement, argued most forcefully [in favor of] a … post-racial South Africa, a unified nation founded on the sovereignty of the people rather than sovereignty of the party.

In that sense, he was a profoundly liberal thinker, in spite of the efforts of the Ronald Reagan and Maggie Thatcher regimes to construe him as a raving communist. He was never that at all, he was always a very considered — if anything, a Christian — democrat.

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2013/12/still-transcendent/