A Different World, the Same Cause : Apartheid: Mandela’s principled stands of decades ago remain the bible for black activists.

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa —  Back in 1964, when 45-year-old Nelson Mandela and seven other men were sentenced to life in prison for sabotage, the Beatles were touring Australia, winter coats were selling for $10 and Ford Motor Co. was proudly increasing its investment in what it called “a prosperous South Africa.”

South Africa and the world have changed drastically since the days when Mandela and his colleagues launched the armed struggle against apartheid. Thousands of blacks have died in South Africa, hundreds of bombs have exploded and three leaders of the ruling National Party have come and gone, always clinging desperately to legally prescribed racial segregation.

Yet in all those years, Mandela’s principled stands on the enduring problems facing this wealthy, white minority-ruled country have remained steadfastly unchanged. And those stands, unmarked by bitterness or emotion, have been the bible that generations of African National Congress leaders have turned to for answers to the problems of the day.

“I have done my duty to my people and to South Africa,” the tall lawyer told a court during a 1956 treason trial for which he received a five-year prison term. “I have no doubt that posterity will pronounce that I was innocent and that the criminals that should have been brought before this court are the members of the (white) government.”

It was Mandela’s speech from the dock during his later sabotage trial, after which he was sentenced to life in prison, that publicly established the moral underpinings of the armed black liberation struggle and became one of the most famous speeches in South African history. On that April day in 1964, he admitted having founded Umkhonto we Sizwe, or Spear of the Nation, the military wing of the then-banned African National Congress.

“I do not deny that I planned sabotage,” he said. “I did not do this in a spirit of recklessness . . . but as a result of a calm and sober assessment of the situation after many years of opposition and tyranny of my people by whites.

“All lawful modes of expressing opposition to this principle had been closed by legislation,” he said. “We were placed in a position in which we had either to accept a permanent state of inferiority or defy the government. We chose to defy the government.”

On Saturday, in announcing Mandela’s release on Sunday, President Frederik W. de Klerk said he is convinced that Mandela is committed to peaceful solutions to the country’s problems. But it is the government, not Mandela, that has changed its position on that issue.

In 1984, then-President Pieter W. Botha made world headlines when he offered to release Mandela if the prisoner would renounce violence. Mandela’s answer, smuggled out by his daughter, Zindzi, and read to a rally that year, showed that in more than two decades behind bars, he had not changed.

“Only free men can negotiate,” his statement bluntly responded. “Prisoners cannot enter into contracts.”

And a few months ago, at age 71, Mandela indicated that his years in prison have not softened his stance on violence.

“White South Africa must accept the plain fact that the ANC will not suspend, to say nothing of abandoning, the armed struggle until the government shows its willingness to surrender the monopoly of political power, and to negotiate directly and in good faith with acknowledged black leaders,” he said.

Those words were contained in a lengthy policy statement that Mandela wrote in sturdy longhand and presented to the government last year. As in the 1950s, when Mandela asked the government to negotiate with the ANC and was spurned, he was again urging talks.

“Not only did the government ignore our demands for a meeting (but) it took advantage of our commitment to a nonviolent struggle and unleashed the most violent form of racial oppression this country has ever seen,” Mandela had said in the 1950s.

This time, though, it came amid a new era in which De Klerk’s government was actively talking with its most famous prisoner.

“My views are still the same,” Mandela wrote the government last year. “The ANC . . . has no vested interest in violence. It abhors any action which may cause loss of life, destruction of property and misery to the people.

“But we consider the armed struggle a legitimate form of self-defense against a morally repugnant system of government which will not allow even peaceful forms of protest.”

Yet Mandela held no bitterness against the government and he again made a peace offering, an attempt, he said, “to bring the country’s two major political bodies to the negotiating table.”