Mandela Day is an international day in honour of Nelson Mandela,
celebrated annually on the 18th of July – Mandela’s Birthday.
It is a call to action for individuals – for people everywhere –
to take responsibility for changing the world into a better place,
one small step at a time, just as Mr Mandela did.
Following the success of Nelson Mandela’s 90th birthday celebrations in London’s Hyde Park in June 2008 and the 4664 concerts, it was decided that there could be nothing more fitting than to celebrate Mr Mandela’s birthday each year with a day dedicated to his life’s work and that of his charitable organisations, and to ensure his legacy continues forever.
The day was officially declared by the United Nations in November 2009. Mandela Day is not meant as a public holiday but is a global call to action that celebrates the idea that each individual has the ability to make an impact and the power to transform the world.
The Mandela Day campaign message is simple: Mr Mandela gave 67 years of his life fighting for the rights of humanity. All we are asking is that everyone gives 67 minutes of their time, whether it’s supporting your chosen charity or serving your local community.
Long Road to Freedom
On August 5th, 1962, an ordinary piece of road along the R103 about 3 kilometres outside Howick in KwaZulu-Natal took on extraordinary significance when armed apartheid police flagged down a car.
The man pretending to be the chauffeur had earned the nickname of the “Black Pimpernel” having evaded capture by the apartheid regime for 17 months. It was in this dramatic manner at this unassuming place that Nelson Mandela was finally captured and was to disappear from public view for the next 27 years.
Mandela had just paid a clandestine visit to ANC President Chief Albert Luthuli to report on his African Odyssey. His meeting was also to request support for an armed struggle, after having spent most of his adult life trying to find peaceful ways in which to end the injustice and suffering caused by the system of Apartheid in South Africa, without success.
50 years later on August 4th 2012, to mark the anniversary of the start of Nelson Mandela’s “long walk to freedom” a quietly powerful new sculpture was inaugurated and unveiled at this spot.
The sculpture is comprised of 50 steel column constructions, each between 6.5 and 9.5 meters tall, set into the landscape of the Natal Midlands. The posts are staggered and the portrait of Nelson Mandela only comes into correct focus when the posts line up at a position 35 meters from the sculpture (a reference to the fact that Mandela proved notoriously difficult for the authorities to find).
From this perspective the sculpture reads as a familiar photograph of Mandela, suggestive of his incarceration as one is aware it is comprised essentially of a series of steel bars, but seen from other angles the design splinters into a dynamic moment of fracture and release.
The artist Marco Cianfanelli comments on the deliberate structural paradox, that, “this represents the momentum gained in the struggle through the symbolic of Mandela’s capture. The 50 columns represent the 50 years since his capture, but they also suggest the idea of many making the whole; of solidarity. It points to an irony as the political act of Mandela’s incarceration cemented his status as an icon of struggle, which helped ferment the groundswell of resistance, solidarity and uprising, bringing about political change and democracy”.
