Just watched the movie "Invictus" produced and directed by Clint Eastwood, starring Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela and Matt Damon as Francois Pienaar, the South African rugby team captain. I thoroughly enjoyed the film. I also wanted to read the entire poem, "Invictus" and find out more about Nelson Mandela, his 27 years in prison and what he did to deserve such a severe sentence. The CIA had a hand in his arrest in 1962 and by my summation of the CIA, the FBI, the US Senate, corporate, industrial and banking interests and our own proclivity for racism. (Welcome to America, now clean our toilets) I was pretty sure the US was definitely on the wrong side of apartheid. We have yet to ratify sanctions against apartheid and the reason the US Ambassador gave at the time are as pathetic as our rationalizations regarding torture. Are we really the good guys?
"Invictus"
"Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul."
"Invictus" is a short poem by the English poet William Ernest Henley.
On 5 August 1962 Mandela was arrested after living on the run for seventeen months, and was imprisoned in the Johannesburg Fort. The arrest was made possible because the U.S. Central intelligence Agency (CIA) tipped off the security police as to Mandela's whereabouts and disguise.
Seventy-six other countries subsequently signed on, but a number of nations have neither signed nor ratified the ICSPCA, including Canada, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and the United States. In explanation of the US vote against the convention, Ambassador Clarence Clyde Ferguson Jr. said: "[W]e cannot...accept that apartheid can in this manner be made a crime against humanity. Crimes against humanity are so grave in nature that they must be meticulously elaborated and strictly construed under existing international law..."