Aufgabe 3.1 · Abitur NRW Englisch LK · Cohen: Nelson Mandela’s Stolen Spoo 2021

Material

Roger Cohen: Nelson Mandela’s Stolen Spoon (2018)

Thank you, Madiba 1, for pardoning my family, me, the whites of South Africa. You’re 100, so let’s celebrate your example.

CAPE TOWN — I go out to Robben Island on a bright clear day with my daughter, Adele, who

chose to do her semester abroad at the University of Cape Town. Full circle: My family,

Lithuanian Jews, stepped onto the teeming dock at Cape Town in June 1895, with their bundles

borne from Europe.

5 Sunshine, the surf sparkling, Table Mountain tracing a line so flat it seems an apparition. The

island, where Nelson Mandela spent 18 of his 27 years in prison, looms. A guide, himself once

imprisoned here, tells us we are permitted to look into but not to enter it.

“Visitors are no longer allowed in because somebody stole Mandela’s spoon,” he says.

The bowl, the cup (but no spoon), a sleeping mat, a rectangle of blue sky visible through the

10 window — here, in this tiny space, Mandela maintained the captaincy of his soul. Anyone

harboring the dangerous illusion of humanity’s perfectibility should remember: A tourist stole

Nelson Mandela’s spoon.

It’s the 100 th anniversary of Mandela’s birth this month. Celebrations unfurl across the world.

He was the master of his fate. The white man’s arsenal could not touch him. It was over. As

15 with Mahatma Gandhi 2, the riveting inner force prevails.

The spoon-stealers are out there. Sometimes it seems these thieves […] are taking over the

world.

They are not. Other forces are at work, raising people up rather than casting them down,

uniting, not dividing. Mandela chose to confront humanity in its iniquity and vanquish violence

20 in the name of hope.

The 27 years stolen from Mandela by people with white skins, the suffering inflicted on tens of

millions of black South Africans over decades, would not be repaid in blood.

Perhaps white South Africans, like my family, got off too lightly. Theirs was a “picnic in a

beautiful graveyard,” as Nadine Gordimer 3 wrote.

25 Then, when it was over, sanctions lifted, they joined the economic world, the sporting world.

Suddenly a South African passport was a great thing. They could say, “I never voted for

torture!” and forget their complicity in South African policing by pigment — the segregated

schools, the forced removal of blacks from their homes, the banishment of blacks to invisible

townships of dust and drudgery.

30 Today, there is a black middle class, but inequality is entrenched. A cry rises from young blacks

directed at whites — “Expropriation without compensation!” 4 It’s popular enough to have an

acronym, “EWC.” […]

For Jews, South Africa was liberation from pogrom, first, lifesaving distance from the Holocaust

later. Yet most Jews went along with apartheid — by no means all, however, including several

35 of Mandela’s lawyers. There are more bystanders than heroes in times of oppression. That’s

part of the survival gene — even if humanity’s ultimate survival depends on the few who will

resist.

South Africa was as good a place as any for a Jew to live in the 20 th century. If you’re busy

persecuting millions of blacks you don’t have much time left for tens of thousands of Jews.

40 That’s what I heard when I was old enough to hear it.

Thank you, Madiba, for pardoning my family, me, the whites of South Africa, the spoon thieves,

today’s political infants, all humanity for its iniquity and tribal stupidity. Thank you for lifting our

gaze.

I fly to Johannesburg and go out to Soweto 5 one day. There, I meet Macdonald Maanda Muhali,

45 age 30. He’s been out of a job for more than a year. He used to work as a security guard doing

perimeter patrols. Now he watches “Breaking Bad” or “Prison Break” all day on the TV he

bought when he had a job. He lives in a single room. The toilet is outside. Job applications go

unanswered. Sometimes he washes cars or lays a pipe for cash. His ear is perforated but he

says he’s too old now for an earring.

50 “Do your best,” says a sign on his wall. “God will do the rest.”

I ask this young black South African, raised in the post-apartheid era, if life is getting better.

“As long as you are not working, things are not getting better,” he says. Then I ask him if whites

got off too easily.

“Mandela forgave them,” he says. “We must trust him. If the people who suffered most forgave,

55 why shouldn’t we?” You feel no anger? “None whatsoever.”

We go out. Garbage skitters across a square. Idle young men chat and smirk. Girls in purple

sweaters and gray skirts emerge from school. A woman sells the brooms, rakes and dusters

arranged on her head. I buy sausages at a butcher. Muhali, using half a raw onion, scrapes a

grill clean. We eat. We laugh.

60 Thank you, Madiba, for the power of your example. Don't worry, you're 100, we'll find that

spoon thief. Their kind will not inherit the earth.

Cohen, R. (2018). Nelson Mandela's Stolen Spoon. The New York Times. 27 July, 2018.

803 words

Annotations

1 Madiba – Nelson Mandela’s clan name, used as a sign of respect and affection

2 Mahatma Gandhi – an Indian activist (1869 – 1948), who helped guide India to independence in 1947, renowned for his policy of nonviolent protest

3 Nadine Gordimer – a white South African writer active in the anti-apartheid movement, who received the Nobel Prize in literature

4 “Expropriation without compensation” – policy that means taking land from white farmers without paying them

5 Soweto – a township of the City of Johannesburg, known for mass protests against Apartheid in 1976

3.1

“Thank you, Madiba, for pardoning my family, me, the whites of South Africa, the spoon thieves, today’s political infants, all humanity for its iniquity and tribal stupidity. Thank you for lifting our gaze.” (ll. 41-43)

Taking the quotation and the article as a starting point, assess to what extent forgiveness is a value necessary for society and politics.

(40%)