[Shasown]

Originally Posted by setanta

No point getting like that. I put in the wrong word in my tiredness but you knew exactly what I meant. Although, in saying that internment did function as a type of internship for nationalists.

Mandela has blood on his hands. He created, financed and directed that organization and it's silly to assume that he had no role to play in it's functioning while he was in prison.

Of course he had a role to play, but mostly as a figurehead, are you trying to say he ran the ANC's armed struggle from his prison cell? Via mail and visitors perhaps? As it wasnt till his last couple of years imprisonment he was allowed access to a phone.

His mail inbound and outbound was not only censored, sometimes to the point of making it illegible, it was often held back from him or not posted for several weeks. Oh he could have also passed messages via his visitors?

Yeah that would be right, visitors and mail were the same rate. One letter and one visitor every six months. He obviously couldnt run the organisation that way.

He did however send messages to not only the ANC but the wider black and even white South African Community calling for a democratic society in which black and white would be equal with neither side ruling the other.

Incidentally it wasnt until 2008 Mandela could legally go to Disneyland or Disneyworld on holiday. The US still had him as a listed terrorist until then and as such he had to be escorted from the airport to the UN and back, if he stayed in a hotel he had to be guarded and not allowed out without an escort. But that was because the ANC had been declared a terrorist organisation by the South African Government and the US State Department hadnt updated their status.