Partnering for Peace

“If you want to make peace with your enemy, you must work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner.”

Nelson Mandela

This picture shows Mandela with F.W. de Klerk, his lifelong enemy. De Klerk represented a ruthless and racist regime that used massacre, torture, infiltration and assassination over decades in relentless efforts to destroy Mandela and his colleagues in the South African resistance movement. Yet Mandela had the wisdom to make de Klerk his partner-adversary in creating a new South Africa. Mandela’s own release from prison in 1990 after 28 years, was just one milestone in that long and difficult partnership. Four years later, Mandela’s African National Congress won South Africa’s first non-racial election, ending apartheid and creating a peace which lasts to the present day.