What would happen if Nelson Mandela died in 1968 and Martin Luther King Jr died in 2013?
A switch of destinies
- Thread starter traveller76
- Start date
South Africa might just be under Apartheid today, unless King manger to put a end to it.
Cook
Banned
We would have had another anti-Apartheid song about Mandela's death to go with the one about Steve Biko.
No, the anti-Apartheid campaign went way beyond just Mandela; for almost his entire prison sentence he wasn't allow any contact with the outside world except for irregular visits from his wife. He was entirely cut off and could as effectively been dead.
The Commonwealth economic boycont capaign of the 1980s meant that by the 1990s Apartheid was going to collapse, the only question is would the transition to a post-Apartheid South Africa be peacful or not.
Without Mandela, the most well known and respected anti-Apartheid campaigner internationally would have been Desmond Tutu, but just how much capasity to reign in the militant arm of the ANC and arrive at a peaceful transition is problematic; he was after all not a member of the ANC and was often just as harsh in his criticism of the ANC as of the South African government. Who would be the ANC's negotiator instead of Mandela, facing off against F.W. de Klerk, is the key question.