Saturday, April 17, 2010

My hero / Nelson Mandela by Gordon Brown

Nelson Mandela



My hero Nelson Mandela by Gordon Brown


Gordon Brown
Saturday 17 April 2010



B

ack when I was at university I was a journalist on the student paper and led a campaign to get Edinburgh University to disinvest from apartheid South Africa. It felt a long way from Scotland when, more than 30 years later, I found myself face to face with Nelson Mandela – Madiba – for the first time. He pointed at me, and smiled, and said "Welcome, representative of the British empire!" It was typical of the man I have come to know – a man whose generosity of spirit and capacity for forgiveness make him a true hero for our times.

Back then – when students, trade unionists, musicians and human rights campaigners formed a grand coalition against apartheid – we talked about a future rainbow South Africa in hope more than expectation. The brutality and tyranny seemed simply too great to be overcome in one lifetime. And when there were even people in Britain opposing sanctions and wearing "Hang Mandela" T-shirts, it could sometimes feel that justice would never come. But the lesson of the struggle against apartheid is that no injustice can last forever – that if people of courage and good conscience are prepared to stand and fight, there is nothing we can't achieve.


That is the spirit that animated so many of the other people I have admired – Burmese monks, Iranian students and Zimbabwean trade unionists, whose names we may never know, but whose courage has been immortalised in the campaigns they have waged for freedom. Back in 2005, there was an amazing video made for Live 8: it showed the leaders of great movements – Martin Luther King at the march on Washington, Wilberforce at the great abolitionist rallies, the Pankhursts during the suffragettes' protests. Then it focused on the faces in the crowd.

The message is that anonymous people aren't the audience for change, they are leading the change – that progress is only possible when we recruit a movement: first hundreds, then thousands and, finally, millions-strong. If any one man can embody that message, it is my hero, Madiba.

THE GUARDIAN




2009
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler 
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser
007 My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes
008 My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self
009 My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd
010 My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville
011 My hero / Vicent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble
012 My hero / Franz Marek by Eric Hobsbawm

2010

017 My hero / Jack Yeats by Colm Tóibín
018 My hero / Francisco Goya by Diana Athill
019 My hero / Max Stafford-Clark by Sebastian Barry
020 My hero / Arthur Holmes by Richard Fortey

036 My hero / Robert Lowell by Jonathan Raban
037 My hero / Beryl Bainbridge by Michael Holroyd
038 My hero / Charles Schulz by Jenny Colgan
039 My hero / Oliver Knussen by Adam Foulds
040 My hero / Annie Proulx by Alan Warner

041 My hero / David Lynch by Paul Murray
042 My hero / Edwin Morgan by Robert Crawford
043 My hero / Anne Lister by Emma Donoghue
044 My hero / Jane Helen Harrinson by Mary Beard
045 My hero / Edmund Burke by David Marquand
046 My hero / Shelagh Deleaney by Jeanette Winterson
047 My hero / Christopher Marlowe by Val McDermid
048 My hero / Gwen John by Anne Enright
049 My hero / Michael Mayne by Susan Hill
050 My hero / Stanley Spencer by Howard Jacobson

051 My hero / William Beveridge by Will Hutton
052 My hero / Jean McConville by Amanda Foreman
053 My hero / Alexander Pushkin by Elaine Feinstein
058 My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal

2011
079 My hero / Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman
087 My hero / Alberto Moravia by John Burnside
096 My hero / Isaac Babel by AD Miller
097 Lucian Freud by Esi Edugyan
100 Thomas Tranströmer by Robin Robertson
102 My hero / David Hockney by Susan Hill

2012

190 My hero / Iris Murdoch by Charlotte Mendelson
194 My hero / René Descartes by James Kelman
199 My hero / Albert Camus by Geoff Dyer

2015
2016




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