Seattle scientist recalls genius, inspiration of Nelson Mandela

Nelson Mandela, who died last week at age 95, was a beacon of hope and inspiration for a Seattle man who grew up in South Africa as an activist against apartheid.

Alan Aderem was just a boy when Mandela was sent to prison, where he stayed for 27 years. The mere mention of his name, or Mandela’s African National Congress, could get you sent to jail. But Aderem’s mother made sure that her son knew about Mandela.

“There was a massive attempt to essentially expunge his name from the historical record,” said Aderem, who never met him, but called Mandela his political leader since age 10.

Aderem joined Mandela’s ANC as a teenager. He rallied support as a community organizer and got himself arrested, but it wasn’t having the impact that he hoped.

“It became clear quite soon that we were just going to get arrested over and over in demonstrations and things like this. We needed to tackle the power structure where it mattered and that was in its economic Achilles heel and that meant organizing workers and trade unions.”

That got the attention of the government, which put Aderem under house arrested for 5 years, in 1977. The charges?

“There were no charges ever associated with that. These were executive orders. I was never in court, never.”

When his house arrest ended, supporters urged Aderem to leave the country for his safety and he lived in exile in the U.S. In 1990, the “change” came, as Aderem puts it. The nation was on the verge of a race war and the South African government decided to release Mandela, but he refused to come out until his demands were met, including that political prisoners were freed and the ANC was unbanned.

“His position was that he couldn’t be free if the people weren’t free,” said Aderem.

Mandela shared the Nobel Prize Prize in 1993 and one year later was elected as South Africa’s first black president. Then came a controversial and momentous decision. Mandela established the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, bearing witness to the victims of human rights violations. Besides shining a light on injustices, some who had committed crimes, even murder, were granted amnesty by the Commission – bitter pill to swallow for Aderem.

“I had some very, very close friends of mine tortured to death in prison and another particularly close friend of mine was blown up with a very young daughter in Botswana while she was in exile. The guys that did this brazenly stood up in court and said, ‘this is what I did,’ and so they walk free to this day,” Aderem lamented.

Aderem now concedes that peace could not have happened without Mandela’s political savvy, empathy, and philosophy of forgiveness and reconciliation.

“That was his extraordinary genius, was being able to not only take that position, but to essentially persuade everybody in the country of that position,” said Aderem. “I still wonder at that.”

Aderem earned a Ph.D in bio-medical science before he left South Africa. Today, as the President of SeattleBioMed, an institute focusing on vaccines and the global health crisis, Aderem fights a new battle in South Africa; trying to control HIV where the level of infection is the greatest in the world. Sadly, that virus, said Aderem, “is now doing what apartheid could never do.”