South Africa has rugby. America has college football. South Africa and Birmingham (AL) are more alike than the former Mrs. Mandela could ever imagine.
Early in March of 2010 Nelson Mandela’s former bride, Winnie, spoke to a crowd of well-wishers in Birmingham, Alabama. Spewing the normal platitudes about the Civil Rights movement, the former Mrs. Mandela stated:
“Birmingham has always been an extension of our struggle,” Mandela said. “I was stunned by the similarities of the methods of oppression . . . The apartheid regime must have come here to take notes.”
Birmingham, Alabama is a favorite city of SBPDL. Once the jewel of the South, it is now one of the first major cities on the verge of bankruptcy and insolvency in the United States. All of this – like South Africa now – is thanks to the glories and sound leadership of Black people. Jefferson County, Alabama was once (like South Africa) a city comprised of visionaries, men and women who worked hard together to build a community and municipality that the entire world envied.
However, white flight – coupled with Fortune 500 companies fleeing – turned Birmingham into a city with far more similarities between what South Africa has become now than what it once was so long ago.
Sadly, South Africa never became the beacon of Democracy so many thought it would when the Black majority was handed power from the white minority who created the nation. In fact South Africa got Democracy good and hard, showcasing how this form of government offers no inspiration when it is implemented, but an ongoing tragedy that is uniformly ignored by the nations of the world.