In Parts One and Two of this article, I explored Hannah Arendt’s communication with Karl Jaspers about potential recipients of the 1963 Balzan Prize, as well as her correspondence with South African writer Dan Jacobson about James Baldwin and the difference between American and South African struggles for racial equality. In this final part, I look at Arendt’s decision – likely shocking to a contemporary audience – not to recommend Nelson Mandela as the top candidate for the Balzan Prize.

During the early 1960s, Arendt, Baldwin, and Jacobson were witnesses to the renewed convergence between the civil rights movement in the United States and anti-colonialism around the globe. On both sides of the Atlantic, these movements triggered white backlash. 

Unlike Jacobson, Arendt held Baldwin in the highest regard (see Part Two for Jacobson’s critique of Baldwin). After reading his 1962 New Yorker essay “Letter from a Region in My Mind,” she congratulated editor William Shawn on its publication. This was “a great public service,” she told him with excitement.[1] She even penned a letter to Baldwin, lauding his essay as “a political event of a very high order,” because “the Negro question” mattered to everyone.[2] At the same time, she shared with him a cautionary note. Christian love in politics was dangerous, if not scary. More precise in analysis than Jacobson’s interpretation, her criticism defended yet again the public realm as a site of equal political freedom.[3]

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As far as American racial politics was concerned, Arendt did not think that it simply boiled down to the question of Black minority. As she explained to Jacobson, “the Negro question” needed to be scrutinized in relation to laws governing the country. The situation was very different in South Africa. She had never visited this part of the world before, but an entire chapter in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) was devoted to its history and politics.[4] South Africa was located on “the Dark Continent”—a term Arendt borrowed from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. It was “a race society” where the colonial dynamic between Africans, Afrikaners, and the British obstructed the creation of a shared world. South Africa was an uncanny place where a new political beginning in Augustine’s sense of initium could not occur because of colonial power, slavery, and capitalist exploitation.[5] To substantiate this point, Arendt delved into the global history of nineteenth-century imperialism.

On the vast continents of Africa, America, and Australia, Arendt contended that history had begun only with the arrival of European colonizers. Prior to their settlements, Indigenous peoples had lived for generations without making history themselves. Their lives and deaths had followed natural cycles. She quoted Conrad again to represent Africa as an extralegal colony where “the gentleman and the criminal” commingled with innumerable natives. In their first contacts, Europeans came face to face with a branch of “humanity” that was at once incomprehensible and frightening. To distinguish themselves as civilized and politically organized nations from rootless, unorganized “savages,” they invented the concept of race.[6]

What was unique about South Africa in Arendt's opinion, then, was the dramatic change it had undergone through colonial power. It essentially remained a lawless, racist society. Prior to the construction of the Suez Canal during the third quarter of the nineteenth century, it had served as a pivotal “maritime station” connecting European countries, including the Netherlands, France, England, Portugal and Germany, to the Far East. In order to consolidate economic monopoly and political power in South Asia, the British Empire had taken control of Cape Town from the Dutch East India Company, but there was little interest in establishing a settlement. Alongside Africans, there were mostly the Boers, whose Dutch ancestors had arrived “to provide fresh vegetables and meat for ships on their voyage to India.” With the few French Huguenots who had followed them, these colonial settlers raised cattle on largely interspersed farms. To protect themselves from “the everpresent [sic] threat of a common foe,” they enslaved “black tribes.” Cut off from Europe geographically, politically, and culturally, they developed a distinct society where neither the liberal tradition of working the land nor a “civilized feeling for human fellowship” held sway. The result was “absolute lawlessness.” Arendt wrote: “The Boers lived on their slaves exactly the way natives had lived on an unprepared and unchanged nature.” They lived like parasites, themselves superfluous, but contemptuous toward slaves. What “transformed the Dutchman into the Boer” was this “complete contempt for labor and productivity in any form.” And once gone native, the Boers could no longer live without slaves. Thus, when the British Empire abolished slavery in the Cape Colony in 1834, a year after having passed the Slavery Abolition Bill, the Boers abandoned their “territory,” their “patria,” setting off on the Great Trek to defend their idle, slave-dependent lives further inland. When more and more British settlers and Jewish financiers arrived in the region to profit like mobs from the booming mining trades in gold and diamond, the Boer War broke out because the Boers wanted to protect “the lawlessness of a race society.”[7] They wanted to maintain their isolated, phantom-like race society. Even after the departure of British uitlanders (outsiders) and the demise of Nazi Germany, they held fast to white supremacy and apartheid.

Having read C. W. de Kiewiet’s A History of South Africa (1943), an influential socioeconomic historiography of the British colony, Arendt illustrated the extent to which slave labor was an integral part of this impoverished race society. Echoing Kiewiet, she criticized Boer and British colonial policies vis-à-vis African natives. Yet she knew frustratingly little about indigenous cultures, languages or histories in the colonies. This lack of knowledge left the space open for her glorification of the Founding Fathers in On Revolution. She observed that the inequity between rich and poor—“the social question”—could give birth to revolutionary aspirations only if political actors doubted this condition as a matter of natural inevitability. War, rebellion, and violence had been familiar to the ancients, but the American revolutionaries were the first ones not simply to liberate themselves from labor by enslaving Blacks, but to create a prosperous republic founded on a constitution. Their modern doubt about poverty was not unfamiliar to the French revolutionaries, but the “American colonial experience” took a unique turn in world history because political freedom, not social equality, guided its subsequent revolutionary élan.

The American Revolution exemplified a new political beginning, whereas the French Revolution devolved into terror. The Haitian Revolution was different again, according to Arendt. It was an “uprising of the slave population.” Hence, the American Republic was a modern reinvention of the Roman Republic, whereas the French First Republic gave way to Napoleon Bonaparte’s First Empire. America was the only beacon of “an Atlantic civilization,” whereas the French Revolution and Marxist philosophy demolished this political “treasure.”[8] America was the sole hope for constitutional republicanism in the modern world, whereas Europe followed a different historical trajectory: from imperialism and colonialism to totalitarianism and ethno-racial nationalism.

In Arendt’s imagination of the Atlantic world, the Framers embodied the antitheses to the Boers. Both settler communities owned Black slaves, but different conclusions needed to be drawn from these slave societies. Whereas the Boers vegetated on sterile soil, depending on slaves to take care of cattle or mining, Americans got to work, avoiding economic misery and creating a lasting foundation of freedom. Whereas the Boers adopted an idle African way of life, Americans busied themselves economically and politically. Hence, these settler colonies could not be any more different in Arendt’s assessment: one was lawless, the other lawful. Consequently, racial violence was met with a different response in each country. In lawless South Africa, apartheid incited anti-colonial violence. Since a consensual, rule-based body politic was impossible, there could not be a peaceful end to racial discrimination. Jacobson disagreed with this evaluation. For him, South Africa was a land of racist laws. Apartheid was a racist institution backed by the state and reminiscent of the American South. For Arendt, though, “the Negro question” in America could be addressed politically and judicially. There was a constitutional mechanism for rebalancing racial inequality in the public sphere. The problem was that African Americans wanted more than what politics and law could redress. They demanded equality and recognition in the private and social realms. Black Power went so far as to do so violently.

So Why Not Mandela?

In 1963, these comparative thoughts converged, as Arendt dwelled on possible nominations for the Balzan Prize. Given the mounting controversy over Eichmann in Jerusalem and a set of other personal difficulties, she did not have time to read Huddleston’s Naught for Your Comfort, but she felt sufficiently informed to support his candidacy.[9] Based on Jacobson’s assessment, her typewritten “recommendation” (Gutachten) for Jaspers and the rest of the selection committee identified him as the top choice.[10]

Arendt listed “TREVOR HUDDLESTONE” [sic] first. He was apparently a good-looking, charismatic Anglican priest in his early 50s who had moved from England to South Africa after the Second World War for missionary work in “Black ghettos” (Negerelendsvierteln). For fearlessly opposing apartheid, he was beloved by Africans, whereas the “Boers” (Buren) hated him. Convinced that Christianity and racism were “incompatible” (unvereinbar), he preached “passive resistance” (passiven Widerstand) and devoted himself to racial justice rooted in the Christian faith. In addition, “Huddlestone” [sic] believed that communism was “irrelevant” (irrelevant) for the anti-apartheid movement, although a lot of its supporters adhered to this political ideology. Still, he refused to “boycott” (boykottieren) them. In response to his political activism, the South African government denied him reentry when he tried to return from an assignment in England. So he agreed to serve as bishop in Tanganyika (now part of Tanzania), remaining close to the anti-apartheid movement. Arendt also mentioned that Naught for Your Comfort had appeared with great success in England and the United States. She was not sure whether a German translation was available.[11]

Next came “ALLAN [sic] PATON.” In mid-50s, he was a South African citizen of English descent. He, too, was a devoted Christian. Although he was not popular among Blacks because of his servile “Uncle Tomism” (Uncle-Tomismus), his leadership in the Liberal Party of South Africa was noteworthy because this small group advocated for equal voting rights. Cry, the Beloved Country (1948) became a bestseller in many countries, after the National Party had come into power. In South Africa, he was a persona non grata, but the government did not dare to imprison him because he was “too well-known” (zu bekannt).[12] The brevity of Paton’s biography was an indication that, in Arendt’s view, he was not an optimal candidate for the prize.

Finally, Arendt introduced Mandela as an approximately forty-year-old “Negro, lawyer and former leader of the African National Congress’s youth movement” (Neger, Rechtsanwalt und ehemaliger Führer der Jugendbewegung des afrikanischen Kongresses). He was a descendant of “some tribal chiefs” (von irgendwelchen Stammeskönigen) serving time in prison. He had been arrested several times before and used to live underground. In 1961, he achieved fame by mobilizing a nationwide “strike” (Streik). This defiant call for action was apparently his final peaceful attempt to bring the apartheid state to reason, after it had declared itself a “republic” (Republik) with a new constitution. But the campaign was brutally crushed “with helicopters and giant headlights” (Hubschraubern und Riesenscheinwerfern) and, as Arendt pointed out, “terror” (Terror) broke out. Mandela was captured, after an “agent provocateur” had reported him to the authorities. At his closed trial, journalists were present, but they were not permitted to report anything. In his own defense, he allegedly gave “a very outstanding speech” (eine ganz hervorragende Rede), which was subsequently published in British newspapers. Nonetheless, Mandela received a sentence of “five or seven years” (fünf oder sieben Jahren). Due to new ordinances, he could remain in prison “indefinitely” (auf unabsehbare Zeit) without ever facing trial.[13]

Echoing Jacobson’s letter, Arendt mentioned that it was unclear whether Mandela was a communist. The African National Congress was filled with such ideologues, but there was no evidence that he was affiliated with communism. Without habeas corpus, he had surely suffered the most among the three candidates, but Arendt concluded that, according to Jacobson, Mandela should only be the second choice.

Missed Opportunities and Humanistic Challenges

Arendt’s summary of Mandela’s life was shorter than Jacobson’s one-page-long typewritten biography, but she did not forward this document to Jaspers. Nor did she include in her résumé other meaningful information from Jacobson’s account: Mandela’s father being “Chief Henry Mandela of Transkei, Eastern Cape”; his legal education at the University of South Africa; his “first African legal partnership in South Africa” with Oliver Tambo (1917-1993), another major anti-apartheid activist; his key role in organizing peaceful campaigns through the 1950s with “people of all races”; or the injustice of his arrest by the apartheid state. Jacobson’s letter also offered helpful contexts for the “two statements” that Mandela had made, “the first being his application for the magistrate’s recusal at the opening of the trial, and the second being his formal statement to the court after he had been found guilty on the two charges laid against him.” These copies even contained what appeared to be Mandela’s handwritten “corrections and deletions.” After the trial, two correspondents for The Observer were apparently able to get hold of them and, though banned in South Africa, the statements appeared in England.[14] Arendt sent these speeches to Jaspers, but she did not say anything about them, most likely because she did not read them carefully. None of the marginalia in these documents was in her handwriting.

Again, if Arendt had read Huddleston’s Naught for Your Comfort, she could have found additional relevant facts. Let me give just a few examples. Huddleston and Paton were friends. The former thanked the latter in the preface of the book and referred to Cry, the Beloved Country explicitly. Huddleston was also a South African citizen who considered himself an exile no longer able to live in his adopted homeland. In reference to the African who found himself “outside the law” because of ruthless pass laws and curfews, he even used the word “pariah.”[15] Since Arendt associated this type with Jewishness, it would have been fascinating to read her thoughts about Huddleston’s argument.

But even if these points were beyond the parameters of a nomination, why couldn’t Arendt prioritize the candidacy of a Black South African activist, for whom the Christian faith also played a crucial role? Or what about Martin Luther King Jr. in the United States? His liberation politics were rooted in Christian ministry. In April 1963, he famously issued an open letter, justifying civil disobedience in the face of unjust laws and immoral practices. In the same year, 32 African states formed the so-called Organization of African Unity, with Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah as its most vocal advocate, to protect the sovereignty of decolonized nations and to uphold the dignity of liberated Black citizens. At the height of Cold War decolonization, Arendt missed valuable opportunities to recalibrate her republican principles and historical narratives.

In light of intense debates nowadays on postcolonial violence, international peace, racial injustice, and human or civil rights violations, it seems crucial to ask what stories of missed opportunity need to be told, and how humanists can contribute to alternative visions of democracy on such bases. When hope runs out in political reality, what narratives reveal forgotten, unfinished or unknown lessons in emancipatory politics? 

In the three parts of this essay, I have scrutinized newly discovered archival materials on Arendt not only to correct factual errors or to fill knowledge gaps, but also to underscore the value of international research in the humanities for every soul-searching diverse community.