Photograph by Kathy De La Torre

Lisa Mammel holds a headdress she brought back from Africa.

Africa Matters

Lisa Mammel, in several official capacities, observed South Africa move from apartheid to a multiracial democracy

By Sandy Sims

With her brand new baby boy cradled in her arms, and her 2-year-old daughter off somewhere with the nanny, the willowy, blond Lisa Mammel tells an amazing story of her involvement in Africa, where she's worked to improve conditions; where she's witnessed the very worst and the very finest of human behavior; where she's witnessed the profound transformation of South Africa.

Few of us directly affect national policy. But Los Gatan Lisa Mammel's work for this year's African Summit may well have influenced President Clinton's recent efforts in Nigeria. And Mammel's research in South Africa was placed on President Bush's White House desk to read before he met with Nelson Mandela.

Mammel has worked in Zaire (The Democratic Republic of the Congo), and in Tunisia. She's worked in Mali, Mozambique, Nigeria, The Ivory Coast and Senegal. She was in South Africa when its new constitution was born and as a United Nations observer when they had their first democratic elections, and she was a monitor for South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Early this year, Mammel was a California delegate to the African Summit held in Washington, D.C., along with 7,500 people, President Clinton and Nelson Mandela.

Mammel, who grew up in Michigan, began her relationship with Africa by traveling down the Congo River. "It's the same river Joseph Conrad wrote about in his novel Heart of Darkness," Mammel says.

She was just 24-years-old and an international/economics graduate student at Johns Hopkins University. Mammel was hired by the U.S. State Department to work for the American embassy in Zaire (now The Democratic Republic of the Congo). The United States wanted to know whether it made better economic and commercial sense to help pave Zaire's roads, or dredge the river. Mammel was given the job of assessing the river.

"The boat was like a floating city," Mammel says. "You could buy anything." But it had no phone, just a ship-to-shore radio, and the river was so dry that the boat kept hitting sandbars."

As the "floating city" traveled down river, the goal was to get goods from Stanleyville to where the money was, in Kinshasa, the capital. Mammel watched the prices for the goods rise higher and higher as the boat drew closer to the capital.


Photograph by Kathy De La Torre

Lisa Mammel holds one of the masks she brought back from Africa.




Along the way, Mammel watched people come out of the equatorial jungle to buy goods. She was surprised to find many of them well-educated. "Their life in the city had become deplorable, and they'd returned to the jungle," Mammel says.

Along the way, three people died: a boy died of malaria; a woman was crushed between two barges; and a man drowned. Just outside Mammel's room, a man was severely beaten.

After graduate school, Mammel and her husband, a biologist who had just earned his Ph.D., spent a year in Tunisia working for Catholic Relief Services to improve the production of small businesses, control diarrhea, and create a Head Start program. Her husband taught at the National Argriculture Institute. Later in 1988, the U.S. Information Agency hired Mammel as an Africa analyst. She traveled to Senegal and Nigeria to study Islamic attitudes toward the West. In Liberia, the Ivory Coast and Nigeria, she studied attitudes toward debt forgiveness.

What took Mammel to South Africa the first time was her job as a public opinion analyst. She organized the first U.S.-sponsored poll in South Africa that included blacks. She was to find out what the people there thought about U.S. policies of sanctions and disinvestments in protest of apartheid. Apartheid was the official policy of segregation in South Africa's government to keep the white population in power. "We wanted to know if our policy was on target," Mammel says.

Later, after helping the government of Mali organize a plan for their first public opinion poll and teaching a polling seminar to the newly legalized political parties in Mozambique, Mammel returned to South Africa to find things were changing rapidly.

With the election of F.W. de Klerk as president in 1989 and his release of political prisoner Nelson Mandela, the ban was taken off the anti-apartheid African National Congress (ANC), and apartheid had begun to fall apart. But now some of the black factions were warring against each other, and the country was close to a civil war.

As a law student in 1993 working as a summer associate for a law firm in Johannesburg, Mammel helped prepare litigation on the Boipotang massacre--just one of many violent crimes at that time. "There were frequent death threats against whites who were working with blacks or with the ANC." Mammel says. "You could hear gun shots off in the distance on a daily basis." Mammel had her own scare one night when she heard threatening sounds outside her house.

Amid this roiling atmosphere, members of the different factions gathered for a council. "I watched these groups sitting together in the huge oval trade center in Johannesburg," Mammel says. "They were haggling over what would eventually become the interim constitution."

The final constitution would be ratified in 1995 and be perhaps the most progressive in the world, proclaiming that citizens have such rights as the right to fair labor practices, the right to the language and culture of choice, the right to campaign for a political office and the right to be free from discrimination by gender or race.

Part of a mural in South Africa depicting the tenets of the country's Bill of Rights.

Photograph courtesy of Lisa Mammel







With all the violence still going on, Mammel headed home thinking the country would surely head into a civil war.

When Mammel returned as a U.N. observer of the 1994 elections--one of some 50,000 observers--she says, "I couldn't believe the change. There was the spirit of compromise. No victor and no vanquished.

"When I left in 1993, there were daily revenge killings. Even the night before the election, bombs were set and 153 people injured." But on the day of the election, there was no violence, even though they did not check for weapons at the polling stations.

People lined up at 4 a.m. at the polling stations. This was the first time blacks had ever voted in South Africa, and they lined up for miles ... some even gave birth in the lines.

The first two people into the township hall where Mammel observed were two "old grannies, with cataracts and canes." The observation group there was large and multiracial. "The room spontaneously broke out in applause," Mammel says. "Those little ladies were not used to that kind of attention, so they dropped their canes and started applauding, too. I couldn't help crying and so did my friend."

Mammel also observed in a prison and in a nursing home. Those qualified to vote, voted in the courtyard. Mammel watched as a fat, white guard sometimes kicked the prisoners in the rear end when it was their turn to vote.

Lisa Mammel stands in front of the mural depicting the tenets of the South African Bill of Rights.

Photograph courtesy of Lisa Mammel







Newspapers helped

As an observer, Mammel could not say a thing, but she could include everything she saw in her frequent reports to the U.N. officials. "We'd go on the radio with our observations, too," she says.

Some whites voluntarily went to black townships to vote.

Organizing the election was an enormous task. A large majority of the people were illiterate and identification was almost nonexistent in some areas. Newspapers helped considerably with large pictorials of the voting procedure.

So those who couldn't read would be able to vote for the party of their choice, the ballots showed the party's name, its acronym, its logo, and a picture of its leader. To insure honesty, there was a representative from each party at each voting center. If a voter had a question, all party representatives would gather around the voter and make sure the answer was accurate.

"Accuracy was maintained but secrecy was gone," Mammel says. And there was always the fear of retaliation. However, during and after the election, no one was killed. Mammel shows a picture of herself in a bullet-proof vest. "See this," she says. "We only had one bullet-proof vest for several of us who rode together to the polling places." She explains that the United Nations told them to give it to the driver because he was the only one who knew how to find his way around.

After the ANC party won the election placing Mandela as president, the country debated over how they would reconcile. Too many had committed violence against each other. A Nuremberg type of tribunal couldn't work. It would take many years and money the country didn't have. They didn't want to give blanket amnesty to all perpetrators of violence. What about the victims? And South Africa would lose the history of what really happened during apartheid.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established with Archbishop Desmund Tutu at the helm.

From this committee came the Truth and Reconciliation hearings. There were three parts to the TRC: 1. Amnesty for those who committed a crime of gross human violation because of a political objective. Mammel explains the reasoning behind this: In 1960 the government stopped people from participating in political parties. The factions went underground and committed crimes because they had no other way to vent their political beliefs. However, the perpetrators had to be forthcoming about what they did and could hold nothing back, or they would be prosecuted in court; 2. compensation for victims; 3. victims would be provided the opportunity for their stories to be heard. About 20,000 victim statements were taken, but only about 10 percent of those were heard in public hearings.

The hearings offered the victims national respect and empathy and personal catharsis. The hope was that this might restore civil and human dignity to these people.

In addition, the commission wanted to reveal the truth of the years of apartheid. They wanted to know the causes for the gross violations of human rights. They also wanted to overcome the national denial of what had happened.

Mammel returned as an observer of the TRC hearings. She watched the big hippo trucks bring people to the hearings. "It was eerie," Mammel says, "because those trucks were the ones that went out to wipe out villages."

The victims' hearings were painful. But the mission was important. "They lit a candle for unity," Mammel says.

She remembers social workers sitting with victims to help them through their sometimes horrific stories of torture, and murder of loved ones. The translators were also disturbed because they were recounting the stories in the first person. The commissioners had a tough time. Many of those present at the hearings needed counseling. "I became numb," Mammel says. "I'd heard some of these stories in 1993, so I was prepared, but it was still hard."

She was struck by the modest reparation requests of the victims. One woman whose husband's body had been returned without a foot, asked to have his foot back. Others asked for medical help. Some asked for school dues, or medication. One man whose daughter had been tortured and killed, asked for her remains. A minister asked for a tombstone for his son and that a youth center be built in the name of four other children who had been shot by the police.

Mammel says there was an overwhelming ability by victims to forgive.

She says, "forgiveness is empowering." Many of these people didn't need to know who committed the crimes. What mattered was honoring what happened. Mammel says she'd ask victims how they felt after testifying. "I need to get on with my life," they'd say. "I forgive because Mandela and Tutu say so."

Few whites attended the TRC hearings.

The ballot for the 1994 elections had the name of the party, its logo, its acronym, and a picture of the party leader.

Ballot courtesy of Lisa Mammel







According to a BBC article on the Internet, the perpetrators had the difficult task of telling all they'd done. One white policeman who was known by blacks as the "Prime Evil" for all the killings he'd done, actually received applause by the blacks in the audience for his absolute honesty. Another man, the head of the military research laboratory told how the apartheid government considered developing a bacteria that would only kill blacks. Only those who were completely forthcoming would receive amnesty.

Some victims and others have challenged the TRC. And Mammel says legally there is a problem. It's with international law. It seems that certain crimes against humanity may not be forgiven by any state or country, and those crimes must be prosecuted. This means victims of human rights violations in South Africa who are unhappy with the TRC could appeal to the international community for prosecution.

South Africa decided they needed the TRC hearings to heal and to move the country forward.

In February of this year, Mammel, just two months pregnant, attended the National Summit on Africa. She had been the head writer of the California proposal to the Summit. Some 2,300 delegates representing every state and territory in the United States, plus some 4,200 other Americans and Africans, met in Washington, D.C., to finalize The National Policy Plan of Action for U.S.-Africa Relations in the 21st century., a document created to help shape U.S. policies toward Africa. The summit was addressed by President Clinton and Nelson Mandela.

Prominent U.S. civil rights leaders from the 1960s were there. "It had the electricity of a civil rights march," Mammel says. "There were so many there who've done amazing things in Africa," she says. They hammered out consensus positions on 239 recommendations, addressing such issues as debt relief, trade and investment, waste management, diseases control, peacekeeping, education, land mine treaties, technology, agriculture, small business support, democracy and human rights.

The motto for the conference was "Africa matters."

Far from Africa now, Mammel, who is an attorney in Palo Alto, lives in Los Gatos with her husband, a NASA scientist, and their two children.

She is involved in international law.

She lays her tiny newborn baby in his crib. Among all the toys and baby things in her living room are the mementos she's brought back from Africa--memories of some amazing experiences she will tell her children some day. "I'm passionate about Africa," she says.

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