--- title: Why Nelson Mandela Was on Terror Watch Lists Until 2008 description: On the centennial of Nelson Mandela's birth, he is remembered as a symbol of peace—but he was on the U.S. terror watch lists until 2008. canonical: https://time.com/5338569/nelson-mandela-terror-list/ author: Olivia B. Waxman article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2018-07-18T14:45:29.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:53:18.251Z article:section: History og:title: Why Nelson Mandela Was on Terror Watch Lists Until 2008 og:description: On the centennial of Nelson Mandela's birth, he is remembered as a symbol of peace—but he was on the U.S. terror watch list until 2008 og:url: https://time.com/5338569/nelson-mandela-terror-list/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltfa636f5abc33ff11/69893582929fad865abf116c/mandela-nelson-centennial.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2405 og:image:height: 1353 og:image:alt: mandela-nelson-centennial og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Why Nelson Mandela Was on Terror Watch Lists Until 2008 twitter:description: On the centennial of Nelson Mandela's birth, he is remembered as a symbol of peace—but he was on the U.S. terror watch list until 2008 twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltfa636f5abc33ff11/69893582929fad865abf116c/mandela-nelson-centennial.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # The U.S. Government Had Nelson Mandela on Terrorist Watch Lists Until 2008\. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: How Prison Changed Nelson Mandela [Watch (HLS stream): How Prison Changed Nelson Mandela](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/HeyIZuOa.m3u8) (4:09)  _Published 2013-12-05. Former TIME Managing Editor Rick Stengel talks about the time he spent working with Mandela on his autobiography 'Long Walk to Freedom.'_  by [Olivia B. Waxman](https://time.com/author/olivia-b-waxman/)  ## Olivia B. Waxman Staff Writer Jul 18, 2018 2:45 PM UTC  Nelson Mandela waves goodbye to Boston from the airplane doorway on June, 24, 1990. Nelson Mandela waves goodbye to Boston from the airplane doorway on June, 24, 1990. Jonathan Wiggs/The Boston Globe—Getty Images  by [Olivia B. Waxman](https://time.com/author/olivia-b-waxman/)  ## Olivia B. Waxman Staff Writer Jul 18, 2018 2:45 PM UTC A full 100 years after Nelson Mandela’s July 18, 1918, birth, he is remembered around the world as a symbol of peace and freedom, for [ushering South Africa into a democratic, post-apartheid future](http://world.time.com/2013/12/05/nelson-mandela-1918-2013-remembering-an-icon-of-freedom/). Yet throughout his life, Mandela had a habit of saying that he was “not a saint,” as TIME noted in his [2013 obituary.](http://world.time.com/2013/12/05/nelson-mandela-1918-2013-remembering-an-icon-of-freedom/) Perhaps more surprisingly from today’s perspective, many people around the world felt the same way. In fact, Mandela remained on [U.S. terrorist watch lists](https://www.fbi.gov/about/leadership-and-structure/national-security-branch/tsc) until 2008. Understanding the reasons behind that fact requires seeing Mandela’s life and work in the context of both the history of the African National Congress (ANC), the political party with which Mandela was associated, and the history of United States attitudes during the Cold War. --- ### More from TIME --- On the ANC side, a deciding factor was a shift in strategy that led some activists to see violence as a possible means to an end; the end being, the end of South Africa’s official government policy of the separation of blacks and whites. Since its founding in 1912, “the ANC fought against apartheid for decades through rigorously nonviolent means, mostly labor strikes and public service boycotts,” TIME later [reported](http://time.com/vault/issue/1986-10-27/page/68/). But, “The ANC’s policy of nonviolence received a sudden and brutal setback in 1960.” That’s when the Sharpeville Massacre took place. In 1960, South African police killed 69 black protesters in the town 40 miles south of Johannesburg; amid the crackdown that followed, the government banned the ANC. As the ANC went underground, Mandela became the head of the military wing of the African National Congress, Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), also known as MK. In 1964, he was convicted of sabotage and treason, and wound up imprisoned until 1990\. TIME later described the group’s activities from 1962 as “low-level guerrilla war.” Defending the shift in strategy as a last resort, Mandela said in one of his interviews from prison, “‘The armed struggle \[with the authorities\] was forced on us by the government.'” At the same time — even as some American activists [embraced or aided the South African fight for racial justice](http://time.com/5337741/barack-obama-nelson-mandela-civil-rights-apartheid/) — the U.S. government was deep in the Cold War. As Mandela was sent to prison, his fellow ANC leader Oliver Tambo avoided that fate, TIME later reported, “because he had been sent abroad to open a headquarters and search for funds” for keeping the campaign going underground. “The newly exiled revolutionary found some interest in his cause in Scandinavia but little in other Western nations. Tambo’s pleas were better rewarded by the Soviet Union, which beginning in 1963 became increasingly important to the ANC as a supplier of funds, military equipment and scholarships for young members. Precisely how much influence Moscow has over A.N.C. policies and personnel is a matter of deep controversy.” However much influence it was, it was enough to get on the wrong side of the United States, between Mandela and his disciples getting funding from the Communists and their willingness to engage in violence. Mandela was viewed as “a person on the wrong side of the Cold War,” as historian Robert Trent Vinson, author of _The_ _Americans Are Coming!: Dreams of African American Liberation in Segregationist South Africa,_ puts it. Even decades later, as Americans became increasingly attuned to the injustice being perpetrated in South Africa, the influence of the Cold War was felt in the dynamic between the U.S. and that nation. “When Congress finally passed new U.S. economic sanctions against South Africa three weeks ago, it ordered President Ronald Reagan to issue a report early next year detailing any Communist influences on the ANC,” TIME [put it](http://time.com/vault/issue/1986-08-04/page/1/) in 1986\. “The Administration is understandably troubled that some members of the African National Congress are Communists, but to alienate those who are not is to risk enlarging the Communist ranks.” In a 1986 speech, President Reagan also warned of “[calculated](https://www.nytimes.com/1986/07/23/world/transcript-of-talk-by-reagan-on-south-africa-and-apartheid.html) terror by elements of the African National Congress,” [including](https://www.nytimes.com/1986/07/23/world/transcript-of-talk-by-reagan-on-south-africa-and-apartheid.html) “the mining of roads, the bombings of public places, designed to bring about further repression, the imposition of martial law, and eventually creating the conditions for racial war.” The Department of Defense included the ANC in a 1988 [report](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bb/Terrorist%5FGroup%5FProfiles.pdf) billed as profiles of “key regional terrorist groups” from around the world. Indeed, ANC actions during this period would include nighttime raids that destroyed fuel storage tanks and nearly two days of fires in 1980, a [bombing](http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/9705/12/safrica.amnesty/index.html) at a bar in Durban that left three dead and more than 60 wounded, and a car bomb that killed 19 outside of the headquarters of the country’s Air Force in Pretoria in 1983\. The later ANC [apologized](http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/9705/12/safrica.amnesty/index.html) for civilian deaths that occurred as a result of “insufficient training.” Meanwhile, Mandela was in prison. But, removed from the fight on the ground, Mandela ended up having a massive impact on the fight for anti-apartheid justice in South Africa — and, especially as anti-apartheid sentiments spread around the world, global opinion of him shifted dramatically. “He comes out of jail an old man, much more ready to compromise after almost 30 years in jail,” argues Peniel Joseph, Founding Director Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at the University of Texas at Austin. “When he comes out, he’s saying we’re renouncing violence.” TIME [explained](http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2019712%5F2019711%5F2019688,00.html) the specific events that led to the transformation in the perception of Mandela in its issue naming Mandela and South African President F.W. De Klerk Men of the Year for 1993: --- > “” --- And yet, even after the apartheid regime came to an end and Mandela was elected President in the early 1990s, Mandela and members of the African National Congress still had to apply for permission to enter the United States, and the State Department took the approach of letting in members of the ANC into the country on a case-by-case basis. That is, until April 2008, when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said it was about time that Congress lifted those [travel restrictions](https://www.epic.org/foia/fbi%5Fwatchlist.html), as the U.S. otherwise had “excellent relations” with South Africa. “It is frankly a rather embarrassing matter that I still have to waive in my own counterparts — the foreign minister of South Africa, not to mention the great leader, Nelson Mandela,” she [said](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-safrica-usa-mandela/rice-wants-to-end-travel-curb-on-mandela-and-anc-idUSN0920168620080409). In July 2008, President George W. Bush signed a bill into law that lifted that requirement — about four years after Mandela announced he was retiring from public life. The bill [authorized](https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2008/07/20080701-1.html) “the Departments of State and Homeland Security to determine that provisions in the Immigration and Nationality Act that render aliens inadmissible due to terrorist or criminal activities would not apply with respect to activities undertaken in association with the African National Congress in opposition to apartheid rule in South Africa.” As Tom Casey, who was a State Department spokesman at the time, [said](http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/africa/07/01/mandela.watch/), “What it will do is make sure that there aren’t any extra hoops for either a distinguished individual, like former President Mandela, or other members of the African National Congress to get a U.S. visa.” But why did the change take so long? Though [some](https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324461604578191683590816070) have looked for a deeper reason for why the U.S. might want to keep Mandela out, the official answer usually cites mere[ bureaucratic oversight](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-safrica-usa-mandela/rice-wants-to-end-travel-curb-on-mandela-and-anc-idUSN0920168620080409) for explanation. As the 2008 bill’s bipartisan sponsors said in a statement, the change ended an “embarrassing impediment to improving U.S.-South Africa relations” and was, by that point, not a controversial idea. “Nelson Mandela does not belong on a terrorist watch list – period,” [said](https://www.corker.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/news-list?ID=E99CEE75-F570-E478-0A9D-4A95F70CF5B8) Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse. “This problem has caused injustice to South African leaders and embarrassment to the United States, and I’m glad it will be repaired.” ## Transcript >> There's Mr. Mandela, Mr. Nelson Mandela, a free man taking his first steps into a new South Africa. >> During the course of our interview, as I would ask him, I'd say, Madiba, tell me what was different about the man who emerged from prison and the man who went in and how did that happen? >> His first public appearance in nearly three decades. 72 years old. >> He said, I came out mature. >> Walking strongly step by step. >> I met Nelson Mandela in December of 1992 when I went down to South Africa to work with him on what became his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. When I first met him, I realized this was just an absolutely historic opportunity and I begged him could I just be with him everyday no matter what he did and we would find time to talk. I spent about a year and a half with him almost everyday. It was an amazing experience to try to plumb what happened to him and his life in a way that would then make sense to a reader and I think for him it was-- it was both therapeutic and actually enjoyable. >> In prison, there have been men, you know, who are very good. >> For years and years after having worked with him, people would always say to me, I can't believe he came out in prison and wasn't bitter or angry. >> And they do everything to try and make you as happy as possible. And that has wiped out any bitterness which a man could have. >> I'd always smile at that because I did discover that he was tremendously hurt and wounded and bitter about what happened to him, but he also realized to create this multiracial, free, democratic South Africa, it had to be a rainbow nation. It had to be black, and white, and brown. >> We had walked a long and hard path to arrive here. >> No one could feel like they had some special right of citizenship or they were excluded from that and he taught himself to not show any of that bitterness or anger. He made incredible efforts and I think they were strategic to have-- when he came out of prison, have meetings with his old guards and he would go back and see the old apartheid leaders of South Africa, all of that to show that as he would say so many times, the past is the past or forget about the past. And what I knew from working with him and talking to him is that he couldn't forget about the past. He dwelt on the past. >> And one wonders what must be passing through Mr. Mandela's mind at this moment. >> He did feel that he had lost the best and richest part of his life and he had. He was a person who I always thought that in a different society, in a free and democratic society, he might have been a small town lawyer or had a big family and never have been that ambitious. The trigger for it was when he went to Johannesburg as a young man when he was 17 or 18, having grownup and lived in a pretty much all- black area of South Africa, the Transkei part of the Xhosa Tribe. He had never really experienced prejudice or part- time directly. And when he did, it changed his life and it changed the destiny of South Africa. >> I would like to be remembered not as anybody unique or special, but as part of a great human in this country that has struggled for many years, for decades, and even centuries to bring about this day. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/5338569/nelson-mandela-terror-list/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/5338569/nelson-mandela-terror-list/"},"headline":"The U.S. Government Had Nelson Mandela on Terrorist Watch Lists Until 2008. 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