As Assemblymember Das Williams tells it, he “sort of” met Nelson Mandela in the summer of 1994. Back then, the African National Congress leader, who died last Thursday at age 95, was elected South Africa’s first post-apartheid president. Williams, a self-proclaimed “son of Isla Vista hippies,” grew up in a household where Mandela was revered on a par with George Washington, Sitting Bull, and Abraham Lincoln. When the walls of apartheid began to crumble in the early ’90s, Williams — then 19 — felt compelled to go to South Africa and help expedite their collapse. Mandela had been released four years earlier from Victor Verster prison after 27 years of confinement. Williams, who already knew more than a thing or two about getting out the vote and winning elections from his Isla Vista activism, dropped what he was doing and headed to South Africa. There, he spent three-and-a-half months working to get Mandela elected. In that time, he never met Mandela face-to-face and boasts no grip-and-grin Polaroids showing the two of them together. He did, however, manage to get close enough to Mandela at a rally — attended by tens of thousands — to snag a few shots. Even so, he considers his experience in South Africa that year to have been life-changing.
Williams had been all set to attend UC Berkeley. But when Mandela opted to run, he quickly changed his plans. At the time, he said, politics in the United States too often boiled down to a lesser-of-two-evils choice. Nothing could be more clear-cut than South Africa and Nelson Mandela. “He was always a hero growing up,” Williams recalled. “The anti-apartheid movement was one of the reasons for the unrest in Isla Vista.” When the Vietnam War ended, student activists around the country began agitating — throughout the 1980s — for their various boards of regents to divest their investments in companies doing business in South Africa. Apartheid, Williams thought, was one of the great moral challenges of the age. “Were we really so afraid of Communism that we were willing to support a system that was so oppressive to its people as apartheid?”
Williams scraped together what funds he had to get a ticket. It wasn’t enough. A family friend — from South Africa, it turns out — had connections with St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Ojai. “He arranged for me to give a little radical sermon,” Williams recalled. “I did, and they passed the collection plate on my behalf.” After landing in South Africa and getting settled in with “a friend of a friend of a friend” in a township outside Cape Town, he searched out African National Congress headquarters, walked in, announced that he’d done elections in Isla Vista — specifically for former supervisor Bill Wallace — and asked to be given a job. Amazingly, they agreed to do so, making Williams volunteer coordinator for five townships — some black, some white, and some mixed. For his efforts, he was paid $20 a week, which was enough to get by on.
