Myths and Heroes : Nelon Mandela

Myths and Heroes

● I’m going to present you the notion of myths and heroes.

A myth is a story that may or may not be true. Some myths may have started as ‘true’ stories but as people re-told them some parts may have been changed by mistake, or to make them more interesting. All cultures have myths and this mythology has been developed over time. Mythology includes the legends of our history, our religions, stories of how the world was created, and our heroes. These stories have great symbolic power, and this may be a major reason why they survive as long as they do, sometimes for thousands of years. A hero is a person who is admired for their courage, outstanding achievements, or noble qualities. It can be the main character in a book or a film or a person with superhuman qualities. It can also be a modern-day hero, a person who has performed a heroic act or simply our own personal hero, our role model, who we look up to.

First, I’m going to talk about Nelson Mandela and why he is a hero, after I will talk about the myth of the Devil Marbles and about Uncle Sam and finally I’ll talk about my hero.

● Nelson Mandela was the president of South Africa. He dedicated his own life for racial equality, he was involved in the struggle against the apartheid regime. Mandela was arrested in 1964, he was convicted of sabotage, sentenced to life imprisonment, and incarcerated at Robben Island Prison. He was released in February 1990 after 27 years in jail, he became the first democratically elected black president of South Africa in May 1994, it was first all – race elections. Nelson Mandela was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.  

To study the life of Nelson Mandela we watched the movie Invictus. Invictus tells the inspiring story of the union of forces between Nelson Mandela and the captain of South African rugby team, François Pienaar, in hopes of unifying their country. Nelson Mandela, noted that his nation remained divided on racial and economic grounds because of apartheid. He believed he could unite his people through the universal language of sport, and Mandela joins the South Africa rugby team for the World Cup championship in 1995, although the victory seems far away.

Nelson Mandela is a hero because he sacrificed his own life for his people to give them equality and liberty, he fought against apartheid, he tried to create equality between Afrikaners and Blacks. He was in jail for many years because of the whites and despite of that he didn’t want to take a revenge.

● Now I’m going to talk about the Devil Marbles. It was a myth about smooth boulders in Australia, the Devil Marbles mean a lot to the Aborigines. In the Aboriginal mythology, the boulders are the eggs of the rainbow serpent. The Aborigines believe they have extraordinary powers. We have studied a text in class about this myth, it recounted that when a rock was removed from its original place in 1980, an aboriginal elder died, most Australians don’t exactly measure the importance of these rocks.

In class, we also studied Uncle Sam, he is considered as the most popular and interesting American Icon. His origin lies in a meat packing plant, the plant was located in Troy, New York. The manager of this factory was Sam Wilson. This plant sold meat packed in barrels who on which was was written US, US stood for United States government stores, they decided to refer to the US as Uncle Sam as a joke. This joke spread to the whole town and to New England. Uncle Sam was depicted as a rather tall man with a thin stature. His image caught on and has been used throughout the centuries.

...