The oddest bit of news last week was the tale of the hunt for Nelson Mandela’s pistol, buried on a farm near Johannesburg 43 years ago.



It was a Soviet-made Makarov automatic pistol, given to Mandela when he was undergoing military training in Ethiopia.



A week after he buried the gun, he was arrested by the apartheid regime’s police as a terrorist and jailed for life.



It’s hard now to imagine Mandela as a terrorist. He is the most universally admired living human being, almost a secular saint, and the idea that he had a gun and was prepared to shoot people just doesn’t fit our image of him. But that just shows how naïve and conflicted our attitudes toward terrorism are.



Mandela never did kill anybody personally. He spent the next 27 years in jail and only emerged as an old man to negotiate South Africa’s transition to democracy with the very regime that had jailed him.



But he was a founder and commander of Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), the military wing of the African National Congress, and MK, as it was known, was a terrorist outfit. Well, a revolutionary movement willing to use terrorist tactics, to be precise, but that kind of fine distinction is not permissible in polite company today.



There’s nothing unusual about all this. Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya, Archbishop Makarios in Cyprus, Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe and a dozen other national leaders emerged from prison to negotiate independence after ‘terrorist’ organizations loyal to them had worn down the imperial forces that occupied their countries.



In the era of decolonization, terrorism was a widely accepted technique for driving the occupiers out. South Africa was lucky to see so little of it, but terrorism was part of the struggle there too.



Terrorism is a tool, not an ideology. Its great attraction is that it offers small or weak groups a means of imposing great changes on their societies. Some of those changes you might support, even if you don’t like the chosen means; others you would detest.



But the technique itself is just one more way of effecting political change by violence — a nasty but relatively cheap way to force a society to change course, and not intrinsically a more wicked technique than dropping bombs on civilians from planes to make them change their behaviour.



What determines most people’s views about the legitimacy of terrorist violence is how they feel about the specific political context in which force is being used.



Most Irish Catholics felt at least a sneaking sympathy for the IRA’s attacks in Northern Ireland. Most non-white South Africans approved of MK’s attacks, even if they ran some slight risk of being hurt in them themselves.



Most Tamils both in Sri Lanka and elsewhere support the cause of the Tamil Tigers, and many accept its methods as necessary.



Americans understandably see all terrorist attacks on the U.S. and its forces overseas as irredeemably wicked, but most Arabs and many other Muslims are ambivalent about them, or even approve of them.



We may deplore these brutal truths, but we would be foolish to deny them. Yet, in much of the world at the moment, it is regarded as heretical or even obscene to say these things out loud, mainly because the United States, having suffered a major attack by Arab terrorists in 2001, has declared a “global war on terror.”



Rational discussion of why so many Arabs are willing to die in order to hurt the U.S. is suppressed by treating it as support for terrorism, and so the whole phenomenon comes to be seen by most people as irrational and inexplicable.



And meanwhile, on a former farm near Johannesburg that was long ago subdivided for suburban housing, they have torn down all the new houses and are systematically digging up the ground with a backhoe in search of the pistol that Saint Nelson Mandela, would-be terrorist leader, buried there in 1963.



If they find it, it will be treated with as much reverence as the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch. The passage of time changes many things.



Gwynne Dyer is a Canadian journalist based in London whose articles are published in 45 countries.