Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom (1994)
Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela (1918–2013) was supposed never to be written. By the mid-1970s, when Mandela had been imprisoned on Robben Island for more than a decade, the world had not heard a word from him for years. The South African press was banned from publishing his photo or quoting anything he had ever said. He had been refused permission even to attend the funeral of his eldest son. Mandela, along with those who shared his imprisonment, posed a risk to the apartheid regime which excluded blacks, who comprised the majority of the South African population, not just from power but from practically every human right.
After a time, conditions for Mandela and his comrades improved slightly. Some were even allowed to study. This meant they had access to paper. Mandela began secretly to compose a memoir of grace and wisdom. The handwritten drafts had to be buried in the prison’s vegetable patch. Had they been discovered, the consequences for producing something of such beauty and truth would have been dire.
I grew up in a world where it seemed that every fence and every hoarding carried a sign that said ‘Free Nelson Mandela’. Now the signs all say ‘Free Wi-Fi’. Apartheid was the soundtrack of my teenage years. It had a major effect on sport and so many bands performed songs on the topic. Everyone from U2 and Simple Minds to Stevie Wonder sang about it. Peter Gabriel released a song in 1980 called ‘Biko’, about Steve Biko, the founder of the black-consciousness movement which led to the Soweto uprisings of 1976 and a resurgence of protest, focussed in particular on an absurd education policy. Gabriel’s song said that you could blow out a candle but not a fire. There was a lot of noise on the subject. Everyone at a safe distance protested on the top of their lungs. Those closest to the lived reality, though, spent a lot of time in silence.
In 2014, I was with a group of young people who went to Africa as part of Zimele, a community whose name was borrowed from Steve Biko. Zimele was established to try to build bridges between the privileged world in which my students and I live and the world in which most people on earth live. We visited the Apartheid Museum in Soweto which, as its name implies, began as a township southwest of Johannesburg. The museum was paid for by gambling money, principally revenue raised in taxes from the garish casino nearby where people of any colour are welcome to come and lose their money. Plenty of other cultural entities around the world, such as movies and galleries, have been made possible from gaming revenue—almost as if the governments that are so reliant on this source of income want to throw a few shekels back to the public as guilt money. But none of that need undermine the quiet, dignified and candid manner in which the Apartheid Museum tells its horrendous story.
On a Saturday morning, there was hardly anyone else there. There were exhibits that nailed me to the ground. One was of a massive yellow Casspir, the infamous vehicle that was developed in South Africa for subduing the black population in townships. It was a fort on wheels that could carry fourteen troops and was able to resist mine explosions. The improvised shantytowns were no match for it. It could push them over like cardboard. Even in the safety of a museum, I felt a frisson of fear as it towered over me.
There was also the famous recording of Nelson Mandela speaking at the trial for sabotage at which he was finally condemned to life imprisonment, in 1964. The sound is grainy but Mandela’s voice is slow and deliberate. This is a man on trial for his life. He plants every word:
I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.
This speech has been replicated many times. At the museum, you can buy T-shirts and mugs with those words on them. On that occasion, his last public appearance for twenty-six years, Mandela spoke for four hours. He was not going to be rushed. Then he disappeared from public view until 11 February 1990. On that day, I was sitting in the early hours of the morning watching a TV in Melbourne with two young Jesuits from South Africa as Mandela was released from custody. Both of them were crying. When Mandela finally appeared, holding the hand of his then wife, Winnie, it was not the man I expected to see. My mind still carried the image of the posters that plastered the billboards of my youth: a much younger and physically impressive man, one you wouldn’t want to mess with. I felt at once that this new Mandela was bigger than revenge. You could see it in the careful way he walked.
At the Apartheid Museum, I spent fifteen minutes watching a video of Mandela shaving. The film draws the onlooker into a richer and more mysterious intimacy with him than any amount of footage of his numerous appearances. As president of South Africa, Mandela maintained many of the quiet rituals that had enabled him to survive his decades in prison. He made his own bed, following an inflexible pattern. He did his exercise beside his bed, even though the president would surely have had access to a gym, because that was a ritual that sustained him. His handwriting was fastidious. For both good and ill, the president was still the prisoner.
Watching him, I began to think about my own frenetic approach to shaving. I often shaved under the shower to save time. It was a job to be got out of the way so I could move on to other frenetic activities. Yet I was a schoolteacher. Mandela was running a country and really had stuff to worry about. His shaving was a meditation, a sign of freedom. I hoped that I might find a less anxious way of living, or at least of shaving.
As we were having a cup of coffee, John Mount, a fellow teacher, said that he could recall a time in the early 1960s when he was glad that Mandela was in jail because he thought that Mandela and the African National Congress were all communists. He laughs at himself now, but apartheid would have fallen apart much sooner except that the Reagan and Thatcher administrations, in the United States and Britain respectively, hid behind a fear of communism.
I mentioned to Tom Purcell, the founder of Zimele and leader of our group, that I had a kind of envy of Mandela and those who shared the journey with him because they had such a strong sense of what their purpose was in life.
Tom reacted against this. ‘But at what cost,’ he said. ‘Mandela had three marriages. He was unable to attend the funeral of his oldest son. He said in his mid-eighties that he was supposed to be the grandfather of the nation when he didn’t even know his own children.’
Even the 2005 death of his son Makgatho, at the age of fifty-four as a result of AIDS, was a public matter. AIDS was a huge issue in South Africa and Mandela has been criticised for his tardiness in addressing it. He made an announcement: ‘Let us give publicity to HIV/AIDS and not hide it because that is the only way to make it appear like a normal illness.’
Aged eighty, Mandela married Graça Machel, the widow of Samora Machel, the former president of Mozambique. ‘We were both very, very lonely,’ she said as millions looked on.
In Long Walk to Freedom, Mandela writes about the manner in which his political commitments had prevented him from helping his mother:
Her difficulties, her poverty, made me question once again whether I had taken the right path. That was always the conundrum: Had I made the right choice in putting the people’s welfare even before that of my own family?
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One of my favourite parts of Long Walk to Freedom concerns a period in the course of his long captivity when Mandela was at last allowed to have a small garden. For years he had been refused this permission without being given any reason. Then, still without reason, the system changed its mind.
A garden was one of the few things in prison that one could control. To plant a seed, watch it grow, to tend it and then harvest it offered a simple but enduring satisfaction. The sense of being the custodian of this small patch of earth offered a small taste of freedom.