AUTHOR: NELSON MANDELA
DATE: 1994
Long Walk to Freedom is the memoir of Nelson Mandela, the central figure in black South Africa’s fight to dismantle the country’s apartheid regime – a system of government that privileged the rights of the white minority over those of the black majority. Jailed for his political activities for twenty-seven years, Mandela was freed in 1990 and four years later was elected president in the nation’s first post-apartheid elections. He emerged as an international icon and a unifying force for good. As South African Nobel Laureate Nadine Gardiner would note: ‘He is at the epicentre of our time, ours in South Africa, and yours, wherever you are.’ Long Walk to Freedom was a landmark work that documented not only Mandela’s personal journey, but his country’s extraordinary social and political transition too.
Written in collaboration with American author and editor, Richard Stengel, the book covers the full expanse of Mandela’s life, from his birth in a village in Cape Province into the royal family of the Xhosa-speaking Thembu people. He was raised, he noted, with the name Rolihlahla, a moniker sometimes given to playfully suggest a ‘troublemaker’. In later life, though, he would be known by his clan name, Madiba.
Mandela described an adolescence and education in which he felt himself to be at once privileged in comparison with much of the black population but acutely aware of the secondary position in which the European-rooted authorities held black culture. After studying at the University of Fort Hare – a tertiary institute for black students where he met future confederates, including Oliver Tambo – he made his way to Johannesburg, in part to escape the threat of an arranged marriage. There he began a legal career as well as exploring his sympathies with communism and nurturing his association with the African National Congress (ANC), the political party that would become the country’s most potent opposition to the apartheid system formally introduced in the late 1940s.
Although initially committed to peaceful protest and civil disobedience, in the face of the increasing violence of the apartheid regime – as epitomized by the Sharpeville Massacre, when sixty-nine protestors were killed at a police station while protesting against the so-called pass laws that required blacks to carry identity papers – he concluded that the battle against apartheid would require the adoption of guerrilla tactics. In 1963–4 he was a defendant in the so-called Rivonia Trial on charges connected to acts of sabotage and their commission. Found guilty, he received a life sentence, but he also entered the international consciousness with an address from the dock in which he said:
During my lifetime I have dedicated my life to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons will live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal for which I hope to live for and to see realized. But, my Lord, if it needs to be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.
POSTHUMOUS SEQUEL
It was always Mandela’s intention to write a further memoir dealing with his time as president, but such a book never emerged in his lifetime. However, in 2017, celebrated South African writer Mandla Langa used Mandela’s unfinished manuscript along with archive material and interviews to complete the volume, which was published as Dare Not Linger: The Presidential Years – a title referencing the final line of the previous volume. It also included a prologue by Mandela’s third wife, Graça Machel, herself a noted humanitarian and a former wife of Samora Machel, President of Mozambique from 1975 until 1986.
During his almost three decades of incarceration, most notoriously on Robben Island, international pressure ramped up against the apartheid regime until Mandela was finally released during the tenure of President F. W. de Klerk. Mandela’s magnanimity in the face of his many struggles gave him a moral authority arguably unrivalled by any other living person, and the path was set for the dismantling of the apartheid system and the establishment of democratic elections in 1994 – an election that resulted in Mandela serving a single term as president before withdrawing from front-line politics, while remaining a major public figure both at home and abroad.
Long Walk to Freedom was a significant component in cementing his reputation and fleshing out his philosophy of compassion, empathy and compromise. Mandela’s charisma not only attracted fellow world leaders and public figures who yearned to be photographed alongside him but appealed to ordinary people the world over otherwise immune to the draw of politicians. In his autobiography, he devoted time to exploring some of the credos by which he lived – such that the greatest glory lies not in never falling, but in rising every time one falls, and that if people can learn to hate, they can also be taught to love. His wisdom proved to have universal appeal in an age when it was not always in great supply on the international stage.
Mandela concluded the book – which sold 15 million copies and spawned a successful Hollywood movie – by observing that he could not rest for a moment, for with freedom comes responsibilities, and he dared not linger because his long walk was not yet ended. Indeed, he had almost two decades longer until his death in late 2013. Born into tribal royalty, imprisoned as a terrorist and then lauded as a quasi-saint, he documents in Long Walk to Freedom one of the most extraordinary life stories of modern times, a contemporary Odyssey. Mandela’s unrivalled legacy, both personal and political, was encapsulated in a eulogy given at his funeral by Barack Obama:
Mandela taught us the power of action, but he also taught us the power of ideas; the importance of reason and arguments; the need to study not only those who you agree with, but also those who you don’t agree with. And when the night grows dark, when injustice weighs heavy on our hearts, when our best-laid plans seem beyond our reach, let us think of Madiba and the words that brought him comfort within the four walls of his cell: “It matters not how strait the gate, how charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.”