Long walk to freedom
By Nelson Mandela
Abacus, 1995. 768 pp., $16.95
Reviewed by Brendan Doyle
Long walk to freedom is Nelson Mandela's moving account of one of the greatest stories of the struggle for justice and human dignity. Written in an informal, very personal style, this great adventure of the human spirit is told with humility, irony and even humour in the face of extraordinary suffering and moments of dark despair.
In 1918, the year of Mandela's birth in a village in the Transkei, a delegation of the African National Congress visited the Versailles peace conference to voice the grievances of the African people of South Africa. The ANC was already a political force.
Mandela was the first in his family to be sent to school, where "British culture and British institutions were automatically assumed to be superior. There was no such thing as African culture."
But from Thembu chiefs, Mandela learned the stories of the great African warriors who had fought against western domination. He also learned that "democracy meant all men were to be heard, and a decision was taken together as a people ... A minority was not to be crushed by a majority."
In 1943, Mandela met Joe Slovo, Ruth First and other members of the South African Communist Party (SACP) at Witwatersrand University. In the same year he co-founded the ANC Youth League, whose battle cry was African nationalism. The Youth League rejected "the communist notion that Africans were oppressed primarily as an economic class rather than as a race", and Mandela firmly opposed whites or communists joining the league.
Despite this, Slovo became Mandela's lifelong comrade in the ANC struggle.
In 1946, 70,000 African miners went on strike. The strike was suppressed, and 12 miners died. Mandela comments: "The freedom struggle was not merely a question of making speeches, holding meetings, passing resolutions and sending deputations, but of meticulous organisation, militant mass action and, above all, the willingness to suffer and sacrifice".
After protesting against the Group Areas Act of 1950, which enforced ethnic cleansing, Mandela was "banned" and could not attend any "meetings", including his son's birthday party! In the same year, he opened the first African firm of lawyers in Johannesburg and began defending his people against the criminal charges that accompanied being non-white.
In 1953, the issue of violent resistance to apartheid confronted him when the Public Safety Act legislated for detention without trial. He writes: "For me, non-violence was not a moral principle but a strategy; there is no moral goodness in using an ineffective weapon". This signalled a break from the ANC's policy of non-violence.
The ANC-sponsored Freedom Charter, adopted by a Congress of the People held in Kliptown in June 1955, outlined a future democratic socialist state: non-racial; one person one vote; equal rights for all ethnic groups; mineral wealth, banks and monopoly industry to be "owned by the people"; the land "to be re-divided amongst those who work it".
Mandela goes to some lengths, however, to deny that it was a blueprint for socialism in South Africa. "The charter does not speak about the eradication of classes and private property, or public ownership of the means of production. It was not meant to be capitalist or socialist but a melding together of the people's demands to end the oppression."
In June 1961, following the Sharpeville massacre of 1960 and then the declaration of martial law and the banning of the ANC and Pan African Congress (PAC), Mandela joined communists Joe Slovo and Walter Sisulu in recommending that the ANC begin armed struggle and in organising MK, the ANC's military wing. Then followed his first visit to other black African countries for military training and to share resources and experience.
In 1963 Mandela began a five-year prison term for inciting people to strike and leaving the country without a passport. Even in solitary confinement, he refused to yield to humiliation. He relates that one evening he did not receive any of the awful gruel that passed for food. He banged on the door and called "Warder, I have not received my supper". "You must call me baas", was the reply. "I went hungry that night", Mandela says.
In October 1963, Mandela and others were tried for sabotage and faced the death penalty. In his statement from the dock, Mandela said: "The ANC has never at any period of its history ... condemned capitalist society ... The Communist Party sought to emphasise class distinctions while the ANC seeks to harmonise them ... Communists regard the parliamentary system of the West as undemocratic and reactionary ... I am an admirer of such a system."
Mandela and three others were condemned to life imprisonment on Robben Island. During Mandela's 27 years of imprisonment, he suffered great personal anguish. In 1969, his wife Winnie was imprisoned under the Terrorism Act. In the same year, his son Thembi was killed in a car accident; Mandela's request to attend the funeral was denied.
In spite of the brutality of the prison guards, Mandela writes of one of them: "Badenhorst was not evil: his inhumanity had been foisted upon him by an inhuman system". Mandela never lost hope: "I knew that some day my people and I would be free."
During the mid-1980s, the struggle outside became more violent. Mandela became convinced that a military victory was impossible and, without informing the ANC leadership of his intentions, started talks with the enemy in the person of President Botha.
Meanwhile, the ANC became part of a broad alliance, the United Democratic Front, which then joined forces with COSATU, the trade union congress, to form the Mass Democratic Movement. No doubt because of the political strength of this organised mass movement, as well as mounting world denunciation of his regime, de Klerk, the new president, released eight of Mandela's comrades. In February 1990, he lifted the bans on the ANC, PAC and SACP, and Mandela was released from prison.
Mandela quickly sought world support for increasing the sanctions against the apartheid regime. Despite suspension of the armed struggle in August 1990 by the ANC, the regime fomented trouble by secretly funding Inkatha supporters who set about killing ANC members and supporters. In the worst incident, 46 people, mainly women and children, were killed in Boipatong. The government did not investigate, and de Klerk made no comment.
In August 1992, an ANC-led mass action campaign resulted in the largest political strike in South African history, involving 4 million workers.
As the first democratic elections approached, ANC candidates held People's Forums all over the country, asking people their opinions and complaints. According to Mandela, these were extremely popular, undoubtedly contributing to the high voter turnout. The rest is history, as they say.
"My commitment to my people", Mandela writes in the last pages of the book, "to the millions of South Africans I would never know or meet, was at the expense of the people I knew best and loved most". Yet he expresses no regret for the years he spent in prison. His generosity towards those who made his life a misery is a mark of the astonishing qualities of the man.
"It was during those long and lonely years", he writes in a moving final paragraph, "that my hunger for the freedom of my own people became a hunger for the freedom of all people, white and black. I knew as well as I knew anything that the oppressor must be liberated just as surely as the oppressed ... We have not taken the final step of our journey, but the first step on a longer and even more difficult road. For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others."