Nelson Mandela’s autobiography Long Walk to Freedom had been placed by my bedside for six years, but it seemed that I could never find the time to finish that dictionary-thick book. Finally I decided to listen to its audiobook. I listened to it while biking to grocery stores, waiting for a delayed flight, or on my way to visit a friend. With his words in my ears, all the mundane moments were magically transformed. Boston Sunday Globe said that the book “should be read by every person alive.” I am thankful that I did (listen to it). “I am no more virtuous or self-sacrificing than the next man, but... I could not enjoy the poor and limited freedom I was allowed when I knew my people were not free. Freedom is indivisible; the chains on any of my people were the chains on all of them, the chains on all of my people were the chains on me.” I had the great pleasure to recap the parts of his life that have a lasting impression on me.
The Beginning
Madiba (Nelson Mandela’s clan name, referred to as a term of respect) was born on July 18, 1918 in Mvezo, a tiny village in the Transkei, eight hundred miles east of Cape Town in South Africa. His father was the chief of Mvezo and a respected counselor to two kings of Thembuland. As a boy, Madiba rubbed white ash into his hair to imitate his father. Later his father was deposed by the white magistrate whom he defied. After the deposition, his father lost his fortune and title, and his mother, his father’s third wife, moved to the village of Qunu, where Madiba spent his happy boyhood, running barefoot in the grassy valley, swimming in clear streams, making toys from clay and tree branches, stick-fighting with other boys, and herding sheep and calves in the maize fields and green pastures. As a boy, he learned that to humiliate another person is to make him suffer unnecessarily after an unruly donkey threw him off its back in front of his friends. So he learned to defeat his opponents without dishonoring them. Occasionally, whites passed through his area and they appeared as grand as gods to him. He was aware that they were to be treated with fear and respect. At age seven, on the first day of school, he was given the English name, Nelson. Two years later, his father passed away.
After his father’s passing, his mother told him that he would be leaving Qunu. Before they disappeared behind the hills, he turned to look for one last time his village. He rested his eyes on the three huts where he enjoyed his mother’s love and regretted that he had not kissed each of them before he left. They traveled by foot and in silence until the sunset before they arrived at the Great Place, Mqhekezweni, the royal residence of Chief Jongintaba Dalindyebo, the acting regent of the Thembu people. Jongintaba had offered to be Madiba’s guardian for he had not forgotten that it was Madiba’s father who made it possible for him to become the chief.
His mother returned to their old home and Madiba was quickly absorbed in his grand new life, wearing handsome new outfits, going to the one-room school next door to the palace, and sometimes dancing the evening away to the beautiful singing of Thembu maidens. Justice, the regent’s son, who was handsome, muscular, and outgoing, and followed by many female admirers, became his best friend and his first hero after his father. Madiba became conscious of the temptations of money, class, fame, and power. He did his best to appear suave and sophisticated in front his peers. He also developed his interest in African history, which was not to be found in standard British textbooks.
Madiba learned a great deal about leadership by observing the regent and the meetings he held at the Great Place. After opening the meeting by thanking everyone for coming and explaining the purpose of the gathering, the regent remained silent until everyone had voiced his opinions, including their criticism of the regent himself. Only at the end of the meeting would the regent sum up what had been said. If no agreement could be reached, another meeting would be held. Madiba always remembered the regent’s axiom: a leader is like a shepherd, who stays behind the flock, letting the most nimble go out ahead, whereupon the others follow, not realizing that all along they are being directed from behind.
Entering Manhood
At age sixteen, accompanying Justice and along with twenty-four other young men, he received an elaborate tribal ritual in preparation for manhood--circumcision. During the several days staying in seclusion lodges with other initiates before the ceremony, he was almost convinced by an engaging and glamor boy at the circumcision school that to be a miner was more alluring than to be a monarch; to be a miner meant to be strong and daring, the ideal of manhood.
At the end of their seclusion, Madiba was gifted two heifers and four sheep and felt rich for suddenly he had property! He was hopeful that one day he might have wealth, property, and status. He was not jealous of Justice who had inherited an entire herd, for he knew Justice was the son of a king while he was destined to be a counselor to a king. However, his colored dreams were darkened by the speech by Chief Meligqili at the end of the day who addressed the young fellows that all black South Africans were a conquered people and they were tenants on their own soil and had no control over their own destiny in the land of their birth.And the gifts they received that day were naught as compared to the greatest gift of all, freedom and independence.
At the time, Madiba regarded the white man as a benefactor not an oppressor, and dismissed the chief’s words, thinking the chief was ungrateful for what the white man had brought to their country. However, a seed was planted, though Madiba let that seed dormant for a long season.
Soon after his return from the ceremony, the regent drove him to Clarkebury Boarding Institute, a place far grander than the Great Place. He was introduced by the regent to Reverend Harris who ran Clarkebury with an iron hand. Madiba worked in Reverend Harris’s garden, which planted in him a lifelong love of gardening and growing vegetables. He also saw a gentle and broadminded individual behind Reverend Harris’s forbidding mask, who believed in the importance of educating young African men.
On the first day of classes, Madiba walked clumsily in his new boots on the shiny wooden floor, a female student said to her girlfriend loud enough for everyone to hear, “The country boy is not used to wearing shoes.” Later she became Madiba’s first true female friend, with whom he could confide and confess his weaknesses and fears that he would never reveal to another man.
At Clarkebury, he emulated sophisticated and cosmopolitan students, but was proud to think and act like a Thembu. He believed that he would become a counselor to the Thembu king and to be a Thembu was the most enviable thing in the world.
In 1937, at age nineteen, Madiba joined Justice at Healdtown, the Wesleyan College in Fort Beaufort, which was far more impressive than Clarkebury. It was then the largest African school below the equator. Like Clarkebury, Healdtown was a mission school of the Methodist Church, where the students were aspired to become “black Englishmen.”
At the end of the final year at Healdtown, the great Xhosa poet Krune Mqhayi visited the school and gave a speech on the African pride and Xhosa pride since he was one, and the brutal cultural clash between Africa and Europe. At that time, Madiba danced between seemingly contradicting ideas, such as tribalism versus Africans of all tribes, and standing his ground as an African, yet still eagerly seeking benefits from whites.
Justice, who enjoyed playing more than studying, remained at Healdtown; Madiba was accepted to the University College of Fort Hare, which was founded by Scottish missionaries and situated where the British defeated the gallant Xhosa warrior, the last Rharhabe king in the 1800s. It was Oxford and Cambridge, Harvard and Yale, all rolled into one for young black South Africans, and home and incubator of some of the greatest African scholars, whom he met and was taught by. Madiba believed that the missionary schools’ benefits outweighed their limitations.
He was proud to be the first member of the regent’s clan who would have a university degree. At age twenty-one, he could not imagine anyone at Fort Hare smarter than he. He was encouraged to study law by a friend. But his upperclassmen treated him with disdain and mocked his English accent. He organized to elect their own House Committee which defeated the upperclassmen. That was one of his first battles with authority, and he felt the sense of power that came from having right and justice on his side.
He continued to be more active in sports, such as soccer and long-distance running. The valuable lesson he learned from the training in cross-country running was that he could compensate for a lack of natural aptitude with diligence and discipline. He not only participated actively in sports, but also joined the drama society and acted in a play about Abraham Lincoln as his assassin. He not only learned about physics at Fort Hare, but also another precise physical science, ballroom dancing. In an African dance-hall in a neighboring village, he felt embarrassed to find out that the lovely young woman he asked to dance with was the daughter of one of the most respected African leaders and scholars of the time.
Fort Hare took pride in its intellectual and social sophistication. Madiba wore pajamas for the first time, brushed his teeth with a toothbrush and toothpaste for the first time, and used water-flush toilets and hot-water shower for the first time. The students boasted about their athletic prowess and how much money they were going to make after graduation. With a B.A., a university degree, they would become the African elite. Madiba dreamed to restore his mother’s wealth and prestige, and would build her a proper home in Qunu with a garden and modern furniture.
Yet, as he became more “sophisticated,” he yearned for simple pleasures that he enjoyed as a country boy. He joined a group of young men for secret evening expeditions to the university’s farmland. They built fire and roasted mealies.
During one winter holiday at Fort Hare, he witnessed how his friend, whose father had twice been president-general of the African National Congress (ANC), defied the white magistrate by refusing to take his change. Though he found it disturbing, he admired his friend’s courage. Later, he was elected one of the six representatives of the Student Representative Council, but insisted on resigning, twice, when the authorities didn’t accept two of the students’ demands before the election. He had to decide whether to continue to get his B.A., a passport for success, or to stand up for what he believed in. When he returned to Mqhekezweni during the break, he and Justice were shocked to hear that the regent had selected brides for them to marry soon. With all the education the regent afforded him, Madiba was prepped to reject such traditional customs. The only solution seemed to be running away with Justice to Johannesburg.
Johannesburg
After failing to use the regent’s relations to get a job at a gold mine and lying or intentionally omitting certain facts to get accommodations from family friends, Madiba learned the importance of having the courage to speak the truth the hard way. Later in Johannesburg, he met a young successful African businessman and local leader, Walter Sisulu. They became close friends and years later worked together as leaders in their lifelong struggle against the Apartheid. With Walter’s recommendation, Madiba worked as a clerk at a Jewish law firm where he found Jews to be more broadminded than most whites on racial and political issues. After meeting Walter Sisulu, who had never gone past Standard VI (8 years of schooling in South Africa), Madiba’s previously firm belief of having to have a B.A. in order to succeed and become a leader was shaken.
While working as a clerk at the law firm, he planned to complete his B.A. degree at the University of South Africa by correspondence, and then pass the exams in law while working several years of apprenticeship to become a practicing lawyer. At work, he met many colleagues who influenced him greatly, a kind Jewish boss who abhorred politics, an influential African community leader, and his first white communist friend. He was invited by his white communist friend to parties where there was a mixture of whites, Africans, Indians, and Coloreds. Madiba was anxious to go to the party because he managed to find only a tie to wear. At Fort Hare, he learned the social importance of wearing proper attire to match his education. But at the party, he was introduced to someone who had a master’s degree didn’t even wear a tie! He also felt shy and unequipped to participate in the sophisticated dialogue there.
While working in Johannesburg, he lived in Alexandra, also known as “Dark City” for lacking of electricity. In Alexandra, the boundaries among different African tribes blurred. Though poverty and violence stricken, Alexandra’s urban life was alive and adventurous and the Africans lived with a sense of solidarity, which concerned the white authorities that relied on divide-and-rule tactics and ethnic divisions to govern the Africans.
With two pounds a month from the law firm, Madiba managed to survive on extreme meager resources, wearing the same old suit that his boss gave him for five years, sometimes eating only one hot meal a week offered by his landlord, and many days walking six miles to town in the morning and six miles back in the evening to save bus fares. Poverty caused pain and struggle, but also brought him true friendship, and even love. During that time, he developed his inner strength to stand on his own feet for he didn’t need to depend on his royal connections or family support to advance. Also during that time, he restored his regard for the regent when the regent visited him in Alexandra. But Madiba’s attempts to persuade Justice to go back to the regent failed.
Madiba was offered free accommodation in the WNLA compound closer to Johannesburg downtown, where he met tribal leaders from all over South Africa. One time, a queen regent addressed him directly, “What kind of lawyer and leader will you be who cannot speak the language of your own people?” He realized that he had succumbed to the ethnic divisions fostered by the white government and could not speak the same language of his people. And without language, how could he talk to them, understand them, grasp their history, or appreciate their poetry and songs?
Six months after the regent’s visit, he heard about the death of the regent and went back to Mqhekezweni, where Justice stayed to succeed the regent as chief, and Madiba returned to Johannesburg alone. Though in his heart he knew he was and would always be a Thembu, his horizon went way beyond Thembuland and the Transkei.
At work, he continued to weigh different views expressed by his colleagues.
“Do you see those men and women scurrying up and down the street? What is that they are pursuing? I’ll tell you: all of them, without exception, are after wealth and money because wealth and money equal happiness.”
“I have been involved in politics for a long time, and I regret every minute of it. I wasted the best years of my life in futile efforts serving vain and selfish men who placed their interests above those whom they pretended to serve.”
“If you get into politics, you will lose all your clients, you will go bankrupt, you will break up your family, and you will end up in jail.”
But he was more leaned towards his African coworker Gaur’s influence. Gaur believed that, for Africans, the engine of change was the African National Congress (ANC), which preached the goal of Africans as full citizens of South Africa. Gaur also said that if they were to depend on education alone, they would wait a thousand years for their freedom. With Gaur, Madiba went to ANC meetings as an observer, and marched with Gaur along with ten thousand others in support of the Alexandra bus boycott against the raised bus fares. The march greatly impacted him and in a small way, he departed from an observer to a participant.
He realized that having a successful career and a comfortable salary were no longer his ultimate goals. He swam in his new environment where common sense and practical experiences were more important than higher education. At the university, teachers shielded away from the topics on racial oppression, but he had to deal with such matter every day; so he had to learn by trial and error.
After completing his B.A., he enrolled in the University of the Witwatersrand (known as “Wits”), the premier English-speaking university in South Africa, for a bachelor of laws degree. It was at Wits where he had regular contact with whites of his own age as the only African in the classes. He met a core of sympathetic whites who later became his friends and colleagues, but most of the whites were not liberal or color-blind. Though the hostility was mostly muted, he felt just the same. Though he didn’t finish his studies there, it was at Wits where he met white and Indian intellectuals of his own generation who would form the vanguard of the most important political movements in South Africa.
He later worked in different firms and was angry to find out that the white firms charged the affluent white clients less than the black clients. In 1952, he and Oliver Tambo opened the first all black African law firm in the country. The firm ceased to exist after the anti-Apartheid began to consume most of their time.
Birth of A Freedom Fighter
It wasn’t on a particular day that Madiba said to himself that from that day on he would devote himself to the liberation of his people. It was a steady accumulation of countless indignities and seemingly uncrucial moments that led him to devoting his life to the liberation struggle. Under the tutelage of his friend Walter Sisulu, he joined the ANC. At that time, Africanism struck a chord in him for he realized that he had been susceptible to the appeal of being perceived by whites as “cultured,” “progressive” and “civilized.” He had been drawn to becoming the black elite that Britain sought to create in Africa and enjoying the relationships with the white establishment. Many felt that the ANC as a whole had become the preserve of privileged African elite who were more concerned with their own rights than those of the masses. Consequently, the Youth League was born to reaffirm African nationalism and overthrow of white supremacy. Its manifesto stated: “...the national liberation of Africans will be achieved by Africans themselves...”
At the time, Madiba was among those who firmly opposed to allowing Communists (the Party was dominated by whites) or whites to join the league for fear that the blacks would remain prey to a continuing sense of inferiority. He was suspicious of the white left and wary of white influence in the ANC. He felt the same way about the Indians because of their superior education, experience, and training.
Although he was elected to the executive committee of the Youth League, he was nervous to join and still had doubts about the extent of his political commitment due to the little time he had outside of working full-time and studying part-time. Also he felt insecure and politically backward and was intimidated by the eloquence of so many in the league. It was in 1947 when he was selected to the Executive Committee of the Transvaal ANC, he began to identify himself with the organization. The more he became involved with the political movement, the less he could spend time with his family, which was his lifelong dilemma. To put in his own words, “I did not in the beginning choose to place my people above my family, but in attempting to serve my people, I found that I was prevented from fulfilling my obligations as a son, a brother, a father, and a husband. In that way, my commitment 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.”
Long Walk to Freedom
It was a long walk before he came to embrace not only the Africans, but the Indians, the Coloreds, and the whites, who fought against the same system in a larger international and historical context. It was a long walk before he became an international icon as a leader from a family and career focused man, to going back and forth between courts and jail, to leading the liberation movement underground as an outlaw, to traveling internationally seeking funding for the anti-apartheid armed struggle in South Africa, to spending twenty-seven and a half years behind the bars, to negotiating with the white government to co-establish a democratic government even before he could persuade his ANC colleagues, and to becoming the first black President of South Africa.
When he went underground and was dubbed the Black Pimpernel, his outlaw existence caught the imagination of the press. He traveled secretly about the country and even fed the mythology of the Black Pimpernel by phoning individual newspaper reporters from telephone booths about what the ANC was planning and the ineptitude of the police. He would pop up here and there to annoy the police and to delight the people. Although he was a gregarious person, he loved his solitude to plan, to think, to plot. But he missed his wife and kids dearly.
He first embraced Gandhi’s nonviolent resistance, and later advocated armed struggle despite the strong opposing voices from other ANC leaders. He once suggested Walter Sisulu visit the People’s Republic of China to ask for support. Years later when armed struggle seemed more necessary, he traveled internationally to raise funds to form MK, a military organization in South Africa to sabotage the white establishment. The armed struggle led to increased military oppression by the white government and civilian deaths, but later also played certain role on the negotiation table between Nelson Mandela and the National Party government (Dutch rule). As he worked with the white President of the National Party, F.W. de Klerk, for South Africa's first national, nonracial, one-person-one-vote election, they faced violent opposition from the conservatives of both the Africans and the whites. He told a rally, "I will go down on my knees to beg those who want to drag our country into bloodshed."
During the twenty-seven and a half years behind the bars, he continued to live fully through studying law, performing in plays, playing tennis and boxing, and gardening, while strategically interacting with the prison authorities and fighting side by side with his comrades for the basic human dignity in prison. His vision continued to deepen and widen and his leadership transcended.
During the harsh time in prison, Madiba learned that “the human body has an enormous capacity for adjusting to trying circumstances... one can bear the unbearable if one can keep one’s spirits strong even when one’s body is being tested.” Gardening was one of his pleasures in prison which gave him a small taste of freedom. After being transferred to a prison on the mainland from Robben Island where he had worked in a small garden, he requested sixteen 44-gallon oil drums sliced in half and had them filled with rich and moist soil. He grew “onions, eggplant, cabbage, cauliflower, beans, spinach, carrots, cucumbers, broccoli, beet root, lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, strawberries, and much more.” At its peak, he had a small farm with nearly nine hundred plants. He not only supplied the prison kitchen with fresh vegetables, but also some warders.
Three years before he turned 60, his friends in prison, Walter and Kathy, suggested he ought to write his memoirs. To avoid the warders’ watchful eyes, Madiba wrote during the night and slept during the day. Each day, he passed what he wrote to Kathy to review and then read it to Walter, then Kathy wrote their comments and criticism in the margins for Madiba to revise, then the manuscript was given to Laloo Chiba who spent the next night transferring it to microscopic shorthand. Another prisoner Mac later smuggled the transferred manuscript to the outside world. The actual manuscript was discovered and confiscated by the prison authorities.
At the end of Long Walk to Freedom, he wrote:
"I always knew that deep down in every human heart, there is mercy and generosity. No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite. Even in the grimmest times in prison, when my comrades and I were pushed to our limits, I would see a glimmer of humanity in one of the guards, perhaps just for a second, but it was enough to reassure me and keep me going. Man's goodness is a flame that can be hidden but never extinguished.
It was during those long and lonely years 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. A man who takes away another man's freedom is a prisoner of hatred, he is locked behind the bars of prejudice and narrow-mindedness. I am not truly free if I am taking away someone else's freedom, just as surely as I am not free when my freedom is taken from me. The oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of their humanity.
When I walked out of prison, that was my mission, to liberate the oppressed and the oppressor both. Some say that has now been achieved. But I know that that is not the case... 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. The true test of our devotion to freedom is just beginning."
Martin Luther King, Jr.'s wife, Coretta Scott, was on the podium of Madiba's inauguration as South Africa's first black president when Madiba made reference to her late husband's immortal words: "Free at last! Free at last!"
Returning to Childhood Home
Two months after his release, Madiba finally had a chance to visit his mother’s unadorned grave in Qunu. He felt remorse that he hadn’t been able to take care of his mother and a longing for what might have been had he chosen a different life. Though the people of Qunu were not political, Madiba heard the schoolchildren singing the songs related to the struggle. To his dismay, his childhood village remained poor if not poorer. Additionally, the village was unswept, the water polluted, and the land littered with plastic trash, as compared to what he knew as a boy when the village was tidy, the water pure, and nobody knew of plastic.
Endnote
Madiba understood deeply that freedom is way more than the world beyond prison walls. In today's environment, freedom also includes having access to clean air, fresh water, and lush nature. The temple is not built in a day; it takes a village to lay one brick at a time. It’s a long walk to freedom for all as we ponder the direction in which we are heading as a species.
