Dare Not Linger by Nelson Mandela

Author:Nelson Mandela
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

CHAPTER TEN

Reconciliation

In a fleeting news clip that was broadcast to the world on 12 June 1964, the day he was to start serving his sentence, Nelson Mandela is partly obscured by the wire mesh over the window of the van transporting the condemned men.1 Although unseen, the prisoners leave an indelible stamp of rebellion as clenched fists appear through the ventilation holes on the side panels of the sealed vehicle, a physical complement to the language of defiance from the spectators, many of whom had packed the gallery during the trial.

Even though the police officials had used a back exit to avoid the crowds, many people were still able to cheer their heroes to prison. Above the harsh throb of traffic and the stuttering growl of the outriders’ motorcycle engines, Mandela could hear the shouting outside, the call-and-response chants and songs that had throughout time rallied the faithful to battle. A powerful voice shouted in isiXhosa, ‘Amandla!’ and the people responded, ‘Awethu!’ The chant was then repeated in English, with the voice calling out ‘All power!’ and the crowd responding, ‘To the people!’ Never in the history of struggle in South Africa had there been anything as eloquent as these five simple words to express the agony of millions and their resolve to reverse centuries of oppression.

For a black person to enter prison in June 1964, some sixteen years after the National Party came into power, meant being at the mercy of functionaries trapped at the lowest rung of the state’s administrative hierarchy. Simply, white prison staff were usually of Afrikaner stock, ill-educated and powerful. These were mainly young men and women, the likes of whom had prompted American writer James Baldwin’s observation that ‘ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have’.2

The black warders, also victims of the violence driving the apartheid policy, which had turned them into instruments of oppression, were mostly a more benighted version of their paler brethren. However, it was the white officials who had the responsibility for Mandela and the political prison population.

This was Mandela’s new world, a world in which African prisoners were first subjected to the indignity of being stripped naked and then forced to wear shorts, as opposed to the long trousers worn by Indian and coloured prisoners. He had taken pride in how he dressed in the outside world – dress symbolising his own sense of self. When he was to be sentenced at an earlier court appearance, in 1962, he had eschewed a Western suit for a jackal-skin cloak with beadwork, which he wore with defiant grace, to symbolise his Africanness.

In 1965, when he was serving a life sentence on Robben Island, there was no suggestion of future generosity in a series of grainy pictures that were smuggled out and published by the International Defence and Aid Fund in London, in which a shaven Mandela and his compatriot Walter Sisulu are deep in discussion.* All around them is the unremitted bleakness of the rock quarry and walls of stone.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.