Nelson Mandela by The Editors of New Word City

Author:The Editors of New Word City [The Editors of New Word City]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781612305530
Publisher: New Word City, LLC
Published: 2013-03-10T16:00:00+00:00

The Robben Island Years

Sitting seven kilometers off the coast of Cape Town, Robben Island had, in past years, been used as a leper colony and an animal quarantine station. Mandela and his fellow prisoners arrived by plane on June 13, 1964, at 8:45 a.m. “They said it was the coldest day . . . in ten years or something,” recalled Andrew Mlangeni, a prisoner who arrived with Mandela. “Our morale came down. We realized we were going to be here for a very, very long time.”

The days were long, grueling, and silent – the prisoners weren’t allowed to talk to each other. They quarried limestone and reduced it to gravel with a sledgehammer. They were allowed to send and receive letters only once every six months. Each letter was read, copied, and sent to the security police for review. Words or phrases were often blacked out; some letters were even destroyed. Prisoners weren’t allowed to have watches; the pace of the time was controlled by orders shouted by guards or the prison’s sirens.

Mandela’s cell was tiny. “I remember when I first went to Robben Island,” recalled Stengel, the writer who helped Mandela with his autobiography. “I had been working with him for some months, and he’s a big man in every way. And when one of the warders took me to his cell and opened the door, I gasped when I saw it. . . . There wasn’t room for a human being, much less Nelson Mandela, this outsized human being. And in a strange way that cell modeled him. His world became constricted . . . in a way, that allowed him to become bigger because it gave him self-control.”

For the next eighteen years, Nelson Mandela remained on Robben Island. If years in prison can ever be characterized as well spent his was. Mandela used the nights to speak out for all political prisoners on the island. He was their representative to the authorities and the world. He also served as a lawyer for many of his fellow prisoners, helping them file appeals and petitions - and he even did legal work for some of the white warders. These men were “the most ruthless and brutal of the apartheid regime’s characters,” said Allister Sparks, the celebrated South African historian, but Mandela “realized that even the worst and crudest could be negotiated with.” Amazed to find themselves being helped by a black man, some of the jailers reconsidered their opinions.

Throughout his life, Mandela wrote off no one. “I always tried to be decent to the warders in my section; hostility was self-defeating,” he wrote. “It was ANC policy to try to educate all people, even our enemies. We believed that all men, even prison service warders, were capable of change.” As one reward for that innate humanity, Mandela was able to win numerous concessions, ranging from sunglasses and long pants for prisoners to visits from liberal politicians and the Red Cross - and even permission to plant a garden in the prison courtyard.

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