Mandela by Christo Brand

Author:Christo Brand
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466858404
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

CHAPTER NINE

For the first time in 21 years, Mandela found himself completely alone.

He missed the companionship of others, he missed his all-important garden and he missed the sunny aspect of the rooftop from where he had been able to at least see the mountains and the sky.

I was still visiting him twice daily and was in overall charge of his life in prison, but the one man who could have made a difference – the warder assigned to spend all day with him, stationed in the passageway between cells – refused to communicate with him at all.

He was a veteran warder who was once in the police force and he spoke only Afrikaans. He ignored all of Mandela’s efforts to talk to him in his own language. He turned down invitations to share coffee or tea and he would not even take the newspaper Mandela offered, preferring instead to get his own, the very same newspaper, but untouched by a prisoner. He wanted nothing from any prisoner and would spend his whole shift just observing Mandela and reading from the Bible. Mandela complained to me that the sergeant would not even watch television with him in the cell.

However, this situation did not last long. One day, the warder went for a sinus operation in hospital and developed a blood clot while he was in the recovery ward. His wife was shocked to find him dead there.

Mandela was upset, too. But his replacement warder was something of an old friend – a man who had known him on Robben Island and who would at least pass the time of day with him. They used to chat in Afrikaans.

At this time, I was also thinking I might leave the prison service but I discussed my situation with Mandela and he encouraged me to stay. ‘Mr Brand,’ he said, ‘we don’t want to lose good people like you inside. You are good with how you communicate with the people outside; the way you make sure our letters are posted; the way you consult us about our visits.’ These were small things I was doing, just treating him with some dignity. But when Mandela said he did not want to lose me, I stayed.

I had permission to take Mandela into a quiet courtyard in the section for some exercise. There was no tennis or table-tennis there but he could walk around for an hour. Other prisoners from the criminal section could see him from their cells on the second floor. They were uneducated people who only knew that this was some sort of VIP getting special treatment and they didn’t like it.

They were jealous. Mandela used to wear the sombrero-style hat made out of cardboard by his friend Japhta Masemola, a cherished possession, and the prisoners shouted at him: ‘Hey, Amigo!’ and pelted him with the dried peach pips left over from their food pots.

They were aggressive. No ‘Amandla!’ or slogans of political support. They were completely ignorant of Mandela’s status or politics. All they knew was that he had been given huge premises of his own and that I was doing his shopping.

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