Mandela by Donna Faulkner

Author:Donna Faulkner [Donna Faulkner]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781612307497
Publisher: New Word City, LLC
Published: 2013-12-05T16:00:00+00:00

Over the years, life for prisoners on Robben Island slowly became more bearable. Progress was never a straight line; it was an endless zigzag of small battles - a concession that had taken years to win might be revoked in a week. But the overall trend line was positive. By 1970, seven years after the Rivonia men first arrived, the accumulated changes were significant.

They wore long trousers now. Uniforms actually fitted them, and they were allowed to wash them themselves. They were permitted in the courtyard all weekend. The food was never good and still inferior to what was given the Indian and Coloured men, but now it sometimes included bread, and they were permitted to share meals instead of being restricted to individual rations. They played cards and board games, and they organized chess, draughts (checkers), and Scrabble tournaments. Visiting ministers preached every Sunday, and the prisoners no longer had to listen from their cells, but could attend services in the open air. At Christmas, they were permitted to put on concerts and even were allowed to mount an annual drama. One year, Mandela played Creon, the king of Thebes, in Sophocles’ Antigone.

But the biggest freedom was that prisoners were allowed to associate freely with each other. The no-conversation rule withered away until they could talk at meals or in the courtyard. They elected Mandela to head a three-man High Organ of the ANC to govern their behavior in prison, and they held general ANC meetings – inconspicuously, of course.

At the lime quarry, the prisoners wore sunglasses to block the glare, and production quotas were virtually nonexistent. Once, when storms had lashed the island, the head guard at the quarry approached the prisoners and said, “Gentlemen, the rains have washed away the lines on the roads. We need twenty kilos of lime today. Can you help?” Since he treated them as human beings, they obliged. The prisoners did much more talking than digging, however; the quarry was the scene of endless debates, about everything from ANC strategy and tactics to the health benefits of circumcision and whether tigers are indigenous to Africa.

The tiger discussion went on for years. The conventional view was that tigers came from Asia. Mandela held that there is a word for tiger in the Xhosa language, separate from the names for lion and leopard, so it’s likely that tigers once lived in Africa: Why would there be a name for something that didn’t exist? But Mac Maharaj disagreed. There was a Hindi word hundreds of years ago for craft that flew in the air, he said, but that didn’t mean the ancient Indians had airplanes. The men educated each other through their debates, discussed their own and the ANC’s mistakes, and matured their thinking. There’s only one good thing about prison, Mandela once said: There is time to reflect. He and his colleagues used their time in the quarry to good advantage.

The prisoners even began to converse with their warders. Mandela never initiated these discussions,

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.