Raw emotion in Mandela letters
Book reveals the heartbreaking prison years, writes Charlayne Hunter-Gault
WHEN Nelson Mandela was released from prison in February 1990, dozens of journalists and television camera crews from all over the world descended on South Africa and made their way to the dusty street outside his Soweto home.
I was among them. We shared the same goal: to get Mandela to give us some insight into his 27 years in prison and to tell us his plans for the future. My turn finally came toward the end of that warm day, after he had sat for hours in suit and tie, always composed, despite the fact that he’d had virtually no experience being in front of a TV camera when he went to prison, in 1962.
I began by trying to open a door none of the other journalists could, telling him how I identified with the Struggle against apartheid, given my younger years in America’s segregated South before the civil rights’ movement. Before I could finish my sentence, Mandela’s eyes lit up brighter than I had seen them all afternoon, and for the first and only time that day, he provided a small glimpse into his prison life.
“Oh,” he said, “do you know Miss Maya Angelou?” I nodded, and his reserved demeanour briefly fell away. “We read all of her books when we were in prison!” he said.
That was about all Mandela or any of the other political prisoners incarcerated with him on Robben Island gave up to me or to any other journalist for the longest time. When I next travelled to South Africa, for the PBS NewsHour, in May 1994, just before Mandela was sworn in as president, I enquired about interviewing some of the former Robben Islanders. “You know, those old guys only talk about those years among themselves,” one of their friends told me.
But eventually Mandela did talk about those years, in graphic detail, in his monumental autobiography Long Walk
to Freedom (1994). Now, during the centenary of his birth, we have The Prison
Letters of Nelson Mandela, containing 255 of his handwritten letters and displaying unedited his raw emotions, heartbreaking and inspiring, from the period of his imprisonment.
This book confronts readers with the most direct evidence yet of Mandela’s intellectual evolution into one of the great moral heroes of our time. It was assembled over 10 years by Sahm Venter, a South African journalist and author, who obtained the letters from a variety of sources, among them a collection named for a policeman who, after Mandela’s release, returned notebooks confiscated from his cell in 1971 into which he had carefully copied his letters before passing them on to warders to be mailed. Mandela knew that the warders screened his incoming and outgoing correspondence, often withholding both, sometimes for months, or censoring portions.
Many of the letters portray Mandela the loving husband and attentive father to five children – his three older ones by his first wife, Evelyn, and his two with his second wife, Winnie. The letters make clear Mandela’s efforts to stay connected to his extended family.
He refused to condone the apartheid regime’s ploy of establishing separate homelands for black South Africans, at one point declining a request for a visit from his nephew KD Matanzima, a Thembu chief who went along with the plan. Mandela scolded Matanzima in a letter for “using our relationship to involve me and my organisation (the ANC) in Bantustan politics.” Yet in the same letter, Mandela insists on his family bond.
Others convey the legal training he had as a law student before his arrest (for inciting worker strikes, to which charges of sabotage were later added). In a long letter he wrote in 1979 to the commanding officer of Robben Island, and ultimately intended for the minister of prisons and police, he politely elaborated a list of grievances and demands, including requests that political prisoners “be released on remission, parole or probation”, “be allowed to acquire radios and newspapers”, to “study any course or subject with a recognised educational institution local or abroad” and to “train in some skill or trade”.
With words as his only ammunition, Mandela fought his case patiently, on lined paper, his eloquence inseparable from his rectitude. “I detest white supremacy and will fight it with every weapon in my hands,” he wrote to a senior prison official in 1976, in another letter of grievance. Two of the volume’s most heartbreaking letters are ones he wrote after the deaths of his mother and eldest son, whose funerals he was not permitted to attend. His mother’s death “hit me hard”,” he wrote to his nephew Matanzima. Mandela’s letters to Winnie – who, when she was finally allowed to visit him, was denied any physical contact until after he arrived at Pollsmoor prison in the early 1980s – are tender, often addressing her as “My darling Mum” or by one of her clan names. In one, he calls her “the most wonderful friend I have in life”.
In August 1970, he wrote to Winnie, who was also in prison at the time, a letter of eerie prescience: “One day we may have on our side the genuine and firm support of an upright and straightforward man, holding high office, who will consider it improper to shirk his duty of protecting the rights and privileges of even his bitter opponents… Sometimes I even have the belief that this feeling is part & parcel of my self. It seems to be woven into my being.”
Twenty-four years later, Nelson Mandela would become that upright and straightforward man.