Ruislip & Eastcote & Northwood Gazette
PRISONERS OF CONSCIENCE
Nelson Mandela became a free man 30 years ago. MARION McMULLEN looks at leading figures imprisoned for their beliefs
ATINY concrete prison cell with a single light bulb that burned day and night held Nelson Mandela on the notorious Robben Island in South Africa.
He spent 18 of his 27 years behind bars in the maximum security prison on the former leper colony and was 71 when he finally became a free man, 30 years ago on February 11, 1990.
Mandela, who was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1964 for his membership of the armed wing of the African National Congress, later wrote in his autobiography Long Walk To Freedom: “I could walk the length of my cell in three paces.
“When I lay down, I could feel the wall with my feet and my head grazed the concrete at the other side.”
The island is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the prison a museum, which offers tours to visitors.
Mandela famously went on to become South Africa’s president and the country’s first black head of state, but once said: “I was not a messiah, but an ordinary man who had become a leader because of extraordinary circumstances.”
His story was also told in 2013 movie Road To Freedom with British actor Idris Elba portraying Mandela.
Zindzi and Zenani Mandela were attending the London premiere when they received the call saying their father had just passed away. They insisted the screening go ahead and the audience was told the sad news at the end of the movie.
The anti-apartheid activist continues to inspire people across the world. Former American president Barack Obama and his family paid their own visit to Robben Island in 2013 to see the cell where Nelson Mandela spent so many years. Obama said the visit had left him “deeply humbled”.
American boxing champ George Foreman once said of Mandela: “He came out of prison and saved his entire country. Some of the best people in the world have spent time in prison.”
Among those people was Indian spiritual and political leader Mahatma Gandhi who found himself behind bars several times for his involvement in protests to end British rule in India.
He was arrested and jailed for six years in 1922 on charges of sedition, but was released after two years because he needed an emergency appendectomy.
Gandhi promoted non-violent resistance teaching that “an eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind”.
American civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr was inspired by Gandhi’s philosophy of non-violence and used a version of the “eye for an eye” quote in his speeches.
King was arrested around 30 times during his years of campaigning against segregation and wrote in his seminal text, Letter From Birmingham Jail, in 1963: “I am here because injustice is here”.
Russian writer and dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn was taken to Lubyanka Prison in Moscow where he was beaten and interrogated for anti-Soviet propaganda.
His crime was making a derogatory comment about Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in a letter to a friend, and in 1945 he was sentenced to eight years in a labour camp.
The experience led him to write his Nobel prize-winning book The Gulag Archipelago, which revealed the horrors of the Soviet gulag forced labour camp system to the world.
He later said: “You only have power over people so long as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of everything, he’s no long in your power – he’s free again.”
Crime And Punishment writer Fydor Dostoyevsky was arrested in Russia in 1849 for reading and circulating banned political essays.
He was sentenced to death by firing squad and was on his way to a square to be executed when the Tsar stopped the “mock execution” and changed the sentence to eight years imprisonment.
Dostoyevsky spent four years in a labour camp and four years as a soldier in Semipalatinsk and later observed: “People speak sometimes about the ‘bestial’ cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel.”
Italian astronomer and scientist Galileo has been called the father of modern science and was among the first to use a telescope to observe the Solar System.
It led to him discovering four of Jupiter’s largest moons and marking the Phases of Venus.
However, he fell foul of the Catholic Church for supporting the then controversial theory that the Earth revolved around the Sun instead of being the centre of the known universe.
He was tried and convicted on heresy charges in 1633 and sentenced to life imprisonment.
The sentence was later changed, but meant he remained under house arrest for the rest of his life and was banned from teaching or talking about the “heretic” theories in his writings.
Galileo said: “It vexes me when they would constrain science by the authority of the Scriptures and yet do no consider themselves bound to answer reason and experiment.”
Suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst was jailed several times during the fight to get the vote for women. She was arrested in 1914 trying to present a petition at Buckingham Palace and called out “Arrested at the gates of the palace. Tell the King!” as she was driven away to Holloway Prison.
She was released and rearrested 12 times over the space of one year and served a total of around 30 days behind bars and declared: “We are here, not because we are lawbreakers, we are here in our efforts to become law-makers.