Letters from behind bars – in the language of humanity

Prison missives serve to enhance Mandela’s reputation as a defining figure of the last century and this one

THE PRISON LETTERS OF NELSON MANDELA

Edited by Sahm Venter; foreword by Zamaswazi Dlamini-Mandela Liveright, £25

PRISON writing has a special resonance; prison letters and diaries most obviously so. One thinks of Antonio Gramsci’s prison notebooks, a whole new iteration of Marxism created behind bars. Or Vaclav Havel’s Letters to Olga, one of the few books that Salman Rushdie kept by him throughout his own protective incarceration.

Or, with less obvious political content, the personal testimony of Jack Henry Abbott’s In The Belly of the Beast and Jimmy Boyle’s The Pain of Confinement. And all those, stretching back in time, who, like the Marquis de Sade, are not just writing in prison, but imprisoned for their writing.

In a letter of July 1969 to his wife’s sister, Nelson Mandela makes a rather obvious point with dignified simplicity. “One has to be a prisoner to appreciate fully the true value of many things we take much for granted in life outside prison.”

Not the least of these was simple contact with family and friends. At the time of writing, Mandela had been on Robben Island, most notorious of his holding places, for five years, allowed to write letters only every six months and becoming aware that many of these did not reach their intended recipients. What Mandela doesn’t at this point dwell on or even acknowledge is the prisoner whose movement and access has been restricted is almost definitive of the writer constantly pushing against the boundaries of language and meaning.

This is the least scabrous understanding embodied in de Sade’s insane ranting, and it is most scorchingly dramatised in Hubert Selby Jr’s darkest and best novel The Room, a frighteningly convincing imagining of what it means to be confined, but with a mind that runs free.

Mandela had at least the comfort of a specific struggle and a clearly defined network of correspondents. His letters divide somewhat between angrily dignified appeals to the authorities to improve his lot and that of his fellow prisoners and more personal correspondence with a family he was not sure he would ever see again.

At the Rivonia trial, he believed with some reason that his life was forfeit or a life-term possible, and so it proved. His claim of political rights bumped up against the obduracy of a prison system that ground exceeding small. Mandela and his comrades were required to sit chained in rows, breaking rocks into gravel.

They were not allowed to see children who had not yet reached the age of 16. Family life moved, if it seemed to move at all, in a series of jerks and shocks. At one point Mandela says he saw a family member “in 1967” the way we might say “last Tuesday”.

The summer of 1969 was a strange and difficult time for him. While the world marked the Moon landings, Mandela underwent the lunar pain of learning that his son Thembi had died in car accident.

This, following the death of his own mother and the sorrow of not being allowed to attend either funeral or stone-laying. Mandela passes the news to Winnie in a letter of heartbreaking formality; perhaps more openly to Thembi’s mother, his first wife Evelyn. It was the second child they had lost.

It is one of many reminders of just how complex was Mandela’s identity. Most of us will remember that, to South Africans, he was usually referred to as “Madiba”. The more formal and business letters are signed “NR Mandela”.

His familiar “Christian” name was dished out at school, and maybe a less provocative choice for use within the system when we realise that his given name Rohlilala means “troublemaker”.

But he often signs himself “Dalibunga”, a token of his status in the clan, and he is also “Nel” and “Uncle Nel”. To the children, he is “Tata” and “Khulu”, “daddy” and “grandpa” in isiXhosa.

The principal task before us is the overthrow of white supremacy in all its ramifications