Long Walk to Freedom

“This was an all too typical South African story. It was not lack of ability that limited my people, but lack of opportunity.” 

Here, Mandela remembers an early schoolmate, Mathona. She was a brilliant pupil who was unable to rise to her potential because of the economic and political marginalization of Africans.

“But seeing Frank and his wife began to undermine my parochialism and loosen the hold of the tribalism that still imprisoned me. I began to sense my identity as an African, not just a Thembu or even a Xhosa.” 

Much of Mandela’s reminiscences of his childhood concern his growing sense of commonality with other people. At this stage, he was shedding his tribal loyalties and seeing the common interest of all African peoples. This change in consciousness prepared him to learn the tenets of Africanism from Gaur Radebe and Anton Lembede.

“My part was the smaller one, though I was the engine of the play’s moral, which was that men who take great risks often suffer great consequences.” 

Mandela played John Wilkes Booth in a school play about Abraham Lincoln. From an early age, Mandela was aware of the mortal danger facing those who seek to dismantle racialized political systems.

“At the time, I was more advanced socially than politically. While I would not have considered fighting the political system of the white man, I was quite prepared to rebel against the social system of my own people.”

Here, Mandela points to how his Western education gave him no sense of commonality or solidarity with other Africans. His schooling presented South Africa’s racial caste system as natural, so Mandela could not yet conceive that it could be dismantled.

“I had been taught that to have a B.A. meant to be a leader, and to be a leader one needed a B.A. But in Johannesburg I found that many of the most outstanding leaders had never been to university at all.”

Mandela learned some lessons about leadership from watching Jongintaba, but in Johannesburg, he witnessed the style of leadership required to organize a mass mobilization. In Long Walk to Freedom, Mandela calls himself arrogant as a young man because he believed his lineage and education made him the natural choice to lead. In Johannesburg, he learned that action and commitment, rather than title and educational qualifications, determine leadership.

“The passing of the regent removed from the scene an enlightened and tolerant man who achieved the goal that marks the reign of all great leaders: he kept his people united. Liberals and conservatives, traditionalists and reformers, white-collar officials and blue-collar miners, all remained loyal to him, not because they always agreed with him, but because the regent listened to and respected all different opinions.”

Referring again to Jongintaba’s style of leadership, Mandela foreshadows the principles that will guide him once he is a leader of the antiapartheid struggle. Throughout his political career, Mandela sought to engage with and understand his enemies rather than dominate them.

“I had no epiphany, no singular revelation, no moment of truth, but a steady accumulatio of a thousand slights, a thousand indignities, a thousand unremembered moments, produced in me an anger, a rebelliousness, a desire to fight the system that imprisoned my people. There was no particular day on which I said, From henceforth I will devote myself to the liberation of my people; instead, I simply found myself doing so, and could not do otherwise.” 

Mandela describes himself as someone who only slowly came to his political convictions, which is integral to understanding his patience with his political enemies. The speeches of Radebe and Lembede did not instantly convert Mandela to Africanism, but they planted the seeds for his later thinking. Mandela sought to do the same when he talked to those who did not share his viewpoint. 

“I was already on my way to being drawn into the black elite that Britain sought to create in Africa. That is what everyone from the regent to Mr. Sidelsky had wanted for me. But it was an illusion. Like Lembede, I came to see the antidote as militant African nationalism.” 

As Mandela was radicalized by his exposure to Africanism and Communism, he saw that the legalistic reformism of lawyer Lazar Sidelsky and other white liberals was insufficient. An institution as comprehensively and intentionally discriminatory as apartheid could never be undone by working within the very system that implemented it.

“The cynical have always suggested that the Communists were using us. But who is to say that we were not using them?” 

The relationship between the African National Congress (ANC) and the Communist Party was a major source of conflict. Both the National Party and the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) were staunchly anticommunist, though for entirely different reasons. Africanists generally believed that communism, at least as directed by the Soviet Union, was an attempt to replace one form of foreign domination with another. Therefore, the PAC often accused the ANC of being communist puppets. Mandela takes pains throughout his autobiography to show how and why the ANC and the South African Communist Party (SACP) were such close allies.

“It is the oppressor who defines the nature of the struggle.” 

Mandela repeats this saying several times throughout Long Walk to Freedom. The history of ANC mobilizations against apartheid in the 50s is one of increasing government repression. As early as 1952, Mandela recognized that the state would not allow nonviolent political action that meaningfully threatened its monopoly on power. Again and again, he tried to make the white electorate understand that this left nonwhite people no other path to freedom but violence.

“I wondered—not for the first time—whether one was ever justified in neglecting the welfare of one’s own family in order to fight for the welfare of others.”

Mandela’s prominence within the liberation struggle, even as a young man, meant that his political duties kept him from his familial ones. Mandela sometimes had weeks-long periods where he wrestled with his sense of dereliction as a father, husband, and son. 

“This is precisely why the National Party was violently opposed to all forms of integration. Only a white electorate indoctrinated with the idea of the black threat, ignorant of African ideas and policies, could support the monstrous racist philosophy of the National Party. Familiarity, in this case, would not breed contempt, but understanding, and even, eventually, harmony.” 

When Mandela met the white, female guards assigned to watch Winnie, his second wife, he tried to explain the ANC’s mission. The core doctrine was, on its face, unobjectionable: the ANC desired a South Africa with equal economic and political rights for people of all races. Thus, the apartheid government resorted to fearmongering by claiming that antiapartheid activists simply wanted revenge on white people.

“Guerrilla warfare, he explained, was not designed to win a military victory so much as to unleash political and economic forces that would bring down the enemy.” 

Here, Mandela is receiving advice from a leader of Algeria’s anticolonial paramilitary forces. Given the size and technology of the South African military, the MK never intended to seize the reins of power. Instead, it accomplished its aim of forcing the government to bargain directly with the ANC.

“I had chosen traditional dress to emphasize the symbolism that I was a black African walking into a white man’s court…That day, I felt myself to be the very embodiment of African nationalism…The kaross was a sign of contempt for the niceties of white justice.” 

Mandela describes himself as very theatrical when he was a young lawyer. For his trials, he pushed those skills even further, sometimes managing to stage-manage the proceedings.

“There was much in such a society that was primitive and insecure and it certainly could never measure up to the demands of the present epoch. But in such a society are contained the seeds of revolutionary democracy in which none will be held in slavery or servitude, and in which poverty, want and insecurity shall be no more. This is the history which, even today, inspires me and my colleagues in our political struggle.” 

This passage hints at a very downplayed aspect of Mandela’s leadership: namely, bridging the ideological divide between Africanism and Communism. By describing traditional African society in socialist terms, flexibly minded Africanists could celebrate their Africanness while adopting the useful parts of a foreign ideology.

“The ideological creed of the ANC is, and always has been, the creed of African Nationalism. It is not the concept of African Nationalism expressed in the cry, ‘Drive the white man into the sea.’ The African Nationalism for which the ANC stands is the concept of freedom and fulfillment for the African people in their own land.” 

Nonracialism was an essential part of the ANC’s ideology, and it was adopted both on principle and for strategic reasons. Disagreement with this principle prompted many of the ANC’s Africanist members to split off and form the PAC in 1959.

“It was a useful reminder that all men, even the most seemingly cold-blooded, have a core of decency, and that if their heart is touched, they are capable of changing.” 

When Colonel Badenhorst was relieved from his command of Robben Island prison, Mandela was taken aback by the Colonel’s kind parting words. Badenhorst was the harshest commander the island had ever seen, but, as Mandela perceived of many white South Africans, Badenhorst too was a victim of apartheid. A man who might otherwise have been gentle and open-minded was rewarded for cruelty for so long that he assumed the posture by default.

“I found it extraordinary that a cabinet minister should be so uninformed. Yet I should not have been surprised; Nationalist politicians routinely condemned what they didn’t understand.” 

By the 80s, the state’s suppression of ANC literature and leadership allowed it to present a fictitious version of the organization to the white population. Physical separation was intended to keep white people from gaining an accurate understanding of the nonwhite population’s grievances. It was so effective that even government ministers did not realize they were parroting lies.

“I saw my role as an elder statesman who might help them move on to the more inclusive ideas of the Congress Movement. I knew also that these young men would eventually become frustrated because Black Consciousness offered no program of action, no outlet for their protest.”

With the influx of Black Consciousness prisoners in the mid-70s, Mandela was discomfited to find he was no longer on the leading edge of the struggle. He was somewhat offended to discover he was considered a moderate. He realized, however, that he must take on a new role, one more like that of Jongintaba, and listen carefully to the Black Consciousness prisoners’ ideas.

“The name had special meaning for me, for during all my years in prison hope never left me—and now it never would. I was convinced that this child would be part of a new generation of South Africans for whom apartheid would be a distant memory—that was my dream.” 

When Mandela’s daughter Zenani married a Zulu prince, she was able to bring her daughter, Zaziwe, to see Mandela. Despite the toll his work took on his family, Mandela derived great strength throughout his imprisonment from his family. In holding one of his grandchildren for the first time, Mandela resolved to make a better South Africa for future generations.

“Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts…I cannot and will not give any undertaking at a time when I and you, the people, are not free. Your freedom and mine cannot be separated. I will return.” 

These are the final lines of Mandela’s speech that was read out to a United Democratic Front (UDF) crowd in 1985. The government had offered to release Mandela on the condition that he rejected all political violence. During Mandela’s separate imprisonment in Pollsmoor and Victor Verster, ANC supporters were concerned he was negotiating an agreement with the government without consulting the organization. In the UDF speech, Mandela reaffirmed his unwavering support for the ANC and reassured his supporters that he would not accept personal liberty without national liberation.

“There are times when a leader must move out ahead of the flock, go off in a new direction, confident that he is leading his people the right way.” 

Mandela seems to contradict his earlier description of a leader as one who guides without being seen to do so. However, his tactical flexibility allowed him to navigate successfully the political upheavals of the early 90s and see the peace process through to the end. Mandela placed a heavy emphasis on movements as a driver of political change, but he also understood that certain historical opportunities must sometimes be seized by individual political actors.

“The point which must be clearly understood is that the struggle is not over, and negotiations themselves are a theater of struggle, subject to advances and reverses as any other form of struggle.” 

Mandela delivered these lines at the 1991 ANC conference. Negotiations with the government had stalled, and pessimism was seeping into the movement. Mandela reminded ANC members that they achieved direct negotiations with the government—their primary goal for decades—and that the negotiation process had by no means run its course.