In prison, Nelson Mandela found that the older he grew, the more he thought back on his childhood: the Tembu kraal by the Bashee River where he was born, the thatch hut where he learned his ABCs, the pastures where he herded cattle, the hills of the Transkei, where he scrambled after small game. As a boy, he listened to the elders of the Tembu tribe conjuring up the good old days before the white men put their bight on the land. He grew up on tales of Dingane and Bambata, Moshoeshoe and Sekhukhuni and their ways of self-defense. To lead, to swell the glory of the African nation, that was what obsessed him. Across the years the images pushed him forward, shaping him as a politician, then as a guerrilla, steadying his nerve that day in Johannesburg, when he stood in the dock on trial for his life saying, “This is what has motivated me in all that I have done.
Now the world’s most famous political prisoner has become South Africa’s Great Black Hope. Everyone knows his name, but the only people who know much more than that are his cellmates, his wife, Winnie, and a handful of loyal friends. Having granted his freedom after nearly three decades in jail, President F. W. de Klerk reported awkwardly, “He’s an elderly man, a dignified man and an interesting man.” Not much to go on. There he stood at 71, his hair flecked with white, his face deeply lined – a six-footer in a light gray suit with knife-edge creases in his trousers. He looked old next to de Klerk. But unlike the Afrikaner, there was no fat on him. He allowed himself a slight smile, as if to say, “Now, let us see who’s in charge.”
Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, who tracked, tried and jailed Mandela, had hoped to destroy him. The irony is that in the end, all those frantic efforts only managed to preserve him. Nelson Mandela is 10 months younger than John F. Kennedy would have been, had he lived. Mandela went underground in 1961, just after Britain’s Prime Minister Harold MacMillan detected the winds of change blowing over Africa. He disappeared into Robben Island prison the year after Kennedy was shot. He is a creature of the ’40s, ’50s and early ’60s, his ideas joining the traditional African culture from which he comes to the Western political direction in which he has always been headed. Now he has come back as a superb antique. Contemporaries like Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya and Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana are gone, but here is Mandela in the last, worst corner of white racism in Africa, 30 years behind everyone else, finally in position to get underway.
Mandela’s roots snaggle through a time and space warp that places him far outside the turf of white South Africa. You can drive 80 miles an hour down the main highway from East London to Umtata in the Transkei and completely miss the small collection of tin-roof houses and ragged cornfields known as Qunu, where Mandela was born in 1918. Cooking fires smolder in yards where women, small children and chickens mingle. The men are off in the gold fields of the Transvaal or the automobile plants of Port Elizabeth. One barefoot old woman, a cousin, remembers Mandela and the plans for his return: “We will slaughter an ox and make a big feast.”
Born to lead: Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela was born to lead. His great-great-grandfather was a famed Transkeian king, his father a royal counselor with four wives. These bloodlines imbued him with a sense of tribal custom and developed in him very useful traits of character: self-confidence, dignity and, when necessary, ruthlessness. He grew up as a herdboy, helping with the plowing, looking after the cattle and goats. His first politics were pastoral. The chiefs and their counselors were open, democratic after a fashion. The people could move freely through the country. They occupied the land, the forests and rivers, operated their own government, organized their own commerce, controlled their own armies. As a boy, Mandela developed a fascination for the tribal courts. A few years ago, one of his lawyers complained that even in jail he spent too much time sorting out obscure tribal and succession problems referred to him by visiting chiefs.
Too fat: As a prince, Mandela grew up at a time when well-born South African blacks were given rigorous, moralistic, missionary educations. This puts him light-years ahead of dimmer, township revolutionaries who have apartheid’s deliberately inferior, raise-no-expectations, Bantu education forced upon them. Mandelas mother was a devout Christian. She had him baptized as a Methodist and put him through church schools. When he was 10 years old his father died, an uncle, the paramount chief of the Tembus, assumed responsibility for his education. He had to wear his father’s cut-down clothes to school, and the other children laughed at him, but he was a good student. Eventually, his uncle had a three-piece suit made for him and sent him on to the black college at Fort Hare. He developed an interest in current affairs and learned to waltz and fox-trot. But when his uncle arranged a marriage for him, he found the bride to be too fat, tradition a sometime thing. He ran away to Johannesburg.
For three days time he worked as a guard in a gold mine; his first badges of office were a whistle and a knobkerrie stick used to keep hotheads in line. He was powerfully built, a boxer with a vicious left jab. He met Walter Sisulu, who encouraged him to study law. Sisulu also introduced him to a Jewish lawyer, a white liberal, who took him on as an apprentice. With Oliver Tambo, an old schoolmate, he set up what quickly became the best-known black law office in South Africa. Sisulu was self-educated, thoughtful; Tambo a quiet, scholarly man; Mandela was hot-tempered. Sisulu led them all into the African National Congress. “They made a very good team,” says Mary Benson, who wrote a pioneering biography of Mandela. It has lasted for nearly 50 years. Only in recent years have there been rumors of a rivalry between Tambo and Mandela. “The utmost rubbish,” snaps Benson. “They are very close.”
From the beginning, Mandela has been an African nationalist, not a communist as his Afrikaner enemies have so often charged. In the early 1940s, he fell in with a number of radical South African Indians. Over hot tea, hot curry and hot jazz, they argued the relative merits of Karl Marx on the class struggle and Mohandas Gandhi on nonviolent civil disobedience. Gandhi won. As a leader of the ANCs Youth League, Mandela opposed the communists just as the white-supremacist National party began to clamp the lid on everyone of color. Four years later, during the Defiance Campaign, the first organized nationwide protest against apartheid, he recruited many of the 8,577 volunteers who peaceably set out to fill the jails. The campaign gave him his first taste of real action, his first arrest, his first banning.
Two-year idyll: Over the next few years nonviolence remained Mandela’s dominant mode. There was a lot of wear and tear along the way. Arrested with 155 other activists in 1956, he had to weather a four-year treason trial. His first marriage brokeup. He couldn’t pay his debts. His world started to crumble. Then he met a spirited young social worker named Winnie Mandikzela. They married and moved into a little brick house outside Johannesburg. Years later he would write from prison that what he missed the most was the way they had touched hands, the boxing matches, music, movies and “The greatest of all moments – closing the bedroom door.”
The idyll lasted less than two years. After the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960, when police killed 69 peaceful demonstrators protesting the pass laws, the ANC’s commitment to nonviolence gave way to harder feelings. Until this week, the last time Mandela appeared in public was a 1961 conference in Pietermaritzburg, where he proposed a nonracial, democratic constitution – almost work for word what de Klerk is seeking now. Then, believing that the government was spoiling for more massacres, and with a warrant out for his arrest, he went underground. He gave interviews from phone boxes to reporters, who started calling him the Black Pimpernel. Six months after he disappeared, Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), with Mandela as its commander, announced itself with a series of bomb attacks on government installations.
Free man: The emphasis of the campaign was on sabotage. “They hadn’t the foggiest idea how to blow things up,” recalls Benson, who met Mandela underground at the time. “It was very amateurish and desperate. But they felt people were getting very impatient, that it was important to try to lead that anger into a sort of violence that does not harm people.” Mandela slipped out of the country. He traveled on an Ethiopian passport provided by the government of Emperor Haile Selassie under the name David Motsamayi. “For the first time in my life, I was a free man,” he said later. He barnstormed Africa, took guerrilla training in Algeria, visited Britain, returned home. On a street corner one day he saw a black cop studying him. The cop walked up, then, as Mandela braced himself, he flipped a thumbs-up salute, whispered “Afrika,” and walked away. Mandela’s luck held for 15 months. The, betrayed by informers – some accused the CIA, though no one ever proved it – he went out one day disguised as a chauffeur, ran into a roadblock and lost his freedom for the next 27 years.
In the dock during several trials and with an assortment of codefendants, Mandela, with a deep voice and a South African accent to his English, presented an impossing figure. “These people are criminals – communist criminals – just as any spy caught and executed in the United States,” Prime Minister Verwoerd spluttered to Parliament. Mandela defended himself. He said he knew a communist and he had formed alliances of convenience with them (as Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill did in World War II). But he was after African unity, not a war of class against class. He said he admired he Magna Charta, the Bill of Rights, the British Parliament and the congress of the United States. “The defense was political, not one in which people run for cover or commit petty perjuries,” recalls George Bizos, a lawyer who was part of the defense team. “What do you do to a man who says, ‘I am prepared to die for what I believe in’?” The judge found him guilty on all counts – but decided not to hang him. On that decision, the future of South Africa may now turn.
What the government had in mind for Mandela instead was a kind of death in life. He was sent to Robben Island, in the frigid South Atlantic off Cape Town. His prison identity card read Nelson Mandela. Crime: Sabotage. Sentence: Life plus five years. For a long time he broke rocks in a limestone quarry. After a while the authorities called him a 30-minute meting with his wife every now and then. A glass window separated them; they couldn’t touch; just when they began to et through to one another, the warder would yell, “Time’s up.” Mandela lost 50 pounds. One day, the wife of another prisoner, watching as Mandela and others shuffled off, cried out, “Our men are shrinking.”
Mandela’s letters from prison are available in “Higher Than Hope,” an authorized biography by Fatima Meer. The book will be published in Britain this week. It is to come out next month in the United States. Each morning, he wrote Winnie, he dusted her photo (“to do so gives me the pleasant feeling that I’m caressing you”). “Sometimes,” he confessed, “I feel like one who is on the sidelines, who has missed life itself.”
Mister Mandela: It was not in Mandela’s nature to give up. As the years passed conditions improved some. Each morning he would wake at 3:30, exercise for two hours, then spend the day studying. He took correspondence courses in law, cultivated his interest in economics and history, studied Afrikaans and read Afrikaner poetry – to know his adversary. He was dignified, a model to the younger prisoners who started to appear on Robben Island after the Soweto uprising of 1976. People began calling the place Mandela University. Fearing his influence, authorities moved him to Pollsmoor Prison. Five years ago prime ministers started tempting him with offers of release: if he would go into exile, if he would move into the Transkei “homeland,’ if he would renounce violence. He turned them all down. Would he die behind bars? What would the townships do then? The stat e grew nervous and moved him to Victor Verster Prison farm, with a swimming pool, a telephone and access to a fax machine. it became less and less clear just who was the prisoner of whom; his jailers, taking note, called him Mr. Mandela.
He told one friend that he had never been depressed; he was sure that he would win one day. Over the years his thinking became more and more electric, less and less a traditionalist. When his daughter Zeni married a Swazi prince, he worried that she might follow custom and embarrass herself by dancing bare-breasted at her wedding. He wrote Winnie that he had been browsing through some articles on Euripides and Sophocles. “One of the basic tenets we have inherited from classical Greek philosophy,” he observed, “was that a real man is one could stand firmly on his feet and never bend his knees even when he was dealing with the divine.” His jailers may have been supremely white, but they very seldom talked that way. Mandela, all along, has been the upright man.
