So much rubbish has been written over the years by those who feared, revered or pretended to know Nelson Mandela that it is useful, finally, to be able to read about him and the privations of his prison years in his own contemporaneous, understated prose.
At more than 600 pages including annotations, The Prison Letters of Nelson Mandela might be regarded as a volume strictly for the liberation struggle obsessive. But this collection tells us more about the man — in his fearlessness, grace and occasional pomposity — than almost all of the good and bad books that have been written about him.
The key point about Mandela, often overlooked, is that he was high born, the son of a chief of the Thembus. So though he was required to do his bit herding the ancestral cattle, and was forced into the agony of ritual teenage circumcision, he was sufficiently privileged to be sent to the Methodist missionaries for a proper ‘white’ education.
They ensured he was much better educated than the Afrikaners who were later to enforce his incarceration. And the missionaries gave him the impeccably colonial name of Nelson in place of his given name, Rolihlahla, which roughly translates as troublemaker. Little did they know.
Mandela was sent to Robben Island in 1963 for his role in the ANC’s slightly hapless guerrilla campaign against the National party government. Immediately he began to assert himself as the leader of the political prisoners, and to take on the authorities by deploying his superior education and the innate self-confidence of his chiefly upbringing.
The apartheid prison regime was specifically designed to strip the black ‘politicals’ of their dignity. As a ‘native’ and a terrorist to boot, Mandela and his fellow treason conspirators were grade D prisoners, which meant they were classed below rapists and murderers, and forced to wear shorts, even in the cold Cape winters, while working grinding hours in the Robben Island quarry.
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