Writing behind bars

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.