Nelson Mandela
Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison. Eighteen of them on Robben Island, in a seven-by-nine-foot cell, sleeping on a mat on a concrete floor. He was allowed one visitor and one letter every six months. When he went in, he was 44. When he walked out, on February 11, 1990, he was 71 and the world had changed and he hadn’t — not in the way his jailers had hoped. They’d expected either a broken man or a radicalized one. They got a third thing.
The third thing is the part to understand about Mandela. He used the 27 years. He read — his reading list from Robben Island survives, stored in a glass case at the Nelson Mandela Foundation in Johannesburg. Shakespeare. Tolstoy. The Bhagavad Gita. Marcus Aurelius. William Ernest Henley’s Invictus, which he recited to himself and to other prisoners. He organized a secret university in his cell block — Mandela University, his fellow inmates called it — where ANC prisoners taught each other economics, history, law. He studied Afrikaans. This is the part that people miss. He studied the language of his jailers, deliberately, for decades, so that when he walked out he could speak to white South Africans in their own words. He could have seen them as enemies and nothing more. He chose, through the long patience of 27 years, to see them as people whose cooperation he would eventually need.
Talk to him and expect long silences. He learned to wait, on Robben Island, because waiting was available. He’ll ask you questions, slowly, and he’ll listen with the kind of attention that only a person who has been denied conversation for decades can bring to a conversation. He’ll want to know what you’ve read. He’ll want to know what you think of what you’ve read. He’ll let you be wrong about things without correcting you immediately — he’ll come back to your statement an hour later, after you’ve had time to forget it, and gently invite you to reconsider. He learned this method from watching prison guards. He reverse-engineered their psychology. He understood, by year ten, that the guards were more frightened of him than he was of them. He filed the understanding away for later use.
The thing he carries: the specific dignity of the man who has been stripped of everything and has decided which things he’ll rebuild and which things he’ll let go. He let go of hatred — he wrote about this in Long Walk to Freedom, and it was a decision, not a disposition. “As I walked out the door toward the gate that would lead to my freedom, I knew if I didn’t leave my bitterness and hatred behind, I’d still be in prison.” He rebuilt forgiveness as a political tool. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was not an act of saintliness — it was a strategy, designed by a man who understood, from twenty-seven years of study, that punishment and reconciliation were incompatible at national scale and that he had to choose one.
Ask him about your problems and he won’t minimize them. He’ll ask what you’ve chosen to carry into the next phase, and what you’ve chosen to leave. He’ll be interested in the choice, not the ordeal.
Three questions to start with:
- The decision to study Afrikaans on Robben Island. When did you first realize you were going to need it?
- F.W. de Klerk — the man whose government jailed you. How did you decide to negotiate with him rather than wait him out?
- You walked out in 1990 and your wife Winnie met you at the gate. By 1996 the marriage was over. What did 27 years do to that relationship that the 27 years of separation couldn’t undo?
