Long Walk to Freedom

Last month while travelling to Baku I finished reading Long Walk to Freedom, the autobiography of Nelson Mandela. Mandela’s life story is perhaps known to every person aware of freedom movements or about developments in the last decades of the 20th century. Though I do not remember everything that Mandela wrote in the 500 page book, I certainly remember certain messages that Mandela gave in the book, and which he perhaps wanted to impart to his readers and future generations. 

Every culture has its uniqueness, and its utility, for the people who practice it. Mandela was born into Xhoa tribe, one of the tribes among numerous tribes in Africa, and practiced its customs. For him the customs of his tribe were not hindrances rather they had values for his tribe and his society. For Mandela culture has two major purposes. First, it provides regulation for the conduct of social life of the people who adhere to it. While elaborating, particularly, the rituals including the circumcision ritual he argued he is not going to criticize such practices because for him it has a purpose for regulating life in his society. In another example, he says when he met his mother after a long gap he did not run to embrace his mother (as a person might do in some other cultures), but that did not imply that there was no love between mother and son. That was part of the culture. The same thing I have observed in India. Second, for Mandela culture too has implications for political life of the society as well. Culture determines the relations between old and young, between male and female, between village-elder with others. Its main location may be in society but its political role is obvious. As it, in case of the culture Mandela describes, tends to emphasize on a hierarchical society, it also puts premium on old age, which is akin to experience and wisdom. Hence, in this culture the elders have a dominant voice in public affairs.

For Mandela democracy is a not Western invention because he could witness the purest form of democracy in tribal meetings. Those meetings were purely indigenous in origin and conception as none of the participants were well versed with Western system of governance as many of them were illiterate. Mandela while staying in his guardian’s house after his father’s death used to listen to the debates in the tribal meetings. His guardian being a headman, it provided Mandela the opportunity to listen to the elders. He elaborated these meetings: that everybody in the meeting enjoyed freedom to raise his voice without obstacle or intimidation from the chair. He could speak at length without interpretation. The chair would listen to all the arguments, summarize them, and try to develop a consensus among the participants. He would never impose his views though he might put forward them during his speech. If no consensus was reached, the members might disperse and meet another day. The meetings were democratic and free, and the leaders would often draw from their experience and wisdom, from history and tradition. Madela’s argument that he witnessed pure democracy in tribal meetings may baffle some of his readers but not me. I could draw a parallel between those tribal meetings with the Indian Jana Sabhas or Gram Sabhas (meetings of people or village) in Vedic period in ancient India.

Mandela’s life history is life of tolerance and dignity. A Mandela would never compromise his dignity. Though he was humiliated umpteen times whether during his long time in jail or outside, Mandela would never stoop low for exacting a privilege. He was a mass leader and he always put the interests of the masses before him. His sense of African dignity was vivid when he expressed anger, in his book, against the assault on Chief Albert Luthuli, the leader of the African National Congress, by a security man. He wrote that this security man is not, in any measure, near the great African leader but it is the tragic system that leads to his assault. It needs mention that Luthuli was awarded Nobel Peace Prize in 1960. Mandela was a proud African and he admired African values. But at the same time he harbored no revenge, no hostility towards his colonizers. Even his method of underground warfare under the banner of Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), as detailed in the book, was to paralyze the administration so that a plural and non-racial administration comes to power. His strategy, as he argued, was not aimed at killing any person, whether civilian or armed government official, but to paralyze the administration in order to hasten the goal of freedom. 

I found in Mandela a great negotiator. During his last days at Robben Island and later during incarceration when he was shifted to the mainland, he pursued relentlessly various methods of negotiation with the administration which was not always friendly to him. He was the weaker party in the negotiation, at least from a government perspective which enjoyed absolute power though there were pressures from the United Nations and other countries to dismantle the apartheid regime. Mandela singlehandedly, even at times when his trusted friends disagreed with him, continued pursuing his negotiation tactics. He never gave up, even when his letters gone unanswered from the Botha regime, or even when his voice was not taken seriously by the regime. He was optimistic during his negotiations, and he followed a method of incrementalism, i.e. slowly moving towards the target. There were many occasions of uncertainty but Mandela in his purely Mandelasque fashion never gave up.

From another point of view, the book is a treatise on a freedom struggle, and also a treatise on life in a jail for about three decades. I am not elaborating those here. The tortuous life in jail, the exploitation of jail inmates, both general and political, the ingenuity of jail inmates the evade to notice of the authority while performing ‘illegal’ activities like reading newspapers, the perseverance of Mandela and his friends in continuing their mission provide insights into the freedom struggle and also into the life of Mandela and his friends in the struggle. I also found Mandela an emotional and caring person, who cared for his family and friends. His longing for his wife and children was vivid on many pages in the book. His narration how he missed his children and how he cherished the moments when he was with them displayed the emotional and loving side of this great and sturdy freedom fighter. There was also humor lurking throughout pages. His courting of his first wife before marriage or his comparison of his seafood with jail mates while working in the quarry with the royal marriage party or some of the tactics to evade jail wardens offer rich mine of humor in the book. They also bring out the lighter side of Mandela, one of the great figures of our time.