Long Walk to Freedom

That same year, a new commander, Colonel Piet Badenhorst, is transferred to Robben Island. He earned a reputation for brutality before his arrival. New, younger guards are transferred in as well. Badenhorst soon provokes Mandela into open anger and uses it as an excuse to crackdown on all the prisoners.

Humiliating treatment becomes the norm. When a panel of three judges comes to the island, Mandela provokes Badenhorst into threatening him. The judges are displeased, and Badenhorst’s brutality ends. He is transferred off the island three months after the judges’ visit and shocks Mandela by expressing his good wishes to him and the other prisoners. 

An influx of captured MK soldiers arrives in 1971 and 1972. These men are much more aggressive and militant than the Rivonia prisoners, and Mandela sometimes struggles to manage their hostility to the prison authorities.

From time to time, the prisoners are taken to the shore to collect seaweed to sell. It is hard work, but Mandela cherishes the sight of Cape Town and the mainland. When working at the shore, the prisoners collect mollusks and make a seafood stew.

Robben Island becomes known as the University because the prisoners educate each other. Courses such as a history of the ANC are disseminated surreptitiously among the population. Communications between the general population and the political prisoners also allows Mandela to give legal advice.

The government’s harassment of Winnie continues. In 1974, she is imprisoned for six months. In 1975, Winnie forges the date on their daughter Zindzi’s birth certificate so she can visit her father for the first time. Mandela has not seen his daughter for 12 years.

During the visit, Mandela learns that his former lawyer and friend Bram Fischer died and is deeply saddened. He deeply respected Fischer’s strength of character and moral clarity as a well-born Afrikaner who had fought against his own people.

In 1974, Mandela and others begin seriously contemplating escape. They come within moments of attempting one while in a Cape Town dentist’s office, but they suspect it is a trap and call it off. 

In 1975, Walter Sisulu and Ahmed Kathrada suggest that Mandela write his memoirs. They hope to publish them on Mandela’s 60th birthday in 1978, believing it will be an inspiration to the struggle. Mandela soon agrees and, working intently through the night, produces a manuscript—the precursor to Long Walk to Freedom—in only four months. When Mac Maharaj is released in 1976, he smuggles out a copy.

Mandela and the others must hide the 500-page original, so they bury it in several pieces in the courtyard. A few weeks later, the courtyard is dug up. They recover two of the three fragments, but the authorities discover the third and confront Mandela. Mandela, Sisulu, and Kathrada lose their study privileges for the next four years. Mandela hears that the manuscript made it to Oliver Tambo in Lusaka in modern Zambia, but it remains unpublished. 

In 1976, the Minister of Prisons, Jimmy Kruger, visits Mandela and offer to greatly reduce his sentence if he recognizes the legitimacy of the Transkei bantustan and retires there. Mandela’s nephew K.D. Matanzima now rules the Transkei with apartheid government backing, and the government hopes to manipulate Mandela through his family connections. Mandela categorically refuses.

In June 1976, word reaches the prisoners of an uprising of Soweto schoolchildren against a new policy requiring half of all secondary school classes to be taught in Afrikaans. Riots break out across the country. Thousands of young people leave the country to train in MK camps in recently liberated African countries. Despite the government repression meted out on protestors, the prisoners are elated that the spirit of mass resistance has returned.

More political prisoners begin appearing, but they are more militant and Africanist than the older ANC prisoners. This new wave of Africanist militancy becomes known as the Black Consciousness Movement and fills a political void left by the banning of the ANC, PAC, and Communist Party. Black Consciousness shares many of the ideals of the ANC’s Youth League and promotes the idea that Africans must “liberate themselves from the sense of inferiority bred by three centuries of white rule” (485). With patience, Mandela and the ANC members manage to bring some of the new prisoners over to their side.

In 1977, the political prisoners are relieved of their work requirement and now spend their days in the courtyard. Mandela, who had been keeping a small garden for years, takes up the hobby in earnest. He is still prevented from studying and instead reads novels.

After the Soweto uprising, the Black Parents Association forms to mediate between the students and the authorities. Winnie takes a leading role in the organization, and the government is alarmed by her popularity among the radical students. In May 1977, the government forcibly moves Winnie and Zindzi to Brandfort, a small town more than 200 miles from Johannesburg. Winnie does not speak the local language, Sesotho.

Mandela spends much of 1977 and 1978 in his reminiscences, thinking back on his life before his imprisonment. In 1978, Zeni, Mandela and Winnie’s first child, marries Prince Thumbumuzi of Swaziland. This grants her diplomatic privileges, allowing her to visit Mandela whenever she wants. When she visits in the winter of 1979, she brings her infant daughter, and Mandela gets to hold one of his grandchildren for the first 

In 1978, former defense minister P.W. Botha is elected prime minister. In his prior position, Botha favored an aggressive policy and supported a strike against anticolonial forces in Angola in 1975.

Meanwhile, the political prisoners’ diet improves after they are drafted to work in the kitchens. They realize the regular prisoners who worked there previously had kept all the best food for themselves and their diet could have been much better from the start.

In the summer of 1979, Mandela injures his right heel. He is taken to Cape Town for surgery to remove a bone fragment, and the surgeon insists he spend the night in the civilian hospital. Mandela notices that the white doctors and nurses treat him as though they have known nonwhite people. This is a marked change from his experience before imprisonment, and he takes it as an encouraging sign.

In early 1980, the ANC makes Mandela and the demand for his release the rallying cry of what is now a global antiapartheid movement. The slogan “Free Mandela” rapidly spreads, and the prisoners sense the tide is finally and decisively beginning to turn.

In 1980, Mandela learns that Matanzima deposed Sabata Dalindyebo from his status as chief of Thembu. The apartheid government actively promotes traditional African leadership and specifically hopes that involvement in tribal affairs will distract Mandela from the struggle. Mandela meets with the Thembu chiefs who privately support Sabata but fear reprisal from Matanzima; he asks them to convey his disapproval to Matanzima.

For years, Matanzima has requested a meeting with Mandela under the pretense of discussing family matters. However, Mandela and the ANC know Matanzima will use any meeting to claim he has Mandela’s support. Mandela still hopes he can persuade his nephew, but the ANC membership overwhelmingly votes against the meeting, so he turns it down.

On March 31, 1982, Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Raymond Mhlaba, and Andrew Mlangeni are ordered to pack their things. They are transferred off the island to Pollsmoor, a maximum-security prison outside of Cape Town.