Long Walk to Freedom

by Nelson Mandela

Long Walk to Freedom is more than the autobiography of a great man. It’s the chronicle of a son who breaks from his family and tradition; a voice for liberty who is captured, isolated, and imprisoned; a revolutionary who transcends conflict to become a peacemaker and unifier; and a rare human being who, in freeing himself of his demons, also became free to give his extraordinary leadership to his country and the world.

“When you’re young and strong,” he told me, “you can stay alive on your hatred. And I did, for many years.” Then one day after years of imprisonment, physical and emotional abuse, and separation from his family, Mandela said, “I realized that they could take everything from me except my mind and my heart. They could not take those things. Those things I still had control over. And I decided not to give them away.”

When describing why the African National Congress took the fateful decision to give up on nonviolence and take up arms, Mandela writes that they had no choice, that “the oppressor defines the nature of the struggle.”

Just as Nelson Mandela grew to understand the inhumanity of apartheid, he also realized what so many people failed to comprehend: that the oppressor is also a prisoner of prejudice and narrow-mindedness, and that the same chains bound all South Africans, no matter their skin color. This remarkable book is the chronicle of how he first freed himself, then his fellow citizens, as he took them along on his long walk to freedom.

President Bill Clinton Harlem, New York April 2013

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AmaMfengu, who were not originally Xhosa-speakers, were refugees from the iMfecane and were forced to do jobs that no other African would do. They worked on white farms and in white businesses, something that was looked down upon by the more established Xhosa tribes. But amaMfengu were an industrious people, and because of their contact with Europeans, they were often more educated and “Western” than other Africans. When I was a boy, amaMfengu were the most advanced section of the community and furnished our clergymen, policemen, teachers, clerks, and interpreters. They were also amongst the first to become Christians, to build better houses, and to use scientific methods of agriculture, and they were wealthier than their Xhosa compatriots. They confirmed the missionaries’ axiom, that to be Christian was to be civilized, and to be civilized was to be Christian. There still existed some hostility toward amaMfengu, but in retrospect, I would attribute this more to jealousy than tribal animosity.

For me, Christianity was not so much a system of beliefs as it was the powerful creed of a single man: Reverend Matyolo. For me, his powerful presence embodied all that was alluring in Christianity. He was as popular and beloved as the regent, and the fact that he was the regent’s superior in spiritual matters made a strong impression on me. But the Church was as concerned with this world as the next: I saw that virtually all of the achievements of Africans seemed to have come about through the missionary work of the Church. The mission schools trained the clerks, the interpreters, and the policemen, who at the time represented the height of African aspirations.

The meetings would continue until some kind of consensus was reached. They ended in unanimity or not at all. Unanimity, however, might be an agreement to disagree, to wait for a more propitious time to propose a solution. Democracy meant all men were to be heard, and a decision was taken together as a people. Majority rule was a foreign notion. A minority was not to be crushed by a majority. Only at the end of the meeting, as the sun was setting, would the regent speak. His purpose was to sum up what had been said and form some consensus among the diverse opinions. But no conclusion was forced on people who disagreed.

If no agreement could be reached, another meeting would be held. At the very end of the council, a praise-singer or poet would deliver a panegyric to the ancient kings, and a mixture of compliments to and satire on the present chiefs, and the audience, led by the regent, would roar with laughter.

Fort Hare, like Clarkebury and Healdtown, was a missionary college. We were exhorted to obey God, respect the political authorities, and be grateful for the educational opportunities afforded to us by the church and the government.

There is little favorable to be said about poverty, but it was often an incubator of true friendship. Many people will appear to befriend you when you are wealthy, but precious few will do the same when you are poor. If wealth is a magnet, poverty is a kind of repellent. Yet, poverty often brings out the true generosity in others.

The passing of the regent removed from the scene an enlightened and tolerant man who achieved the goal that marks the reign of all great leaders: he kept his people united.

Liberals and conservatives, traditionalists and reformers, white-collar officials and blue-collar miners, all remained loyal to him, not because they always agreed with him, but because the regent listened to and respected all different opinions.

“Nelson,” he said, “I have been involved in politics for a long time, and I regret every minute of it. I wasted the best years of my life in futile efforts serving vain and selfish men who placed their interests above those of the people they pretended to serve. Politics, in my experience, is nothing but a racket to steal money from the poor.”

The English-speaking universities of South Africa were great incubators of liberal values. It was a tribute to these institutions that they allowed black students. For the Afrikaans universities, such a thing was unthinkable. Despite the university’s liberal values, I never felt entirely comfortable there. Always to be the only African, except for menial workers, to be regarded at best as a curiosity and at worst as an interloper, is not a congenial experience.

To be an African in South Africa means that one is politicized from the moment of one’s birth, whether one acknowledges it or not.

An African child is born in an Africans Only hospital, taken home in an Africans Only bus, lives in an Africans Only area, and attends Africans Only schools, if he attends school at all. When he grows up, he can hold Africans Only jobs, rent a house in Africans Only townships, ride Africans Only trains, and be stopped at any time of the day or night and be ordered to produce a pass, failing which he will be arrested and thrown in jail. His life is circumscribed by racist laws and regulations that cripple his growth, dim his potential, and stunt his life.

I had no epiphany, no singular revelation, no moment of truth, but a steady accumulation of a thousand slights, a thousand indignities, a thousand unremembered moments, produced in me an anger, a rebelliousness, a desire to fight the system that imprisoned my people. There was no particular day on which I said, From henceforth I will devote myself to the liberation of my people; instead, I simply found myself doing so, and could not do otherwise.

The Atlantic Charter of 1941, signed by Roosevelt and Churchill, reaffirmed faith in the dignity of each human being and propagated a host of democratic principles. Some in the West saw the charter as empty promises, but not those of us in Africa. Inspired by the Atlantic Charter and the fight of the Allies against tyranny and oppression, the ANC created its own charter, called African Claims, which called for full citizenship for all Africans, the right to buy land, and the repeal of all discriminatory legislation.

I, too, had been susceptible to paternalistic British colonialism and the appeal of being perceived by whites as “cultured” and “progressive” and “civilized.” I was already on my way to being drawn into the black elite that Britain sought to create in Africa. That is what everyone from the regent to Mr. Sidelsky had wanted for me. But it was an illusion.

The manifesto utterly rejected the notion of trusteeship, the idea that the white government somehow had African interests at heart. We cited the crippling, anti-African legislation of the past forty years, beginning with the 1913 Land Act, which ultimately deprived blacks of 87 percent of the territory in the land of their birth; the Urban Areas Act of 1923, which created teeming African slums, politely called “native locations,” in order to supply cheap labor to white industry; the Color Bar Act of 1926, which banned Africans from practicing skilled trades; the Native Administration Act of 1927, which made the British Crown, rather than the paramount chiefs, the supreme chief over all African areas; and finally, in 1936, the Representation of Natives Act, which removed Africans from the Common Voters’ Roll in the Cape, thereby shattering any illusion that whites would allow Africans to have control over their own destiny.

“We may borrow… from foreign ideologies, but we reject the wholesale importation of foreign ideologies into Africa.” This was an implicit rebuke to the Communist Party, which Lembede and many others, including myself, considered a “foreign” ideology unsuited to the African situation.

Mda was more moderate in his nationalism than Lembede, and his thinking was without the racial tinge that characterized Lembede’s. He hated white oppression and white domination, not white people themselves. He was also less extreme in his opposition to the Communist Party than Lembede—or myself. I was among the Youth Leaguers who were suspicious of the white left.

I believed that it was an undiluted African nationalism, not Marxism or multiracialism, that would liberate us.

Despite the influence the Indian passive resistance campaign of 1946 had on me, I felt about the Indians the same way I did about the Communists: that they would tend to dominate the ANC, in part because of their superior education, experience, and training.

But the seriousness of Ramohanoe’s disobedience was too strong. While an organization like the ANC is made up of individuals, it is greater than any of its individual parts, and loyalty to the organization takes precedence over loyalty to an individual.

AFRICANS could not vote, but that did not mean that we did not care who won elections.

The National Party’s campaign centered around the swart gevaar (the black danger), and they fought the election on the twin slogans of Die kaffer op sy plek (The nigger in his place) and Die koelies uit die land (The coolies out of the country)—coolies being the Afrikaner’s derogatory term for Indians. The Nationalists, led by Dr. Daniel Malan, a former minister of the Dutch Reform Church and a newspaper editor, were a party animated by bitterness—bitterness toward the English, who had treated them as inferiors for decades, and bitterness toward the African, who the Nationalists believed was threatening the prosperity and purity of Afrikaner culture.

Malan’s platform was known as apartheid. Apartheid was a new term but an old idea. It literally means “apartness” and it represented the codification in one oppressive system of all the laws and regulations that had kept Africans in an inferior position to whites for centuries.

What had been more or less de facto was to become relentlessly de jure. The often haphazard segregation of the past three hundred years was to be consolidated into a monolithic system that was diabolical in its detail, inescapable in its reach, and overwhelming in its power.

The premise of apartheid was that whites were superior to Africans, Coloureds, and Indians, and the function of it was to...

“Die wit man moet altyd baas wees” (The white man must always remain boss). Their platform rested on the term baasskap, literally boss-ship, a freighted word that st...

The policy was supported by the Dutch Reform Church, which furnished apartheid with its religious underpinnings by suggesting that Afrikaners were God’s chosen peopl...

In the Afrikaner’s worldview, apartheid and the church ...

The Nationalist slogan encapsulated their mission: “Eie volk, eie taal, eie land”—Our own people, our own language, our own land. In the distorted cosmology of the Afrikaner, the Nationalist victory was like the Israelites’ journey to the Promised Land. This was the fulfillment of God’s promise, and the justification for their view that South Africa should be a white man’s country forever. The victory was a shock.

Even General Smuts realized the dangers of this harsh ideology, decrying apartheid as “a crazy concept, born of prejudice and fear.” From the moment of the Nationalists’ election, we knew that our land would henceforth be a place of tension and strife. For the first time in South African history, an exclusively Afrikaner party led the government. “South Africa belongs to us once more,” Malan proclaimed in his victory speech.

We advocated the redivision of land on an equitable basis; the abolition of color bars prohibiting Africans from doing skilled work; and the need for free and compulsory education. The document also articulated the push-and-pull between two rival theories of African nationalism, between the more extreme, Marcus Garvey—inspired, “Africa for the Africans” nationalism and the Africanism of the Youth League, which recognized that South Africa was a multiracial country.

The Youth League was marginally more friendly to the Indians and the Coloureds, stating that Indians, like Africans, were oppressed, but that Indians had India, a mother country that they could look to. The Coloureds, too, were oppressed, but unlike the Indians had no mother country except Africa. I was prepared to accept Indians and Coloureds provided they accepted our policies; but their interests were not identical with ours, and I was skeptical of whether or not they could truly embrace our cause.

Within weeks of coming to power, the Nationalist government pardoned Robey Leibbrandt, the wartime traitor who had organized uprisings in support of Nazi Germany.

The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act was introduced in 1949 and was followed in rapid succession by the Immorality Act, making sexual relations between white and nonwhite illegal.

The Population Registration Act labeled all South Africans by race, making color the single most important arbiter of individuals.

The Program of Action approved at the annual conference called for the pursuit of political rights through the use of boycotts, strikes, civil disobedience, and noncooperation. In addition, it called for a national day of work stoppage in protest against the racist and reactionary policies of the government. This was a departure from the days of decorous protest, and many of the old stalwarts of the ANC were to fade away in this new era of greater militancy.

More than two-thirds of African workers stayed at home during the one-day strike. That night, Walter and I were in Orlando West on the fringes of a Freedom Day crowd that had gathered despite the government’s restrictions. The moon was bright, and as we watched the orderly march of protesters, we could see a group of policemen camped across a stream about five hundred yards away. They must have seen us as well, because all of a sudden, they started firing in our direction. We dove to the ground, and remained there as mounted police galloped into the crowd, smashing people with batons. We took refuge in a nearby nurses’ dormitory, where we heard bullets smashing into the wall of the building. Eighteen Africans died and many others were wounded in this indiscriminate and unprovoked attack.

Supported by the SAIC and the APO, the ANC resolved to stage a National Day of Protest on June 26, 1950, against the government’s murder of eighteen Africans on May 1 and the passage of the Suppression of Communism Act. The proposal was ratified, and in preparation for the Day of Protest, we closed ranks with the SAIC, the APO, and the Communist Party. Here, I believed, was a sufficient threat that compelled us to join hands with our Indian and Communist colleagues.

I was not unmindful of the fact that it had been Dr. Xuma who had tried to help me get my first job when I came to Johannesburg ten years before, when I had no thought of entering politics. Now, as a member of the National Executive Committee, I was playing on the first team with the most senior people in the ANC. I had moved from the role of a gadfly within the organization to one of the powers that I had been rebelling against. It was a heady feeling, and not without mixed emotions. In some ways, it is easier to be a dissident, for then one is without responsibility. As a member of the executive, I had to weigh arguments and make decisions, and expect to be criticized by rebels like myself.

A man involved in the struggle was a man without a home life.

I did not relish being deprived of the company of my children. I missed them a great deal during those days, long before I had any inkling that I would spend decades apart from them.

IF WE HAD ANY HOPES or illusions about the National Party before they came into office, we were disabused of them quickly. Their threat to put the kaffir in his place was not an idle one.

As I have mentioned, the Population Registration Act authorized the government officially to classify all South Africans according to race. If it had not already been so, race became the sine qua non of South African society. The arbitrary and meaningless tests to decide black from Coloured or Coloured from white often resulted in tragic cases where members of the same family were classified differently, all depending on whether one child had a lighter or darker complexion.

The Group Areas Act was the foundation of residential apartheid. Under its regulations, each racial group could own land, occupy premises, and trade only in its own separate area. Indians could henceforth only live in Indian areas, Africans in African, Coloureds in Coloured. If whites wanted the land or houses of the other groups, they could simply declare the land a white area and take them. The Group Areas Act initiated the era of forced removals, when African communities, towns, and villages in newly designated “white” urban areas were violently relocated because the nearby white landowners did not want Africans living near them or simply wanted their land.