Nelson Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom

The chapter in First Flight is an extract from Nelson Mandela's autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. It begins on 10 May 1994, the day Mandela was sworn in as the first black President of South Africa. The ceremony took place in the beautiful sandstone amphitheatre formed by the Union Buildings in Pretoria. Mandela does not let the setting pass without comment, because the setting is half the meaning. For decades those same buildings had been the headquarters of white rule. On that morning they were filled with people of every colour and nation, and Mandela calls the ceremony the largest gathering ever of international leaders on South African soil. The building had not changed; the country standing inside it had.

Notice the order of the swearing-in, because students often mix it up. Mr de Klerk was sworn in first, as second deputy president. Then Thabo Mbeki was sworn in as first deputy president. Only after them did Mandela take his own oath. That order matters as more than a piece of protocol. F.W. de Klerk had been the last President of the old order, and he was now taking an oath under the new one. The new government was not built by throwing the old rulers out of the country. It was built by making everybody, old rulers included, stand under the same constitution.

In his oath Mandela pledged to obey and uphold the Constitution and to devote himself to the well-being of the Republic and its people. In the speech that followed he told the world that the day marked a victory for justice, for peace and for human dignity, and that South Africans had at last won their political freedom. He then made the promise that most students remember: never, never and never again shall it be that this beautiful land will experience the oppression of one by another. The triple repetition is deliberate. He is not making a debating point; he is closing a door.

He also thanked the international guests. He said that people who had been outlaws not long ago had now been given the rare privilege of being hosts to the nations of the world on their own soil. Their presence, he said, was a common victory shared by all humanity, because so many countries had supported the struggle against apartheid for years. Gratitude, in Mandela's writing, is never a formality.

Then came the fly-past. South African jets, helicopters and troop carriers roared over the Union Buildings in perfect formation, ending in a smoke trail in the colours of the new national flag. To an outsider it looked like a display of military precision. To Mandela it meant something far bigger: the armed forces of the country were pledging their loyalty to democracy and to a government that had been freely and fairly elected. The highest generals of the defence force and the police saluted him. He records the thought quietly and it lands hard: not so many years before, these same men would not have saluted him but arrested him.

The day ended with the two national anthems. The whites sang Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika, which had been the anthem of the freedom movement, and the blacks sang Die Stem, the old anthem of the Republic. Neither group knew the other's words very well. That is exactly why the scene moved him. Each community was singing the song of the people it had once been taught to fear.

To follow this chapter you need to know what apartheid was. The word comes from Afrikaans and means apartness or separateness. Under apartheid, the law in South Africa divided people by the colour of their skin and gave the best of everything to the white minority. Black South Africans, who were the great majority, could not vote in national elections, could not live where they wished, could not marry across colour lines, were pushed into the poorest land, sent to deliberately inferior schools, and had to carry passes to move about in their own country. It was not simply prejudice in people's minds. It was written into the statute book and enforced by police and courts.

Mandela describes how the system came about. In the first decade of the twentieth century, a few years after the bitter war between the Boers and the British, white men built a system of racial domination against the dark-skinned people of their own land. In doing so, he writes, they created a structure that became one of the harshest and most inhumane societies the world has known. In the final decade of the same century, that structure was overturned and replaced by one that recognised the rights and freedoms of all people, whatever the colour of their skin. Two sentences, ninety years, and a complete reversal. When a question asks you to compare the systems of government at the beginning and at the end of the century, this contrast is the answer.

What did it cost? Mandela is blunt. The policy of apartheid, he says, created a deep and lasting wound in his country and his people, and all of them would spend many years, perhaps generations, recovering from that profound hurt. Note the word generations. He is warning the crowd celebrating around him that a law can be repealed overnight but a wound heals slowly. Children who were denied schooling do not get those years back. Families broken by the pass laws are not reassembled by a ceremony.

That is also why he refuses to treat 10 May 1994 as the end of the story. In his speech he says that political emancipation has been achieved, and then immediately pledges to free his people from the continuing bondage of poverty, deprivation, suffering, and discrimination of every kind, including discrimination based on gender. The right to vote is the first freedom, not the last one. A person who is free in law but hungry, jobless and unschooled is only partly free. This is a mature political idea and it is one of the most quotable parts of the chapter.

Then comes the turn that makes the chapter more than a history lesson. Mandela says the decades of oppression and brutality had another effect that nobody intended. They produced people of extraordinary courage, wisdom and generosity, people whose like may never be seen again. He puts it in a memorable sentence: the depths of oppression create heights of character. Cruelty meant to crush people ended up forging them. Notice he does not say oppression was good, or that suffering is a gift. He says a wicked system accidentally manufactured the very people who would defeat it.

He adds that he could never repay what those people gave, and that his country is rich in minerals and gems but its greatest wealth is its people, finer and truer than the purest diamonds. For an Indian student, the parallel with our own freedom struggle is worth holding in mind: an unjust system that lasts long enough tends to produce its own opposition, and the character of that opposition decides what kind of country comes afterwards.

One of the most attractive things about this extract is how little of it is about Nelson Mandela. On the greatest day of his life, standing as President in front of the world, he spends his paragraphs thanking other people. He writes that he felt that day, as he had on many other days, that he was simply the sum of all those African patriots who had gone before him. That single sentence is the heart of the section. He treats himself as a total, an addition of many lives, rather than as an original.

He then names them, and you should learn the names exactly, because a question may ask you to list them. He speaks of the Oliver Tambos, the Walter Sisulus, the Chief Luthulis, the Yusuf Dadoos, the Bram Fischers and the Robert Sobukwes of his time, calling them men of such extraordinary courage, wisdom and generosity that their like may never be known again. Notice that he uses the plural form of each name. The plural is doing real work. He does not mean only these six individuals; he means everyone who was like them, most of whose names history did not bother to record.

The list is also a quiet argument. Oliver Tambo and Walter Sisulu were his closest comrades in the African National Congress. Chief Luthuli was a leader of the same movement and a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. Robert Sobukwe led a rival organisation and disagreed with Mandela on strategy, yet Mandela honours him all the same. Yusuf Dadoo was a leader of South Africans of Indian origin. Bram Fischer was a white Afrikaner lawyer from a powerful family who defended Mandela in court and went to prison himself for the cause. Put those six together and you get black, Indian and white, allies and rivals, all in one sentence. The message is that the struggle was never one community's property.

Mandela says he cannot repay what these people gave, and he does not pretend otherwise. He also widens the circle beyond leaders. He says he never lost hope that the great change would come, and that his hope rested not only on the famous heroes but on the courage of the ordinary men and women of his country. He is thinking of people who went to jail without a headline, who kept a family going while a father was locked away, who refused an unjust order at personal cost. Freedom, in his account, was not delivered by a handful of great men. It was carried by thousands of people whose names nobody will ever list.

This attitude is exactly what makes the tone of the chapter so different from ordinary victory writing. There is no gloating and no settling of scores. There is not one sentence of revenge against the people who imprisoned him for twenty-seven years. A man who has just taken power over his former jailers writes mainly about gratitude. When an examiner asks what values the chapter teaches, this is your best material: humility, gratitude, and the understanding that no achievement is ever entirely your own.

There is a useful writing lesson here too. If you are asked to describe a person's character, do not simply write that Mandela was humble. Show it. Say that on the day he became President he described himself as the sum of the patriots who came before him and named a rival leader among his heroes. Evidence first, adjective second. That is how a full-mark answer is built.

Two definitions in this chapter are worth memorising word for word, because they carry the whole argument of the extract and because they are simply good sentences.

The first is about courage. Mandela writes that he learned that courage was not the absence of fear but the triumph over it, and that the brave man is not he who does not feel afraid but he who conquers that fear. Read the definition slowly and see how much it gives away. It admits that the brave man is frightened. It says so plainly. Mandela then confesses about himself that he felt fear more times than he could remember, but that he hid it behind a mask of boldness. A President, on his inauguration day, writing that he was often scared and pretended otherwise. That confession is what makes the definition trustworthy.

This definition also matters practically for a student. If courage meant feeling no fear, most of us would be disqualified from ever being brave. Mandela's version puts bravery within reach of a nervous person, which is the whole point. He says he saw men and women risk and give their lives for an idea, and that they showed a strength and resilience that defied all imagination. He learned the definition by watching such people, not by reading it.

The second definition is about hatred. Mandela writes that no one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite. Every clause is load-bearing. Hatred is not natural, it is taught. Anything taught can be untaught. And love has the easier road, because it is closer to what a human heart does on its own.

He does not claim this as wishful thinking. He offers evidence from the hardest place he knew. He says that even in the grimmest times in prison, when he and his comrades were pushed to their limits, he would see a glimmer of humanity in one of the guards, perhaps only for a second, and that it was enough to reassure him and keep him going. That is a remarkable thing to notice. A prisoner watching his jailer for signs of decency, and finding them. He adds the image that summarises his faith in people: man's goodness is a flame that can be hidden but never extinguished.

Put the two definitions together and you can see how Mandela's politics follow from his psychology. If hatred is taught rather than inborn, then your enemy is not permanently your enemy, and reconciliation is not naive but realistic. If courage is the conquest of fear rather than its absence, then an ordinary frightened person can still act. These are not decorations on the chapter. They are the reasons he could walk out of twenty-seven years of prison and shake hands with the people who put him there.

For examinations, learn both definitions accurately and always add the personal evidence: the mask of boldness for courage, and the glimmer of humanity in a prison guard for love. A quotation with evidence behind it reads as understanding. A quotation on its own reads as memorisation.

This is the most personal part of the extract and, for many readers, the saddest. Mandela writes that in life every man has twin obligations: obligations to his family, to his parents, to his wife and children, and an obligation to his people, his community and his country. In a civil and humane society, he says, a person can fulfil both according to his own inclinations and abilities. There is no conflict between being a good father and being a good citizen when the state is decent.

Apartheid destroyed that balance. Mandela says that in South Africa it was almost impossible for a man of his birth and colour to fulfil both obligations. A man of colour who tried simply to live as a human being was punished and isolated. A man who tried to do his duty to his people was inevitably torn away from his family and his home and forced to live a life apart, what Mandela calls a twilight existence of secrecy and rebellion. The phrase is exact and worth learning. Twilight is neither day nor night. He was neither a settled family man nor an open public leader; he lived in the half-light in between, hiding, moving, and finally imprisoned.

What follows is the sentence that separates Mandela from an ordinary hero. He refuses to accept praise for the sacrifice. He says he did not begin as a man who chose to give up his own comfort for the good of others, and that his commitment to his people, to the millions of South Africans he would never know or meet, came at the expense of the people he knew best and loved most. He wanted to be a good son, brother, husband and father, and the system did not let him. He does not present this as a noble trade. He presents it as a loss, and one that other people paid for along with him.

Think about what that means in practical terms. He was in prison for twenty-seven years. Children grew up without him. Anniversaries, illnesses and funerals passed while he was behind a wall. When he writes that his freedom struggle turned a family-loving husband into a man without a home, and a life-loving man into someone who had to live like a monk, he is listing what was taken, not what he bravely gave.

This section also explains the quiet anger under the calm surface of the chapter. Mandela is not merely saying that apartheid was unjust in the abstract. He is saying it reached into ordinary homes and made ordinary human duties impossible. A system that forces a decent man to choose between his children and his country has already condemned itself. That is a stronger indictment than any slogan.

For Indian students there is a familiar echo here. Many families in our own freedom movement lived the same split, with a father or mother in jail and children raised by relatives. The chapter gives you a vocabulary for it: the twin obligations, and a state so unjust that honouring one meant abandoning the other.

When you answer a question on this theme, make three moves. State the two obligations. Explain why apartheid made them impossible to hold together. Then quote the twilight existence of secrecy and rebellion, and add that Mandela describes the outcome as a cost rather than a sacrifice he was proud of.

The last part of the extract is a short history of one idea. Mandela says he was not born with a hunger to be free; he was born free, free in every way that he could know. As a boy in his village he was free to run in the fields near his mother's hut, to swim in the clear stream, to roast mealies under the stars and to ride the broad backs of slow-moving bulls. Mealies are corn cobs, so this is simply a boy roasting bhutta over a fire at night. Nothing political, nothing grand. He calls these the transitory freedoms of a boy, because they last only as long as childhood does and because they can be enjoyed without anyone asking permission.

As a student he wanted a slightly bigger set of transitory freedoms: to stay out at night, to read what he pleased and to go where he chose. Then, as a young man, he began to want what he calls the basic and honourable freedoms. These are the freedoms of achieving his potential, of earning his keep, of marrying and having a family, and of not being obstructed in a lawful life. Look at that list carefully. There is nothing extreme in it. Every item is something a middle-class family anywhere in the world assumes without thinking. The shock of the chapter is that these ordinary things were denied.

The turning point comes when he realises his boyhood freedom was an illusion. He had never been free at all; his freedom had already been taken away before he was old enough to want it. That is when the hunger begins. And immediately it grows. He says he slowly saw that it was not only his own freedom that was curtailed but the freedom of everyone who looked like he did. His personal hunger became a hunger for the freedom of his people. He puts the logic in one unforgettable image: the chains on any one of his people were the chains on all of them, and the chains on all of his people were the chains on him. Freedom, in other words, cannot be held privately. If your neighbour is in chains, so are you.

Then he takes the final step, and it is the step that makes him unusual among revolutionary leaders. He argues that the oppressor is not free either. A man who takes away another man's freedom, he writes, is a prisoner of hatred; he is locked behind the bars of prejudice and narrow-mindedness. The oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of their humanity. He adds that he is not truly free if he is taking away someone else's freedom, just as surely as he is not free when his own freedom is taken from him.

Follow the imagery, because it is the finest writing in the chapter. Prisoner, bars, chains, locked. Mandela had spent twenty-seven years in a real prison with real bars, and he now uses that vocabulary for the jailer. The white ruler had the keys, the guns and the government, yet Mandela calls him an inmate. His prison is made of prejudice instead of stone, so he cannot see the walls, which makes his case worse, not better.

This is why he says that when he walked out of prison his mission was to liberate the oppressed and the oppressor both, and that the oppressor must be set free just as surely as the oppressed. It is also why the new South Africa did not simply expel its former rulers. The idea is generous, but it is not soft. He is telling the powerful that their cruelty has already cost them something, and that they will not be fully human until they stop.

His speech closes on the note the whole chapter has been building towards: let freedom reign, for the sun shall never set on so glorious a human achievement.

The chapter is autobiography, so it is written in the first person and in the past tense, and it mixes two kinds of writing. Some paragraphs are reportage, telling you what happened on a particular morning: who was sworn in, what flew overhead, which songs were sung. Other paragraphs are reflection, in which Mandela stops the narrative and works out what an experience taught him. Being able to name this mixture is itself worth a mark in a question about the style of the extract.

The device you will find most often is contrast. Courage is defined against fear. Depths of oppression are set against heights of character. The oppressed are placed beside the oppressor. The first decade of the century is set against the last. Whites sing one anthem and blacks the other. Mandela thinks in pairs, and once you notice this you can predict the shape of his sentences.

Next comes metaphor, and almost all of his metaphors come from confinement or from light. Chains, bars, prisoner and locked belong to the first group. Flame, glimmer, twilight and the sun that never sets belong to the second. A wound and healing form a third small group. Because the metaphors are consistent, a question asking you to comment on the imagery has a clear answer: he draws his pictures from imprisonment and from light, which are exactly the two things his own life was made of.

Repetition and parallel structure carry the emotion. Never, never and never again is repetition used as an oath. Free to run, free to swim, free to roast mealies is parallelism that makes childhood sound like a list of gifts. In his description of what the struggle did to him he strings together a series of transformations, from a frightened young man into a bold one, from a law-abiding lawyer into a lawbreaker, from a family-loving husband into a man without a home. The rhythm does the persuading.

Irony runs quietly under the whole opening. The building of white supremacy hosts a multi-racial celebration. The generals who would have arrested him salute him. The man who was an outlaw becomes the host of the nations of the world. Mandela never says the word irony; he simply places the two facts side by side and lets you feel the distance between them.

Some vocabulary to fix before the exam: inauguration, the ceremony of taking office; amphitheatre, an open space with rising rows of seats around it; dignitaries, important official guests; apartheid, the official policy of racial separation; emancipation, being set free; transitory, lasting a short time; curtailed, cut short or restricted; indivisible, unable to be divided; mealies, corn or maize cobs; comrades, companions in a shared struggle; resilience, the ability to recover from hardship.

Now the method for answers. For a short answer of two or three marks, write a direct opening sentence that answers the question, add one short quotation or a precise detail from the text, and finish with one line of explanation. Do not begin with background about Mandela's life; the examiner asked a question, not for a biography. For a long answer, plan three points before you write, give each point its own short paragraph, and put one quotation in each. Keep quotations short. A well-chosen six-word phrase inside your own sentence is worth more than four copied lines.

Two cautions. First, get the names and the order right: de Klerk as second deputy president, Mbeki as first deputy president, Mandela as President. Second, if you cannot remember the exact words of a line, do not put quotation marks around a guess. Write the idea in your own words instead. An accurate paraphrase never loses marks; a misquotation can.