A Circle of Impressions Long Walk Original Manuscript (Image #192)

Chapter 7: A Circle of Impressions The bans confining me to Johannesburg and prohibiting me from atending meetings expired early in September 1955. I had last had a holiday in 1948 when I spent three months in Cape Town. Then I was a green lightweight in the ANC with hardly any serious responsibilities other than attending meetings in the Transvaal Executive, addressing public meetings, writing an article or two and accompanying the provincial president on his rounds. In the intervening years I had reached the light heavyweight division and carried more poundage. Confined to Johannesburg for a whole two years and with the pressure of both my legal and political work weighing heavily on me, I was suffocated from clautrophobia and anxious for a bit of fresh air. Fourteen years of crammed life in South Africa's largest city had not killed the peasant in me and once again I was keen to see that ever beckoning open veld and the blue mountains, the green grass and bushes, the rolling hills, rich valleys, the rapid streams as they sped across the escarpment into the insatiable sea. In 1953 my mother and sister in law,No england, has spent a year with me in Orlando and I now missed them very much. The political storms in which I had been caught on the Rand and elsewhere had made me neglect family affairs and I had now to confer with both Sabata and Daliwonga on several problems. On and off Daliwonga and I had exchanged views on the political situation and, with current developments in the Transkei, I thought the moment was ripe for a full