In His Own Words: Nelson Mandela's Prison Years

Prisoners were forced to work in the island's quarries. This picture shows the infamous Lime Quarry, located at the center of the island.

Removing roadblocks

One of Nelson Mandela’s greatest achievements was his qualification as an attorney. In 1953 he established South Africa’s first black law partnership in Johannesburg with his friend and comrade Oliver Tambo. During his long imprisonment he used his knowledge of the law to full effect and advantage. His answer to brutality and bullying as well as harassment and abuses was to turn to the law, whether it was on his own behalf or to assist other prisoners: he would either threaten to take action or to institute legal action. As this story shows, it became an essential protection.

It would have been easy for Nelson Mandela to allow the world to believe that he was physically assaulted in prison. On the contrary, he has publicly said that it never happened to him. It happened to others but not to him. It would also have been easy for him to tar all the prison guards with the same brush – that they were brutes who would never give an inch.

Paying tribute to his comrades

Nelson Mandela never hesitated to say that he achieved what he did as part of a “collective” and that his comrades in the African National Congress and particularly those he was in prison with were part of this collective.

Whenever he had the chance he complimented them, as well as those from other political persuasions who suffered with him in prison.

In this extract to the sequel to his autobiography, he remembered his prison comrades and recalled how he did not tell them he was initiating dialogue with the apartheid government until it had already started. For very good reason.

He also explained that negotiation was nothing new.

The Release Mandela Campaign

While Mandela and his comrades were imprisoned on South Africa’s notorious Robben Island, efforts to campaign for their release were growing. Since the prisoners were deprived of newspapers for most of the time they were in jail, the campaigners could not expect them to know about their work to publicise their plight.

In this extract from his unpublished autobiographical manuscript written in prison, it is clear that not only was he aware of these efforts – despite stringent censorship of letters and visits, he derived strength from them.

His writing about this issue gave him the opportunity to express his optimism about his eventual freedom and the success of the struggle against apartheid.

(Long Walk Original Manuscript p615).

By the time Nelson Mandela turned 70 – and was still imprisoned – the campaign for his release had reached virtually every corner of the world.

Any and every medium was used to push, coerce, and encourage anyone and everyone to do their bit to help free him. From students and concert goers to politicians and bankers, most people were touched by the Free Mandela Campaign.

One of the efforts was a series of ten posters by artist Mickey Patel which he donated to the office in India of the African National Congress in exile. One hundred more of these posters were then made from a silk-screening.

Twenty-three years later the posters found a home at the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory. They were donated by a former anti-apartheid activist, Mosie Moolla, who escaped from police custody in 1963 and found his way to India where he became the ANC’s Chief Representative in that country.

1969: secret visits

In a letter to his daughter Zenani to mark her 12th birthday in 1971 Nelson Mandela recalled her birth after his wife had been jailed for 15 days. Like most of his letters to his children he poignantly tries to be a long-distant father.

Winnie Mandela was pregnant with her eldest daughter when she was arrested for participating in a protest against the pass laws. “Do you understand that you were nearly born in prison?” he writes.

The letter tells her how she was only 25 months old when he went underground and they never lived together again.

He describes one of her secret visits to him in hiding: “I took you into my arms and for about ten minutes we hugged, and kissed and talked. Then suddenly you seemed to have remembered something. You pushed me aside and began searching the room. In a corner you found the rest of my clothing. After collecting it you gave it to me and asked me to go home. You held my hand for quite some time, pulling desperately and begging me to return.”

1971: Letter to Zeni

Perhaps the most harrowing time in prison for Nelson Mandela was when his wife Winnie was arrested and detained for more than 17 months. From May 1969 to September 1970 she was gone out of their lives and there was nothing he could do to help her or the children she left behind.

At that time their daughters Zeni and Zindzi were aged nine and ten respectively and their father wrote to them from Robben Island trying to comfort them, to be a father. He knew it was highly unlikely that the letter would ever reach them. Luckily he kept a copy in one of two hard-cover notebooks he used to write down the letters he sent.

These notebooks were confiscated by prison warders when he was still on Robben Island but returned to him more than 15 years after his release by a former Security Policeman Donald Card who kept them in his house for years.

1976: Writing to his lawyers

On more than one occasion Mr Mandela and his comrade, Ahmed Kathrada smuggled out letters, especially to lawyers, to complain about conditions in prison.

For example, in January 1977 Mr Mandela wrote, in tiny handwriting, a long letter to lawyers in Durban instructing them to take action against the prison authorities for a list of instances for “abusing their authority”. The letter was addressed to a firm of attorneys called Seedat Pillay and Co.

In October 2010 one of the attorneys of that firm who became a judge of the High Court of South Africa, Judge Thumba Pillay donated to the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory that letter as well as a series of related documents.

Together with his notebooks, the desk calendars are the most direct and unmediated records of his private thoughts and everyday experiences. He did not make entries every day. In fact, there are sometimes weeks where he made none at all. It should be borne in mind that taken-for-granted necessities in the outside world were actually precious luxuries in prison. Milk for tea, for example, was an event. So, too, were visits and letters. And the single word ‘Raid’ masks a deeper menace.

1976: Soweto uprisings

There is no entry for the Soweto 16 June 1976 uprisings. Nelson Mandela and his comrades only heard about this much later when new political prisoners arrived on Robben Island. In the early years on the Island Mandela and his co prisoners were not allowed any newspapers and did not have a radio.

1977: An arranged media visit

Nelson Mandela notes the visit by the media to Robben Island in 1977. The Apartheid government arranged the visit by journalist to dispel rumours about harsh conditions on the Island.

1977: The prisoner in the garden
The famous photograph of Madiba taken on the day the international media was invited by the prison commissioners to Robben Island to observe the prison conditions. This photograph was taken without his consent, and under protest.

1989: De Klerk meeting

On 13 December 1989, Nelson Mandela whilst still in jail met State President F W De Klerk for the first time.

1990: Reunion

In his final weeks in prison Nelson Mandela was given a diary by a university friend and comrade who had not seem him for years.

This inscription appears on the first page of the slim black 1990 diary: “Dearest Nelson, with our love and every good wish. Radhi and ‘J.N.’ – to remember the first January 1990 meeting after so many, many years!!!”

Apart from an entry on 1 January about the Singh’s visit to him at Victor Verster Prison he made one other entry. On 13 January he made his last diary entry -- he filled a page with a poignant description of a group of ducks that had wandered into the house in which he had lived for just over a year.

Only a handful of pages of the original manuscript have survived and are housed in the South African National Archive in Pretoria. The Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory has the version typed from it by Sue Rabkin.

A year after Mr Mandela’s release from prison in 1990 he began working with American journalist Richard Stengel on what is now Long Walk to Freedom (1994). It was based on the prison manuscript and a series of interviews.

In the book Mr Mandela says:
“We created an assembly line to process the manuscript. Each day I passed what I wrote to Kathy, who reviewed it and then read it to Walter. Kathy then wrote their comments in the margins. Walter and Kathy have never hesitated to criticize me, and I took their suggestions to heart, often incorporating their changes. This marked-up manuscript was then given to Laloo Chiba, who spent the next night transferring my writing to his own almost microscopic shorthand, reducing ten pages of foolscap to a single small piece of paper. It would be Mac’s job to smuggle the manuscript to the outside world.”

After Mr Mandela had made the corrections, the pages were given to fellow prisoners Isu ‘Laloo’ Chiba and Mac Maharaj to transcribe into tiny handwriting.

That manuscript was then divided into cocoa containers and buried in the garden of B Section, Robben Island, using digging tools fashioned by Jeff Masemola. Their later discovery by prison officials during the construction of a wall, resulted in Mr Mandela, Mr Sisulu and Mr Kathrada – whose handwriting was on the original – in losing their study privileges for four years.

“... no prison walls, guard dogs or even the cold seas that are like a deadly moat surrounding Robben Island prison, could ever succeed to frustrate the desires of all humanity… ”