In His Own Words: Nelson Mandela's Prison Years

During the 1950s and early 1960s Nelson Mandela frequently found himself in police station cells, court holding cells and prison cells for short periods of time, as his political work made him a target for the apartheid regime. After the banning of the African National Congress in 1960, he went underground in 1961 and became the leader of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the armed wing of the Congress. In 1962 he was captured, and sentenced to five years in prison for leaving the country illegally and inciting a strike. In 1963 he joined other MK leaders in the Rivonia Trial, at the end of which he was sentenced to life for sabotage. He was finally released from prison in 1990 after over 27 years of unbroken incarceration. Eighteen of those years were spent on Robben Island.

The first two counts were for contravening Section 21(1) of the General Laws Amendment Act (Sabotage Act) No. 76 of 1962; the third in contravention of Section 11(a), read with Sections 1 and 12 of Act No. 44 of 1950; and the fourth was for contravening Section 3(1) (6), read with Section 2 of Act No. 8 of 1953 (as amended). The two framed warrants were presented to Mr Mandela on February 11, 1995 – the fifth anniversary of his release from prison – by then Correctional Services Minister Sipho Mzimela, on behalf of the department.

This story about Nelson Mandela’s first imprisonment on Robben Island strongly demonstrates his iron will and indelible sense of dignity that helped him to survive 27 years in prison. He shows, on the one hand, that from day one, the prison warders were determined to treat the prisoners as nothing more than cattle as they tried aggressively to bring them under their control. It was not to be. Mr Mandela immediately took charge and showed how one can turn the tables even in the more dire circumstances. It was this dignity and strength demonstrated by Nelson Mandela and that of his colleagues later that marked their imprisonment and subsequent demeanour.

In the draft of the sequel to his autobiography which he started writing in 1998, Nelson Mandela recalled the harshness of prison life and how his experience as a lawyer before he went to prison helped him to cope. Throughout all his writings from the very early days to even after he had retired, Nelson Mandela was at pains to point out that not every prison warder or apartheid official was bad. This view was underpinned throughout by his assertion that to get along in life one should see the good in all people. It also helped him to choose the right time to initiate talks with the apartheid regime – which was a continuation of efforts made by the African National Congress since the early 1900s and up to 1961.

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. He also explained that negotiation was nothing new.

Heavy censorship of correspondence in prison meant that if a prisoner wanted to communicate anything of a sensitive nature to anyone outside prison they needed to smuggle it out.

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 for years.

In the early years in prison Nelson Mandela and his comrades were forbidden from keeping watches or clocks. He initially made a calendar on the wall of his cell. Later he was allowed to order a desk calendar a year from South African Tourism. He kept a series of desk calendars on Robben Island, in Pollsmoor Prison, and at Victor Verster Prison. He continued recording information in these calendars while he was in hospital in 1988 – first in Tygerberg Hospital and then in Constantiaberg MediClinic being treated for tuberculosis. These desk calendars had scenic photographs and the words “Land of Golden Sunshine”.

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.

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.

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

The original draft was sealed in cocoa containers and buried in the prison garden using tools fashioned by Jeff Masemola. When prison officials uncovered it during construction, Mandela, Sisulu, and Kathrada lost their study privileges for four years.