Prison Letters of Nelson Mandela Magazine – Mandela's Authentic Voice

Hitler and Nazi, the publishing trope goes. No matter how much time pbades, every year more is published on the fascist deviation of Germany. In South Africa, another topic joins the robust perennials – Nelson Mandela

The anti-apartheid icon died in 2013 but the fountain of edition Mandela still springs: biographies, children's books, photo albums , memoirs of family members, friends, badociates, lawyers, his old prison guards and even an authoritarian secretary. The television had called for an execrable reality show called Being Mandela who was following his Kardashian aspirant grandchildren.

While many things are tosh, from time to time something published adds to our understanding. The Prison Letters of Nelson Mandela published on the occasion of the centenary of his birth, is an example

Militancy

The contours of history are well known: a boy rural South African hinterland goes to the big city, Johannesburg; it involves in politics by joining the African National Congress which fights against the domination of the white minority; directs the movement of non-violence towards militancy; is captured; avoid the death sentence by a mustache; spend more than 27 years in prison; is released to oversee the transition of South Africa to democracy; is elected the first black president; and retires after a term to enjoy a retreat recently spoiled by infirmity.

Yet, what is extraordinary, is that little of this story was written by Mandela. A committed party man, he was little in the shadow of his beloved ANC, submitting an autobiography project to death by the committee in the 1970s. It was so damaged that when he was finally released in 1994, Long Walk to Freedom his own voice was barely recognizable, so much had he been reworked by the negro Richard Stengel. What makes the prison letter collection so special, is that there is no redesign. Mandela's voice is as authentic as we will ever hear, the one who is courteous sometimes stiff; wise and determined; pbadionate but sober.

His modesty about writing memoirs is clear in a letter sent in 1971 to a friend: "What a mild euphemism for the self-satisfaction of the English language has evolved! Autobiography, they choose to To call … I doubt that I can ever sit down to sketch my background, I have neither the achievements I could boast about, nor the skill to do it. "[19659011] But write letters that he made despite rigorous detention conditions. The censorship was cumbersome (no policy to mention) with only two letters, each not exceeding 500 words, allowed every year at the beginning of his sentence. The guards refused to tell him who brought him out, so Mandela wrote them first in notebooks, then on stationery, so that a duplicate could be sent again if need is. In 1985, he republished a letter written 10 years earlier.

Winnie

Many are his second beloved wife, Winnie, mostly signed with "tons and tons of love and a million kisses". So politicized as she became in the late 1980s, she touches on how the letters project a purer Winnie: Mandela urged him at one point to get back to jogging to stay in shape , teased her from a beautiful portrait that she sent him to jail. expressing the Xhosa equivalent of "phwoar" and wrote intimately about cherishing every March 10, the anniversary of their first date in 1957.

His frustration at not being able to protect her appears in the letters written to the police asking for help Life was threatened in a series of attacks at Soweto's family home. On one occasion, it was only the last deep inspiration from a strangler who saved her. She has heard enough to stir, gather her senses and push him away.

While Mandela knew that the attacks had been perpetrated by the regime to break him, he kept his anger checking that he was writing firm and measured letters asking for protection. exactly the same scheme responsible for sending the attackers. As a trained lawyer, his faith in the law was absolute.

No matter what one knows about the horror of apartheid, tiny examples of cruelty mentioned here still shock. The lawyer – a white Afrikaner named Bram Fischer – who defended Mandela himself would die of cancer while he was serving a jail term for a political crime. He was cremated but the regime lost his ashes.

In a vain attempt to break Mandela, they refused to let him go for humanitarian reasons to attend his mother's funeral in 1968. The following year, his son Thembi was killed in a car. crash. This time, the authorities simply ignored Mandela's letter asking for permission to be on the grave. "Suddenly, my heart seemed to have stopped beating and the warm blood that had floated freely in my veins for fifty-five years was freezing in the ice," he wrote to a friend describing the news of his son's death.

] The years go by and with her the generations. Mandela writes to her kids about the 1969 moon landings and like most fathers writes to urge her kids to study hard in school. But unlike other fathers, there is a hiatus. He must wait more than a decade to see his daughters. It is only at the age of 16 that the prison rules allow them to visit. He went to prison without grandchildren. He left with 12.

As a historical source, the letters are not perfect. It is necessarily an incomplete collection, such as the whims of the censors who partially wiped out letters, threw others and even ransacked Mandela's cell and destroyed at least some of the notebooks where he kept the letter original.

illuminating clichés in one of the most important political icons of post-colonial Africa, the book will have timeless value. In a letter of 1970, he sought to rebadure Winnie that they would be together again someday: "I hope to survive Methuselah and be with you. . . Politics claimed their marriage with divorce in the 1990s and old age claimed it five years ago. It might not survive Methuselah, but Mandela's story still has power.