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Book Review: Long Walk to Freedom - Nelson Mandela
Title: LONG WALK TO FREEDOM
Author: Nelson Mandela (President, Rep of South Africa)
Publisher: Macdonald Purnell (PTY) Ltd, Randburg, South Africa.
The riveting memoirs of one of the great moral and political leaders of our time - an international hero whose accomplishments won him the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize.
Preview
Since his release in February 1990, Nelson Mandela has emerged as the world's most significant moral leader since Mahatma Gandhi.As President of the African National Congress and spiritual figurehead of the anti- aparthied movement, he was instrumental in moving South Africa towards black-majority rule. And throughout the world he is revered as a vital force in the fight for human rights and racial equality.
The foster son of a Tembu chief, Mandela grew up straddling two worlds: the traditional culture of his tribe, and the hostile reality of a white dominated nation. A career in law beckoned, but Mandela's growing political awareness moved him to become more actively engaged, and he played a pivotal role in the formation of the ANC Youth League. In the early 1950s he initiated the `defiance campaign' against the discrimina- tory policies of the South African government,and argued for non-violent resistance to aparthied. However, following the Sharpeville massacre in 1960 his position changed, and he was forced underground to avoid the newly-imposed ban on the ANC.
The horrors at Sharpeville hardened Mandela's resolve, and he began to advocate a different course of `non-terrorist' action, aimed at the state but theoretically preventing civilian unrest. In 1964 he was arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment on charges of incitement to sabotage, treason, and violent conspiracy against the South African regime. Mandela was to spend a total of twenty-seven years in captivity, most of them in the notorious prison on Robben Island.
Now, following the momentous events of 1994, Nelson Mandela vividly re- creates the drama of the experiences that helped shape his destiny: the years operating undercover, effectively classed as a `terrorist' by the state; the surprisingly eventful quarter-century behind bars, when his dedication to the cause elevated him to a status of martyr, icon and inspiration; and the astonishing moves towards the ANC's near-landslide victory in the breakthrough multi-racial elections of April 1994, when Mandela became South Africa's first-ever black President.
Emotive, compelling and uplifting, `LONG WALK TO FREEDOM' is the exhila- rating story of an epic life; a story of hardship, resilience and ulti- mate triumph, told with the clarity and eloquence of a born leader.
During his lifetime, Mandela dedicated himself to the freedom struggle of the African people, and in doing so, fought against White and Black domination in South Africa. But more than anything else, he fought for democracy as a plural society in which all races, languages and opinions could live together in harmony, and with equal opportunity.
However, what Nelson Mandela, as a political and moral leader, made possible for humanity was to extend and expand our capacity to rethink politics in terms of an ethics of empathy, a politics of forgiveness, and a revolution of values. As such, he was not necessarily, as he proclaimed later, “an ordinary man who became a leader because of extraordinary circumstances.” Truly speaking, South Africa’s transition to democracy, under the leadership of Mandela, was a great work of political creativity and moral wisdom. The two noted definitions of a human being — by Aristotle — that he is a political being and a being endowed with speech, supplement each other in Mandela’s anti-apartheid practice of freedom. What Mandela understood through his life experience was that freedom cannot be speechless, while violence is incapable of speech. That such an outspokenness (what the Greeks called parrhesia) must be intimately connected with the ideal of freedom seems to be true in the legendary life of Mandela. His life experience speaks clearly for itself: the transformation of Mandela and that of the South African society went hand in hand.
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