Jailed But Not Imprisoned

"I am the captain of my soul.”

            His birth name was Rolihlahla which means tugging on a tree branch or troublemaker. It was a fitting name for Nelson Mandela who devoted his life to ending South Africa’s policy of apartheid and became his nation’s first black president in 1994.

            Prior to that triumph, Mandela sometimes joked that he “went on a long holiday for 27 years.” He was sentenced to life in prison on May 1963 and remained confined until February 1990. He was a political prisoner, though the government never acknowledged that.

            The first person in his family to go to school, Mandela would go on to found South Africa’s first black-owned law firm. Political activity accompanied him all his adult life, and as a young man, he joined the African National Congress (ANC) whose goal was the abolition of apartheid.

He started out as a pacifist, believing in non-violent confrontation, in keeping with his views as a Christian. He also became a secret member of the Communist Party in South Africa. Though he was impressed by the ease with which its multi-racial members worked together, he opposed the Communists’ goal of creating a class-free society

 Mandela also stood against the use of violence against people. Instead, as a leader of the ANC in the 1950s, he advocated sabotage against property.

 “It offered the best hope for future race relations,” Mandela later said. He believed it was the smartest path to “scare away capital from the country” and that such a strategy would ultimately convince white “voters of the country to reconsider their position.”

His objective? To create a “democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities.”

Tantalized by the Sight

Understandably, the all-white South African government took a dim attitude towards anyone advocating sabotage. Mandela was tried on that that charge, and though he denied he and the ANC planned guerilla warfare, he was sent to the prison on Robben Island. Like Alcatraz in San Francisco, it lies so close to Cape Town that its prisoners were tantalized by the sight of the city’s high-rises in the distance.

“Going to Robben Island was like going to another country. Its isolation made it not simply another prison, but a world of its own,” Mandela wrote in his autobiography.

Upon his arrival, guards taunted him saying, ““This is the Island! Here you will die!” And he passed under a gate whose sign read “We Serve With Pride.” He was now prisoner 46664, meaning that he was the 466^th person to serve time there.

            For the next 17 years, Mandela’s home would be a seven-square foot cell. It had a one-square-foot window, and it walls were two-feet thick to prevent prisoners from communicating by tapping.

 For many years, he slept on the floor on a bedroll. There were no beds. His cell’s furnishings consisted of a stool and a “honey bucket” which he would empty every morning. (For the last 10 years of his sentence, Mandela was incarcerated at a prison on the mainland.)

            His daily routine went this way. Prisoners were awakened at 5:30. They were expected to clean their cells between then and 6:45 when they were released from their cells for an unappetizing breakfast of corn porridge. Afterwards, Mandela typically took a half hour jog around the perimeter of the prison courtyard.

Guards then escorted prisoners to work. After lunch, they continued working until 4, at which time they had a half-hour to bathe before eating dinner alone in their cells. Meat was served only every other day.

“In those early years, isolation became a habit,” said Mandela. “We were routinely charged for the smallest infractions and sentenced to isolation.”

Work meant going to a lime quarry. Prisoners used pickaxes to pry the lime from the seams in the rock walls. Prisoners labored there for years without sunglasses, and the dazzling whiteness of the quarry permanently damaged Mandela’s eyes.

Other tasks consisted of sitting silently and hammering rocks into gravel all day long.

Unlike some prisoners, Mandela enjoyed the daily 20-minute walk to the quarry, as it gave him an opportunity to spot deer, rabbits, and other wildlife running free.

"Wounds that can't be seen…"

“The months and years blend into each other” in prison, Mandela would later write.

He was not allowed to leave prison to attend his mother’s funeral. He was diagnosed with tuberculosis (and cured), and he endured surgery for an enlarged prostate gland. The psychological hardships of prison were worse than any physical pain. “Wounds that can’t be seen are more painful that those that can be seen and cured by a doctor,” Mandela said.

“To survive in prison one must develop ways to take satisfaction is one’s daily life. One can feel fulfilled by washing one’s clothes so that they are particularly clean, by sweeping a corridor so that it is free of dust, by organizing one’s cell to conserve as much as space as possible,” he wrote. “The same pride one takes in more consequential tasks outside prison, one can find in doing small things inside prison.”

The early years were the hardest. He was allowed only one visitor and one letter every six months. There was almost no reading material. Newspapers would arrive so scissored up (to remove political content) and were nearly unreadable. In the late 1960s, prisoners were allowed more time to socialize and play cards and games, and Mandela became an avid gardener.

Prisoners were finally allowed newspapers and a small library. Mandela came across a poem by the Victorian-era British writer W.E. Manley. Its title was “Invictus” (“Unconquered”). Mandela was fond of reciting it to other prisoners. Its final stanza reads:

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate,

              I am the captain of my soul.

MORAL: Only you can imprison your soul.

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