Long Walk to Freedom
Nelson Mandela
Long Walk to Freedom
Nelson Mandela
The autobiography of Nelson Mandela: from a village in the Transkei, through prison on Robben Island, to the presidency, in his own account
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- 11 key ideas
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- Published 1994
Introduction
Nelson Mandela's autobiography follows one life across most of the twentieth century in South Africa: a boyhood in a rural village, student years, work as a lawyer in Johannesburg, the struggle against apartheid, twenty-seven years in prison, and the negotiations and election that ended white minority rule. It is told in eleven parts and more than a hundred short chapters.
Mandela says he began writing it secretly on Robben Island in 1974; the copy he kept was found and confiscated, but a hidden original reached the outside. He resumed work after his release in 1990 with the help of Richard Stengel, who collaborated with him, and the book was published in 1994. This is a summary of selected themes, not of the whole book: the book is long and names a great many people and events, and we follow the thread of how Mandela describes his own choices and what he says he learned from them.
Notes: the book is Mandela's own account, and its judgments, including his reasons for turning to armed action, are his, which we present as his view. Other people involved have given different accounts. Names of people and places follow the book. Mandela was president of South Africa from 1994 to 1999 and died in 2013.
- 1Mandela describes a boyhood in Qunu and a regent's council that taught him to listen first, and a speech he was not ready to hear
- 2He says school and university gave him an English education but not leadership, and a quarrel over an arranged marriage sent him to Johannesburg
- 3He writes that no single moment made him a freedom fighter: a thousand daily indignities did, and the Youth League gave his anger a direction
- 4In his account, the Defiance Campaign made the ANC a mass movement, and he treated nonviolence as a tactic, not a creed
- 5He describes years of law, bans and a treason trial in which the cause consumed his time, his practice and his marriage
- 6After Sharpeville he argued that nonviolence had stopped working, and with others founded an armed wing aimed at property, not people
- 7At the Rivonia Trial he used the courtroom as a platform, and says he was prepared to die for the ideal he stated there
- 8He recalls that prison was meant to break each man's dignity, and that being kept together, studying and keeping hope were how the prisoners answered
- 9He says that from isolation at Pollsmoor he began talks with the government alone, and rejected a release that came with conditions
- 10He describes release after twenty-seven years, the negotiations and the first free election, and says his mission was reconciliation
- 11He ends by saying that courage is mastering fear, that freedom is indivisible, and that the oppressor must be freed too
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