Long Walk to Freedom

5 Key excerpts on "Long Walk to Freedom"

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  Circuitous Journeys

  Modern Spiritual Autobiography

  • David J. Leigh(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Fordham University Press

    (Publisher)

  10 Retraveling the Century: Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom T HIS FINAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY of the century has puzzled its readers. Published in 1994 to great acclaim, it reads like a mid-century spiritual journey with a structure similar to those we have seen in Merton or Malcolm X. Yet it lacks the periods of wandering and dramatic conversion of its predecessors. Its style is quiet, full of understatement, with a mixture of idealizations and realistic admissions of faults. The autobiographer begins with a youth full of spiritual influences and convictions, but gradually mutes the religious dimension as he travels the long political road. This shift in tone has led some reviewers to read the book as a story of moral growth in dignity, not in religious faith (Sampson). Like Gandhi’s autobiography, Mandela’s story seems one of public successes but personal and family failures. Yet the Long Walk to Freedom ends in a triumphant emergence from jail into political victory, whereas Gandhi’s final chapters are written while he is still in prison. The Long Walk has been condemned by conservative readers for its “ingenuous” pro-leftist comments but praised by liberal reviewers for its rejection of communism (Roberts). Mandela spends many years in prison with little contact with the outside world, but emerges stronger and more able to govern that world. The plot of the autobiography consists primarily in Mandela’s struggles with his enemies, but he ends up working with them in a new government. A close study of the structure and images of Mandela’s life story will give some answers to these puzzles. The book was begun in prison two decades before it was completed with the assistance of Richard Stengel, a Time reporter, who helped Mandela retain the traditional language and tone of his original prison memoirs

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  Mental Maps in the Era of Détente and the End of the Cold War 1968–91

  • Jonathan Wright, Steven Casey, Jonathan Wright, Steven Casey(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  13 Nelson Mandela Rita Barnard and Monica Popescu Introduction

  Nelson Mandela’s 1994 autobiography Long Walk to Freedom concludes with a moving meditation on the way in which his concept of freedom gradually broadened out until it extended far beyond the personal, racial and national, to become an all-inclusive vision of a universal and indivisible liberty. It is because of this broad humanistic vision that Mandela became a figure of global importance, even though his time in office as the first president of a newly democratic South Africa was, in fact, quite brief. The history of how this happened, how Mandela accrued this international status, especially after his release from prison in February 1990, has already been traced by many other writers. It is a fascinating story: at once a drama of international reconfiguration, of national reimaging, of transnational solidarity, of the media, of machinations on the part of opposing political parties and, of course, of a fine, tactical performance of dignified selfhood. That story is already part of our history of the twentieth century. But how did Mandela see the world and how was this vision constrained or enabled by political circumstances? If he came to be received by the world as a galvanizing emblem of moral world citizenship and as an embodiment of the possibility (however short-lived) of an entirely new post-Cold War global dispensation, how did Mandela’s own cognitive map of the world originate and evolve to match this moment? What were its outlines, its lineaments of political aversion and solidarity?

  A Note on Sources

  To answer these questions it is inevitable that scholars return to the various biographies, and to Long Walk to Freedom. But we must do so with an understanding that it is a ghostwritten work and one that does the work of national reconciliation: it is, if you will, a Bildungsroman as national allegory. More useful, for scholars with an interest in ‘mental maps’, may be the collection Conversations with Myself and the quotation book Nelson Mandela by Himself, both put together by the research team of the Nelson Mandela Foundation.1

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  Negotiated Revolutions

  The Czech Republic, South Africa and Chile

  • George Lawson(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 4 The Longest Walk: South Africa    

  We, the people of South Africa declare for all our country and the world to know that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white and that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of the people.1

  These words from the Freedom Charter, first adopted by the African National Congress (ANC) in 1955, stood for decades as the moral compass for opposition to apartheid South Africa.2 This opposition, in many cases forced by domestic oppression to flee abroad, became by the 1980s a cause célébre for civil rights activists around the world. Indeed, few events in modern history resonate with as much force as the release of Nelson Mandela from jail in February 1990. For Mandela, it was another step on a personal Odyssey that took him from freedom fighter to prisoner and finally to the presidency. For many other black South Africans, Mandela’s release represented a turning point in a longer struggle against oppression, one with its origins in colonialism and which became institutionalized after the Union of South Africa in 1910, a struggle which was to grow in intensity under the successive apartheid governments of the post-war period.

  The struggle against racial domination in apartheid South Africa took many forms: an initial movement for political rights developed into a widescale demand for civil rights after 1948, diversifying into a still broader struggle that incorporated mass action, political pressure and armed resistance after the massacre at Sharpeville and the banning of opposition parties in 1960. By the end of the 1980s, increasing international pressure on the apartheid regime, domestic social unrest, high levels of political violence and economic stagnation combined with the facilitative international environment engendered by the winding down of the Cold War to generate a systemic crisis in the country. Out of positions of mutual weakness, combatants on both sides turned to negotiation. Four years of stop-start discussions between state leaders and former revolutionaries led eventually, although by no means inevitably, to South Africa’s first truly democratic elections held in April 1994.

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  South African Literature's Russian Soul

  Narrative Forms of Global Isolation

  • Jeanne-Marie Jackson(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  . . African ‘master texts’ are few and far between. For writing in the West, the works of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes and others supply a vast . . . metaphorical space for new works to resound in, their own meanings amplified by echoes from the past. Modern African literature enjoys no such milieu—but what Africa lacks in great texts, it makes up for with a powerfully symbolic pantheon of great men, the continent’s liberators, who loom so large in the popular imagination that they are themselves like great texts . . . This would explain autobiography’s prominence in contemporary African literature: the need for the great men’s lives to be made into books underscores a larger project of making independence permanent, of bolting the fact of liberation securely down into world history. In effect, then, the autobiographies of great men stand in as Africa’s master texts—and among them none can be accounted more weighty, more foundational, than Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom . I want to argue that this literary function of non-literary figures also grants Mandela’s Ego a place in the discussion of binding that I have developed Émigré Fiction and the Double-Bind of Home 201 around Nabokov and Behr. As much as the novel ironizes the idol-worship that threatens to trivialize the accomplishments it would celebrate, it also betrays an anxiety about the cultural and historical implications of this very task. Nkosi, that is, turns a skeptical eye on Mandela’s dogmatic significance to South African life, but he stops short of offering a viable alternative to this subject for South African fiction going forward. The central problem with which Mandela’s Ego grapples, then, is how to maintain a narrative of individual subjectivity outside the bounds of that subject’s close historical identification.

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  Stories of Women : Gender and Narrative in the Postcolonial Nation

  • Elleke Boehmer(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Manchester University Press

    (Publisher)

  19 These are combined with an authorised biography of Jomo Kenyatta (Kenya) that bears signs of being ghosted by the subject himself. 20 Most of the autobiographies were published within a decade of one another with Nkrumah’s autobiography the first to appear, in 1957, and Azikiwe’s, a long and retrospective account published in 1970, the last. The focus will rest in par- ticular on the presence in these nationalist autobiographies of the structuring tropes of genealogy and ideological patriliny, of national mapping-by-travel, and of the exemplary nationalist hero. Where appropriate the discussion will refer to Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom because, as anticipated, it participates in and highlights the patterns and preoccupations of the 1960s, the era of African independence. The 1960s also represent a key decade in Mandela’s own life: his long imprisonment began in 1962, and the autobiography itself was undertaken as a reflection back on the events leading up to that fateful year. Long Walk to Freedom emphasises in particular the convergence between the individual life and the story of the coming-into-being of the nation, here specifically the story of anti-apartheid resistance. This convergence indeed confirms the convinced view of South Africans and non-South Africans alike that Mandela or Madiba (‘old man’, a customary term of respect) is in fact an incarnation of the nation. Despite – or perhaps because of – this close identification, Mandela’s life-story noticeably lacks the strenuous tones of self-justification of the past, a shift due also to the nation-building and coalescing force of the long struggle against apartheid, and of the consolidating effects of the subject’s own incarceration. Through- out, no matter how divided by apartheid, language or colonial history, the 72 Stories of women South African nation is for Mandela a reality that he speaks of as unquestion- ingly serving and loving long before the watershed moment of 1994.

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