Nelson Mandelas Long Walk to Freedom - Assignment Example

Critical review of Nelson Mandela's Long Walk to freedom Nelson Mandela's critically acclaimed autobiography LongWalk to Freedom has left many readers perplexed. Like many people, Mandela conceptualized his career as a journey - a "long walk". His journey has clear characteristics. It has a destination: freedom. In his book, he traces the development of his political outlook, the people he was influenced by, the reasons which made him passionate about his cause. Mandela embarks upon his long walk, by painting an idealized landscape of his childhood. Although born of royal parentage, Mandela was reared in the traditional African setting among the Thembu. Along with his peers, Mandela was inculcated with a tremendous sense of responsibility to his family and community. This is evident from his statement, "at night, I shared my food and blanket with these same boys. I was no more than five when I became a herd-boy, looking after sheep and calves in the fields." The important element that contributed to the political consciousness of Mandela during his youth was his listening to the elders of his village discuss the history of their people. "It was from Chief Joyi that I began to discover that the history of the Bantu-speaking peoples began far to the north continent." He learned much about some of the atrocities experienced by his people under European colonial rule and this began to shape his consciousness. Mandela's desire to study law emanated from his observations of the paramount chief conducting court in his village and from his commitment to helping to end minority rule in South Africa. "My later notions of leadership were profoundly influenced by observing the regent and his court. I watched and learned from the tribal meetings that were regularly held at the Great Place". Mandela's initiation into political activism began in 1940 while he was working on his degree at Fort Hare College in the Eastern Cape. He did well academically but he began to realize himself as 'the other'. "We were taught -- and believed -- that the best ideas were English ideas, the best government was English government, and the best men were Englishmen. " Such education persuaded him to forge an identity of his own. As a member of the Student's Representative Council, he was suspended from school for participating in a boycott to protest the reduction of the council's powers by authorities. After returning home briefly, he soon left for Johannesburg to avoid an arranged marriage and being trained for chieftainship. The events that occurred here are important as they shape Mandela's views about segregation. While working as a mine policeman, he observed, "the mining companies preferred such segregation because it prevented different ethnic groups from uniting around a common grievance and reinforced the power of the chiefs." During this period, the early 1940's, Mandela became politically aware and joined the African National Congress (ANC), a middle-class political movement founded in 1912. Chafing at the ANC's ineffectiveness in getting the government to recognize African rights, he helped launch its Youth League in 1944. Four years later, the Afrikaner-dominated National Party's rise to power began the apartheid era and made ANC activities more urgent. In the early 1950s he initiated the defiance campaign' against the discriminatory policies of the South African government, and argued for non-violent resistance to apartheid. 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. He was appointed the campaign's national volunteer-in-chief, which required that he travel throughout South Africa visiting the many black townships in order to explain and win mass support for the campaign. During this period, Mandela played a leading role in forming the first significant alliance between the Africans, Asians, and so-called coloreds of South Africa against the apartheid system. His autobiography after having traced his tribal childhood and political involvement, it moves further to tell the story of his imprisonment. Mandela, Sisulu and others were arrested, charged with "furthering the aims of communism". Their arrest merely fueled the antiapartheid movement across the country. Because of his continued ANC activity, Mandela was charged with high treason. Mandela spent the first two-thirds of his twenty-seven-year confinement on Robben Island. There he slept in a cell so small he could barely stretch out straight, and he worked in a limestone quarry. His communications with the outside world were severely restricted, but pressure on the government from inside and outside South Africa helped alleviate his prison conditions. "The warders were white and overwhelmingly Afrikaans-speaking, and they demanded a master-servant relationship. They ordered us to call them "baas," which we refused. The racial divide on Robben Island was absolute: there were no black warders, and no white prisoners." Mandela disdained the classification system in the prison. "It was corrupt and demeaning, another way of repressing prisoners in general and political prisoners in particular". Demands to release Mandela became increasingly connected with demands for radical political change. As a symbol of South African repression, Mandela developed into a more powerful opponent of the government from inside prison than he might have been as a free man. After Mandela's release, the ANC began reconstituting itself as a legal political party, and its leaders entered negotiations with the government on the drafting of a new constitution. Additionally, after his release, Mandela traveled extensively outside South Africa, including a visit to the United States in June, 1990, during which he stressed the importance to his cause of maintaining sanctions against the apartheid-supporting government. Having spent a quarter of a century in prison for his anti-apartheid activities, he was the first black to be elected in South Africa's first-ever multiracial elections in April, 1994. The ANC has been regarded as the organization most representative of the South African people; a large part of this accomplishment is the result of Mandela's successful efforts at working with the Indian, colored, and European populations toward common aims in the struggle against apartheid. Mandela's autobiography absorbs the reader into the simple, but rich, life of his early youth, grips him with the brutality and hardship of the struggle, and then enriches him with the hope that comes with freedom after such diversity. It is written with the humility of a man who gave up his personal life for the struggle of the masses and never sought personal recognition. It is written with humour, even when describing unimaginable cruelty. To read Mandela's book is to read the story of the world's most famous political prisoner, the world's most admired president and statesman. In a style that is clear, unassuming, at time, wryly humorous, at other times generous in its humility. Long Walk To Freedom as is appropriate - refuses separation of the private and public figure, and as a result, assumes proportions of national epic. It in a way becomes South Africa's struggle to defeat racism and injustice of apartheid and, according to African National Congress principle and practice, to institute a non-racial, democratic alternative. His work signals a triumph of humanity over inhumanity and vindicates Mandela's arduous commitment to ideals of hope and freedom. Works Cited Mandela, Nelson. Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela. Sagebrush Education Resources, 1995. Read More