Review: The Prison Letters of Nelson Mandela, edited by Sahm Venter

Liveright, £25

Prison writing has a special resonance; prison letters and diaries most obviously so. One thinks of Antonio Gramsci’s prison notebooks, a whole new iteration of Marxism created behind bars. Or Vaclav Havel’s Letters to Olga, one of the few books that Salman Rushdie kept by him throughout his own protective incarceration. Or, with less obvious political content, the personal testimony of Jack Henry Abbott’s In The Belly of the Beast and Jimmy Boyle’s The Pain of Confinement. And all those, stretching back in time, who like the Marquis de Sade are not just writing in prison, but imprisoned for their writing.

In a letter of July 1969 to his wife’s sister, Nelson Mandela makes a rather obvious point with dignified simplicity. “One has to be a prisoner to appreciate fully the true value of many things we take much for granted in life outside prison.” Not the least of these was simple contact with family and friends. At the time of writing, Mandela had been on Robben Island, most notorious of his holding places, for five years, allowed to write letters only every six months and becoming aware that many of these did not reach their intended recipients. What Mandela doesn’t at this point dwell on or even acknowledge is the prisoner whose movement and access has been restricted is almost definitive of the writer constantly pushing against the boundaries of language and meaning. This is the least scabrous understanding embodied in de Sade’s insane ranting, and it is most scorchingly dramatized in Hubert Selby jr’s darkest and best novel The Room, a frighteningly convincing imagining of what it means to be confined, but with a mind that runs free.

Mandela had at least the comfort of a specific struggle and a clearly defined network of correspondents. His letters divide somewhat between angrily dignified appeals to the authorities to improve his lot and that of his fellow-prisoners and more personal correspondence with a family he was not sure he would ever see again. At the Rivonia trial, he believed with some reason that his life was forfeit or a life-term possible, and so it proved. His claim of political rights bumped up against the obduracy of a prison system that ground exceeding small. Mandela and his comrades were required to sit chained in rows, breaking rocks into gravel. They were not allowed to see children who had not yet reached the age of 16. Family life moved, if it seemed to move at all, in a series of jerks and shocks. At one point Mandela says that he saw a family member “in 1967” the way we might say “last Tuesday”.

The summer of 1969 was a strange and difficult time for him. While the world marked the moon landings, Mandela underwent the lunar pain of learning that his son Thembi had died in car accident. This, following the death of his own mother and the sorrow of not being allowed to attend either funeral or stone-laying. Mandela passes the news to Winnie in a letter of heartbreaking formality; perhaps more openly to Thembi’s mother, his first wife Evelyn. It was the second child they had lost.

It is one of many reminders of just how complex was Mandela’s identity. Most of us will remember that to South Africans, he was usually referred to as “Madiba”. The more formal and business letters are signed “N. R. Mandela”. His familiar “Christian” name was dished out at school, and maybe a less provocative choice for use within the system when we realise that his given name Rohlilala means “troublemaker”. But he often signs himself “Dalibunga”, a token of his status within the clan, and he is also “Nel” and “Uncle Nel”. To the children, he is “Tata” and “Khulu”, “daddy” and “grandpa” in isiXhosa. Names are important because names hide as well as reveal, appearing in coded form. Winifred Madikezela-Mandela is also referred to as Nobandla, Nomzamo, Mhlope, Zami and Ngutyana. The footnotes gloss these usages to the point of redundancy, but only to underline how complex nomenclature is in a divided and repressive society.

One of the most heartbreaking of the letters is one to Winnie, thanking her for a portrait and telling proudly how fellow-prisoners looked at it and exclaimed “Ayingo Nobandla lo! [That’s never Winnie!] It must be her younger sister!” But there are more formal letters, too. An April 1969 letter to the Minister of Justice sets out the full story of his imprisonment and appeals. An earlier one to the liquidator at the department of justice, stamped October 23 1967, is a virtual autobiography and statement of philosophy. In it, Mandela denies that he is a Communist, declares himself a nationalist and a committed member of the African National Congress, which is elsewhere referred to covertly as “our household”. From a cell where his head could touch one wall and his feet another he says, “The principal task before us is the overthrow of white supremacy in all its ramifications, and the establishment of a democratic government in which all South Africans, irrespective of their station in life, of their colour or political beliefs will live side by side in perfect harmony”. That he should be able to write like this in such circumstances seems almost miraculous. That he should have lived to see, as a free man, the first awkward steps towards that goal is almost beyond imagining.

There is nothing in any of these letters that betrays weakness or lack of constraint, nothing of the pettiness and petulance, however forgivable, that occasionally marks even Havel’s letters to his wife. Remarkably, this collection only serves to enhance and consolidate Mandela’s reputation as a defining figure of the last century and the present one. The letters are in multiple languages, English, Afrikaans and isiXhosa, but they speak the language of humanity, which is the language of that fraught but loaded prison word: time. “The years are rolling by . . . “