Following South Africa’s 10-day period of mourning for Nelson Mandela, The Hewitt Times commences its commemoration of the life of the great Madiba. This is the second installment of a three-part series, following Nelson Mandela Before Prison.
Nelson Mandela was arrested on August 5, 1962 in Howick, South Africa, on the charge of inciting workers’ strikes and leaving the country without permission; though there was some speculation that the CIA played a role in his arrest, Mandela, according to his autobiography Long Walk to Freedom, attributes it to his own carelessness in concealing his movements. Jailed in Johannesburg’s Marshall Square prison and then moved to Pretoria, Mandela began studying for a law degree from the University of London. Ultimately, he was found guilty and sentences to five years in prison.
The trial, known as the Rivonia Trial, began at the Pretoria Supreme Court on October 9, 1963; Mandela and nine other leaders of the African National Congress (ANC) accused of sabotage and conspiracy aimed to violently overthrow the government. Instead of running away from all accusations, Mandela boldly admitted to sabotage but denied a connection to guerrilla war against the government. At the opening of the trial, Mandela showed just how he planned to use the trial in his favor to highlight his political cause by making a three-hour speech that has gone down in history as one of his greatest orations.
Listen to the last minute of Mandela’s speech below:
Making his intentions clear, Mandela ended his speech by saying, “I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons will live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal for which I hope to live for and to see realized. But, My Lord, if it needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”
On June 12, 1964, 46-year-old Mandela and two other ANC leaders were found guilty of all charges and were sentenced to life imprisonment. Mandela was then transferred from Pretoria to the Robben Island prison. For the next 18 years, Mandela was confined to a 8′ x 7′ cell with the floor as his bed and a bucket for a toilet. As a Class D prisoner, he was allowed only one visitor per year for 30 minutes at a time, and he could write and receive one letter every six months. Mandela recounts his horrific daily routine on Robben Island in his autobiography here. His experiences included physical and verbal harassments by prison wardens, manual labor breaking rocks into gravel, and work in a lime quarry.
Refusing to quit, Mandela worked on his bachelors degree at night and was locked in solitary confinement on several occasions for smuggling newspaper clippings. Madiba took part in hunger strikes in hopes of gaining better living conditions. He also initiated the “University of Robben Island,” where prisoners lectured on their own areas of expertise, debating topics like homosexuality and politics. Making the most of his annual visits, Mandela also met with important individuals to champion his cause outside of prison, including Helen Suzman.
All of Mandela’s work in prison did not prove to be in vain, for prison conditions improved in 1967: the standard of food was raised, black prisoners were given trousers as opposed to just shorts, and games like football were allowed. By 1975, Mandela had climbed from a Class D prisoner to a Class A prisoner, which gave him a greater number of allowed visits and letters. His character as an activist began to form through prison correspondence with like-minded anti-apartheid advocates like Mangosuthu Buthelezi and Desmond Tutu. He began work on his autobiography that same year, but when prison guards discovered several pages in his cell, Mandela’s studying privileges were revoked. And so, Mandela took up gardening and reading until resuming his law studies in 1980.
Mandela’s international fame was reignited when he was awarded the Jawaharlal Nehru Award for International Understanding in India in 1979 and the Freedom of the City of Glasgow in 1981. “Free Mandela!” became increasingly popular, but the South African government ignored to heed its pleadings, for the government relied on allies like then U.S. President Ronald Regan and U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, both of whom still considered Mandela to be a communist terrorist.
After 18 years on Robben Island, Mandela was transferred in April of 1982 to Pollsmoor Prison in Cape Town due to the belief that he was influencing younger activists. Though he found better conditions and more lenient rules to a certain extent at Pollsmoor, Mandela also found more loneliness.
Mandela’s 70th birthday in 1988 presented him as a global hero because of all that he had accomplished and proved. Earlier that year, Mandela and a team of government figures met to negotiate. The team agreed to release him and to legalize the ANC on the condition that they renounce violence, but he insisted that the government renounce violence first.
In December of 1988, Mandela was moved to Victor Verster Prison in the Western Cape of South Africa, now the Groot Drankenstein Prison, to recover from tuberculosis. There, he lived in a comparatively comfortable warden’s house and used his spare time to finish earning his law degree.
Finally, Mandela was unconditionally released on February 11 1990 and all formerly banned political parties were legalized when the strong apartheid defender South African President P.W. Botha was succeeded by F.W. de Klerk, who believed apartheid to be unsustainable. Mandela’s release and South Africa’s shift in power to an anti-apartheid era at last began to unite a nation divided by race.