Long Walk To Freedom

Last week I started reading Nelson Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom. When the autobiography was published in 1994, I resisted reading because I'd become cynical with the way in which the world embraced Mandela upon his release from prison. Suddenly those who had oppressed Mandela and the people of South Africa were proponents of freedom. His release from Robben Island in 1990 produced a media frenzy; it was like one big party and everywhere it seemed as though his revolutionary spirit had been commercialized and sanitized.

I'm enjoying the first one hundred pages of Long Walk to Freedom. His journey from a boy into young adulthood laid the foundation for what we know of his struggles. His political journey begins after venturing to Johannesburg where he joined the African National Congress and witnessed the white Afrikaner Party come to brutal power in 1948.
It's a long book and I'm ready to plow into the next 500 pages. I'll write more when I finish.

***************


I cannot pinpoint a moment when I became politicized,when I knew that I would spend
my life in the liberation struggle....... I had no epiphany, no singular revelation, no moment of truth, but a steady accumulation of a thousand slights, a thousand indignities, a thousand unremembered moments, produced in me an anger, a rebelliousness, a desire to fight the system that imprisoned my people. There was no particular day on which I said, From henceforth I will devote myself to the liberation of my people; instead, I simply found myself doing so, and could not do otherwise (Mandela, 1994, Long Walk to Freedom, p. 83)