Mandela, the Unapologetic Radical
Source: Color Lines
The warders called us by either our surnames or our Christian names. Each, I felt, was degrading, and I thought we should insist on the honorific ‘Mister.’ I pressed for this for many years, without success. Later, it even became a source of humour as my colleagues would occasionally call me ‘Mr.’ Mandela.
—Nelson Mandela, “Long Walk to Freedom”
Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison, 18 of them at Robben Island – the notorious island jail that held the principle leadership of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. It was at that jail, with the help of his comrades, that Mandela wrote his story, “Long Walk to Freedom” (published in 1994). In this book, one gets a sense of Mandela as the deeply political figure that he was: a lawyer who fought against apartheid — a lawyer who discovered that the law was the barrier to change and so moved to politics, including terrorist operations against the intransigent apartheid state.
