Long Walk to Freedom – Nelson Mandela

Rolihlahla Mandela was born in 1918 into a family well-connected to the Thembu royal house of the Xhosa nation that had for centuries inhabited the Transkei region of South Africa. His early childhood mirrored that of countless previous generations, centred on subsistence farming in the rural hinterland, and was largely unaffected by the white dominated government.

But at seven years old, as befitted his station in life, he was kitted out in a cut-off pair of his father’s trousers and sent off to school to commence a British style education, on the first day of which he was allocated a British name – Nelson.

Though not a brilliant student he was studious and hard-working, and so progressed through the black education system via boarding school to university. It was there that early brushes with the relatively benign white establishment started to build a consciousness of an ingrained assumed superiority among the whites.

While questioning that oppression he also found himself at odds with the traditional tribal authority that among other things threatened him with an arranged marriage. In limbo between out-dated tribalism and stifling white supremacy, he ran away to the city – Johannesburg – to make his own way in the world as best he could.

With a good (for a black) education he found work as a lawyer’s clerk, eventually gaining sufficient qualifications to take on his own cases, often fighting for the rights of those suffering from the discriminatory race laws. More significantly he found like-minded political thinkers in the African National Congress, through whose ranks he rose.

What followed - demonstrations, arrests, banning orders, internal exile, trials, prison and long-delayed release – is familiar; but it is no less interesting as it reveals its gradual imposition on a man trying to balance his love for and need to support his growing family with his deep felt duty to his people.

Written with simplicity of style, clarity of moral purpose, and self-effacing modesty, the book reads less that its 600 pages and places on record the life of an extraordinary man whose remarkable ability to embrace his oppressor and gaoler enabled the rainbow nation to survive a transition from apartheid to inclusive democracy that few would have believed possible.