Mccormack In The Prison Of His Days

A Miscellany for Nelson Mandela on His 70th Birthday
1. Auflage 1989
ISBN: 978-1-84351-255-4
Verlag: The Lilliput Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 102 Seiten

In The Prison of his Days: A Miscellany for Nelson Mandela on His 70th Birthday includes work by the following authors: Chinua Achebe, John Banville, Samuel Beckett, Mary Benson, Edward Bond, Hubert Butler, Austin Clarke, Patrick Galvin, Gunter Grass, Samus Heaney, Desmond Hogan, Danil Kharms, Benedict Kiely, Thomas Kinsella, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, W.J. McCormack (ed.), Mebdh Mac Guickian, Richard Murphy, Agnes Nemes Nagy, Marin Sorescu, and Wally Serote. Beginning with an editorial, it includes poems interspersed between fiction, scholarly criticism, and interviews. Sure to be a collector's item; very few copies remaining.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Mccormack, W. J.

Leseproben

MARY BENSON

On Behalf of Nelson Mandela

In Dublin’s Merrion Square a sculpture honours the most famous political prisoner of our time, Nelson Mandela. Ireland’s gesture expresses the extraordinary, the historic impact which the life of a man incarcerated in remote South Africa has had on the international community. And this book is but one of innumerable tributes in celebration of Mandela’s birthday on 18 July 1988. Mandela would not want to be singled out, but during more than a quarter of a century in jail he has become a symbol of South Africa’s uniquely oppressed society and the embodiment of his people’s prolonged struggle to be free.

The South African government hoped it had crushed that struggle by sentencing Mandela and other leaders to life imprisonment and by outlawing their organisation, the African National Congress. Yet today the ANC (founded in 1912) is acknowledged as the most powerful force fighting apartheid. It has done so through years of bitter unrest and ever more savage states of emergency. And despite the banning of books about Mandela – it is even illegal to quote him or to display his portrait – young South Africans born long after he disappeared behind prison walls regard him as their authentic leader. His almost legendary reputation has been enhanced by reports from men who have served alongside him on Robben Island and from the foreign visitors rarely permitted to see him.

Born into the royal family of the Tembu people in the Transkei, Mandela was brought up with a sense of responsibility. But he had a taste for adventure, and his Xhosa name (Rolihlahla) appropriately means ‘stirring up trouble’. (It was an English woman teacher who, recoiling at the Xhosa, called him Nelson.) To close friends, he is Madiba, his clan name.) After a college education cut short by a students’ strike, he turned his back on the prospect of chieftainship and escaped to the thrusting city of Johannesburg, where he found himself among thousands forced to live in ‘locations’ or shanty towns and subjected to continual harassment from police under the hated pass laws.

His political education had begun and, encouraged by a new friend Walter Sisulu, he joined the ANC. With Oliver Tambo they formed a remarkable team. (Sisulu was to remain at Mandela’s side through much of their imprisonment while Tambo was to lead the struggle from exile.) Joining other young African nationalists, they formed a Youth League to galvanise the somewhat conservative ANC. They sustained a policy of non-violence even in confronting the intensifying violence of the immensely powerful Afrikaner state. When 8,500 men and women – most of them African but with significant Indian support, and a handful of white volunteers – courted imprisonment, Mandela, learning to control his own hot temper, was appointed Volunteer-in-Chief of the Defiance Campaign.

Among organisers given a suspended sentence Mandela, like other leaders, was repeatedly banned from political activity. But he had meanwhile qualified as an attorney and established a partnership with Tambo. If they had not already been rebels against apartheid, said Tambo, their experiences as lawyers would have remedied that deficiency. Every case, every visit to the prisons, reminded them of the suffering and humiliation burning into their people. The laws, Mandela said, were immoral, unjust and intolerable.

In December 1956, one hundred and fifty-six men and women of all races were arrested and charged with treason. Mandela, among thirty defendants still on trial after four and a half years, played an important part in destroying the state’s case. All the accused were found not guilty.

On 21 March 1960 police violence was exposed more shockingly than ever before when they shot dead sixty-nine men, women and children at a township named Sharpeville. At this crucial time Mandela was deputed to lead the struggle from underground. It meant sacrificing his professional life but, far more painfully, his family life also: in 1958 he had married Winnie Nomzamo Madikizela, a lovely young medical social worker, and they had two small daughters. With Sisulu he organised one last non-violent strike, and as he daringly eluded the police the press dubbed him the Black Pimpernel. Defying the biggest call up of police and military since the Second World War, tens of thousands of workers responded to the call to stay at home. It was not enough. In a secret meeting with foreign correspondents, Mandela gravely declared, ‘If the government reaction is to crush by naked force our non-violent struggle, we will have to reconsider our tactics. In my mind we are closing a chapter on this question of a non-violent policy.’ Seven months later in December 1961 that chapter was ritually closed when the President General of the ANC, Chief Albert Lutuli, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition, so he said, of the organisation’s long history of non-violence. During the following week in South Africa sabotage against symbols of apartheid marked the birth of Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation). Leaflets proclaimed, ‘The time comes in the life of any nation when there only remain two choices: submit or fight. That time has now come to South Africa. We shall not submit ….’ While the sabotage continued Mandela made an exhilirating tour of African states to win support for the ANC. After a visit to London and a brief course of military training in Algeria, he slipped back into South Africa.

On 5 August 1962 he was captured and sentenced to five years for ‘inciting’ workers to strike and for leaving the country without valid travel documents. Within months he was again in the dock as Accused Number One, alongside Walter Sisulu and others, in the Rivonia Trial, charged with attempting to overthrow the government. Mandela did not deny planning sabotage. ‘I did not plan it … because I have any love of violence,’ he declared. ‘I planned it as a result of a calm and sober assessment of the political situation that had arisen after many years of tyranny, exploitation and oppression of my people by the whites.’

His statement from the dock has moved people in many lands with its final affirmation: ‘I have fought against white domination and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.’

On 12 June 1964 Mandela, Sisulu, Ahmed Kathrada, Govan Mbeki, Raymond Mhlaba, Andrew Mlangeni, Elias Motsoaledi and Dennis Goldberg were sentenced to life imprisonment. Mandela and the other black defendants were flown to Robben Island, a rocky outcrop surrounded by forbidding seas, some seven miles off Cape Town. There they were held with a score of other politicals in a special section of individual cells. They slept on thin mats, washed in cold water; the food was inedible, the warders abusive. Newspapers were forbidden. Every six months they were allowed one visit of half an hour and one letter of five hundred words, censored. These men, whom the New York Times said were regarded as heroes, the George Washingtons and Benjamin Franklins of South Africa, laboured with pick-axes and spades in a lime quarry, year after year, through cold year after year, through cold dank winters and baking summers.

From the start they had decided that no matter what they were subjected to, no weakness would be shown. Fellow prisoners came to regard Mandela and Sisulu with a kind of reverence. ‘Mandela taught me how to survive‚’ one was to say. ‘When I was ill he could have asked anybody else to see to me. He came to me personally. He even cleaned my toilet.’

Studies became a lifeline and each man shared his special knowledge of politics and law, economics, literature, and languages. Their protests (in which Mandela confronted prison officials with firm authority), their hunger strikes and go-slows, together with protests from the outside world, gradually won improvements such as beds, warmer clothing and more vegetables until by the 1970s visits had been increased and labour in the quarry was replaced by seaweed collecting or road building. In time, hard labour was ended altogether and, finally, the prisoners were allowed newspapers.

On an unforgettable occasion the boilers broke down, there was no food, and the men were kept locked in their cells. After furious protests food was eventually brought into their yard late at night. But when they entered the yard, hunger was forgotten as they gazed up, for the first time in years seeing the night sky, the Milky Way, the Southern Cross, all of them marvelling.

Throughout the nineteen years Mandela spent on Robben Island, Winnie had endured increasingly harsh restrictions as she struggled to make a living and bring up her daughters. Imprisoned in solitary confinement in 1969, she was twice brought to trial under the Terrorism Act and, each time, was acquitted. Clearly an inspiration to young blacks in Soweto, she was again detained after their uprising in 1976 and was released only to be banished to a hostile village in an Afrikaner backwater. A one-woman resistance movement, she eventually emerged triumphant, unbanned and back home in Soweto. In 1982 Mandela, Sisulu and three of the other Rivonia men were suddenly transferred to Pollsmoor Maximum Security Prison on the mainland. Two years later a remarkable event occurred: contact visits were permitted. For the first time in twenty-two years Mandela was permitted to embrace...