Cape Town - As we remember Nelson Mandela on his birthday on Saturday, each of us see him differently.
To you, he may have been a smiling president, or a prisoner who survived 27 years without bitterness; a freedom fighter, or a boxer who loved sport; a gardener, or a statesman who could draw bigger crowds than the greatest celebrities on the planet.
These images form only a part of the much more complex character of Mandela, a man who defied categorisation but came to redefine the image of greatness.
I recently read the memoir of his warder, Christo Brand, Doing Life With Mandela, and was grateful for his frank, intimate account of those prison years. I met Brand on Robben Island with Ahmed Kathrada a couple of years ago while speaking at a commemoration event – I had been, unusually, a white prisoners’ visitor during the last years – and was impressed with Brand’s straightforward and open discussion.
He writes of the little things that mattered deeply to these model prisoners; of Madiba’s favourite possession, a white hat to protect him from the sun. It had been made especially for him by the longest-serving prisoner on the Island, Japhta Masemola (locked up for 28 years). “He was a man,” writes Brand.
Masemola, who could fix anything and everything, writes Brand, would use whatever he could find – pieces of driftwood, paper torn from cement bags. He made the hat for Mandela out of cardboard, coloured with white paint (seen on the cover of A Prisoner In The Garden, compiled by the Nelson Mandela Foundation).
Brand writes: “Mandela wouldn’t go anywhere without it – he wore it in the limestone quarry and when he was gardening. It was among the handful of items that left prison with him when he was released years later.”
Mandela was a rural country boy, born into a chieftain’s family in the Eastern Cape. In Young Mandela, newspaperman David James Smith writes that while both his parents were illiterate, Mandela was a clever boy and at seven he became the first child of his family to go to school, wearing the cut-off trousers of his father, tightly tied around his waist – his first Western clothing.
As a young man, he and his royal cousin bolted for Johannesburg to escape arranged marriages. There Mandela, very poor, stayed with kin and hospitable people such as the Sisulus, working briefly as a security guard at the mines before going to work at a law firm as an articled clerk, enrolling at Wits for his law degree. The late Wolfie Kodesh, an old comrade of Mandela’s, described how people used to turn to look at him on the street, a “prince-like figure”, and attractive to women.
One day he saw a beautiful young woman waiting at the Park Station bus stop and gave her a lift in his car; it was Winnie. Nothing came of that initial meeting, but a little later she was again introduced to him through the Tambos, and so began one of the most famous relationships of the 20th century.
Still, it is his tiny prison cell that defined Mandela in the eyes of the world. I have sat in it alone in the dark, in winter, unable to imagine how he and his fellow inmates survived. The cells were damp, freezing and raw (unpainted then): their very bodies dried them out as they lay on the concrete floors on two mats, issued no more than three blankets. Mandela’s daily exercise routine began at 5am and never has the term “warm-up” been more appropriate.
Mandela loved gardening and he had green fingers: it also supplemented the very poor diet which, on the Island, was racially dictated: black prisoners received smaller food allowances than prisoners of another “colour” and no bread at all. Kathrada would cut up his precious bread ration and share it with his friends. Mandela grew tomatoes, and also aubergines and spinach. He even grew a peach tree that produced fruit. Brand recalls that Mandela “taught me to look after and respect a living thing, a fruit or a flower, something alive”. He loved Ouma rusks with his tea or coffee and would ask Brand to buy them for him from his small prison allowance.
One of the most moving moments in Brand’s book is when he smuggled Mandela’s four-month-old granddaughter, Zoleka, hidden under Winnie’s blanket, in to Mandela for a few moments. Mandela kissed Zoleka with tears in his eyes: Mandela turned to Brand on their way back to his cell and thanked him, saying he knew Brand could lose his job. “Now it’s a secret between us, just you and me.”
Mandela’s magic was his capacity to seek out the best in each person, as he had done with his warder. Matured in political fire, tempered in a damp prison, he ended his Nobel speech in 1993: “Let the strivings of us all prove Martin Luther King jr to have been correct when he said that humanity can no longer be tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war.
“Let the efforts of us all prove that he was not a mere dreamer when he spoke of… brotherhood and peace being more precious than diamonds or silver or gold.”
Cape Argus