Extended Summary
Long Walk to Freedom, the autobiography of Nelson Mandela, describes the South African antiapartheid struggle from the perspective of one of its most important participants. In the book, Mandela describes his childhood; his development into a freedom fighter; his twenty-seven years in prison; and his remarkable role in the construction of a new, democratic South Africa. Long Walk to Freedom was published in 1995, the year after South Africa’s first democratic elections made Mandela the first black president of South Africa.
Mandela begins his book with a description of his genealogy, which is intended to silence rumors that he has a hereditary claim to kingship of the Xhosa people, one of South Africa’s largest cultural groups. Mandela goes on to describe his early childhood, which was spent herding cattle and practicing traditional Xhosa fighting. When Mandela was old enough, his father sent him to school, which was a relatively rare privilege for a child in his village. Mandela excelled at school and an uncle paid for him to continue his education at a series of elite boarding schools.
In the next two sections of the book, Mandela describes his young adulthood and his gradual transformation into a leader of South Africa’s freedom movement. As a young man, Mandela moved to Johannesburg and became active in the African National Congress (ANC), an organization that fought for the rights of black South Africans. Early on, Mandela adopted a leadership role in the ANC’s Youth League, a subgroup that advocated more radical ideals than did the main organization.
South Africa had long been ruled by unjust racial laws, but the situation changed for the worse in 1948, when an all-white vote brought the conservative National Party into power. From that time onward, the National Party codified and expanded South Africa’s racist laws, creating the system of apartheid, which means separateness. Apartheid laws were not only designed to keep the members of South Africa’s many racial groups separate; they were also specifically crafted to keep the country’s white minority in a position of power and privilege. Apartheid laws prevented black South Africans from leaving tiny reservations called homelands unless they carried a pass document that proved they held employment in a white area. African, mixed-race, and Indian South Africans could not legally ride all-white buses, enter all-white recreation areas, or even sit down to eat dinner with white friends. Interracial relationships were outlawed, and separate educational systems were created for each race. By far the lowest educational standards were introduced for black South Africans, and elite schools like the ones Mandela had attended were closed.
Mandela describes how the ANC and partner organizations mobilized against apartheid, instituting the Defiance Campaign in 1951. During this nonviolent campaign, Mandela and other volunteers peacefully broke apartheid laws—boarding all-white trains or entering neighborhoods designated for people of another race—and went to prison. These actions gained the protesters attention and sympathy from liberal white South Africans as well as from the rest of the world.
Although the Defiance Campaign did not succeed in its goal of eliminating apartheid laws, Mandela claims it was successful in increasing communication between and determination within South Africa’s many freedom organizations. In 1955, Mandela helped lead the Congress of the People, a summit of all the groups in South Africa that advocated freedom and equality. The main event at the Congress of the People was the reading of a document called the Freedom Charter, which demanded equality and democratic representation for everyone. The Congress of the People ended in a police raid, with many of its leaders carried away in handcuffs. Apartheid leaders...
(This entire section contains 1714 words.)
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declared the Freedom Charter an illegal communist document.
Mandela was not immediately arrested for his participation in the Congress of the People. Apartheid leaders spent several months gathering evidence and creating a legal case against the leaders of the freedom movement. In 1956, Mandela and 155 other protest leaders were arrested and accused of high treason against the South African government. The government staged a five-year trial to prove that the leaders of the struggle were violent communists who wanted to undermine a peaceful society. Although all three judges who presided over the trial seemed loyal supporters of apartheid, they voted unanimously that the evidence they weighed did not indicate treason. They found all the defendants, including Mandela, not guilty.
In spite of the eventual vindication of the participants in the Congress of the People, Mandela writes that the period during and after the trial was a difficult one for the antiapartheid struggle. Apartheid leaders found a series of ways to limit antiapartheid activities. They called a series of States of Emergency, which prevented virtually all protest activities. Then on March 21, 1960, police massacred a group of peaceful protestors at the black township of Sharpeville. Mandela and the ANC became convinced that nonviolent protest was no longer a viable option.
Shortly after his acquittal at the Treason Trial, Mandela accepted the task of starting an armed ANC movement called Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation) to move toward the goal of violently overthrowing South Africa’s white government. For months, Mandela lived underground, under a series of secret identities, studying military tactics and making plans. Later he traveled in secret to several other African countries, where he solicited training, monetary support, and weapons from other African anticolonial groups. After he returned, he led Umkhonto we Sizwe to perform acts of sabotage against critical South African infrastructure sites.
Mandela’s job as Umkhonto we Sizwe’s leader was short-lived. In 1961, he was captured by the South African police. He was convicted of inciting strikes and of traveling abroad without a passport. The penal system sent him to the notorious Robben Island prison. Partway through his five-year prison sentence, Mandela was placed on trial yet again, this time with a sentence of death hanging in the balance.
In the section on his final trial, Mandela explains that in spite of the risk of execution, he and his fellow freedom fighters used the proceedings as an opportunity to voice their complaints against apartheid. They did not deny committing acts of violence against the South African government, but they claimed that the government’s unjust laws had forced them to take violent action. Near the beginning of the trial, Mandela had the opportunity to read a statement to clarify his organization’s policies and ideals. In it, he described his efforts to achieve freedom in South Africa. He finished with these words:
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.
Mandela and all of his associates were convicted of sabotage. However, they were not put to death. They were sentenced to life imprisonment instead.
Mandela returned to Robben Island, lived in a tiny cell and performed hard labor in a lime quarry. In the early years, he and his associates had little reason to hope, but they continued their antiapartheid struggle anyway. They fought for racial equality among prisoners; educated younger prisoners about South African history, politics, and civil rights issues; and tried to influence prison guards to change their beliefs. Mandela and several of his fellow prisoners secured the right to take correspondence courses toward university degrees. Under the guise of studying, Mandela wrote the first draft of his autobiography and managed to smuggle a copy to the outside world.
Outside Robben Island, the antiapartheid struggle continued. National Party rulers faced domestic, economic, and international pressures to pursue democracy. These leaders began to realize they had to make a change. After many years on Robben Island, Mandela was moved to Pollsmoor Prison and then to Victor Verster Prison, both near Cape Town. There he began meeting in secret with white government officials, including P. W. Botha an F. W. de Klerk, the last two presidents of South Africa under apartheid. In 1990, de Klerk announced the gradual repeal of major apartheid laws, and he ordered Mandela’s release from prison. For the first time in twenty-seven years, Mandela was able to walk free.
For several years following his release from prison, Mandela helped lead resistance and government leaders through a series of complicated negotiations. These talks broke down again and again because of disagreements. White leaders understood the need to dismantle apartheid laws and allow some form of government representation to black South Africans. However, whites fought hard against allowing total equality to South Africa’s black majority, and black leaders refused to compromise on this point. Periodic outbreaks of interracial violence—with accusations of fault toward all sides—complicated leaders’ ability to develop trust. In 1993, the murder of Chris Hani, an ANC leader, caused such outrage that South Africa seemed certain to plunge into civil war.
By this point, Mandela had come to believe that war was not an acceptable option; it would last too long and cause too much suffering. The evening after Chris Hani’s murder, Mandela addressed the South African nation on television. He asked his fellow South Africans to make a commitment to freedom:
Now is the time for all South Africans to stand together against those who, from any quarter, wish to destroy what Chris Hani gave his life for—the freedom of all of us.
This speech helped forestall violence and propel the difficult negotiations toward closure. Shortly afterward, the date was set for a national election in which, for the first time, every adult South African would be allowed an equal vote. That year, Mandela and de Klerk were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
South Africa’s first democratic elections took place in April 1994. People lined up for the polls in lines that stretched kilometers long. Though violence continued to plague the country in the lead-up to the elections, the election day itself was largely peaceful. The ANC, with Mandela as its presidential candidate, received 62.6% of the vote, a decisive decision that ushered them into power. Their long walk to freedom had ended, and their responsibility to govern had begun.