Nelson Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom
Twin obligations and the meaning of freedom
Trace how Mandela's idea of freedom changed.
Twin obligations. Every man has two duties:
- to his family: parents, wife and children;
- to his people, community and country.
In apartheid South Africa a man of colour could not do both. If he served his people, he was 'ripped from his family' and lived 'a twilight existence of secrecy and rebellion'.
How his idea of freedom grew.
- As a boy: free to run in the fields near his mother's hut, swim in the stream, roast mealies under the stars and ride the backs of slow bulls.
- As a student: he wanted freedoms for himself: to stay out at night, read what he liked, go where he chose. These were 'transitory' (short-lived) freedoms.
- As a young man in Johannesburg: he wanted the basic, honourable freedoms of earning his keep and having a family.
- Then: he saw that none of his people were free. That is when he joined the ANC.
What the hunger for freedom did to him. It 'transformed a frightened young man into a bold one', drove a law-abiding attorney to become a 'criminal', turned a family-loving husband into a man without a home, and made a life-loving man live 'like a monk'.
Freedom is indivisible. 'The chains on any one of my people were the chains on all of them.' And the oppressor is not free either. He is 'a prisoner of hatred', locked behind the bars of prejudice. 'The oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of their humanity.'
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