Bongani Madondo, August 6, 2018<\/p>\n
Torn for so long between anxiety and awe at the idolisation of Nelson Mandela, The JRB Contributing Editor<\/a> Bongani Madondo<\/a> approached his latest book of letters with trepidation, only to be uplifted by Mandela\u2019s scorching vulnerability.<\/em><\/p>\n 1. Dated 31 August 1970 Letter to Makgatho Mandela: His son<\/p>\n Heit My Bla I don\u2019t know whether I should address you as son, mninawa or, as we would say in the lingo, my sweet brigade. <\/em><\/p>\n \u2014Page 191, The Prison Letters of Nelson Mandela <\/em><\/p>\n 2. Dated 23 June 1969 Letter to Zenani and Zindzi: His daughters with Winnie Mandela <\/em><\/p>\n My Darlings Perhaps never again will Mummy and Daddy join you in House No 8115 Orlando West, the one place in the whole world that is so dear to our hearts. <\/em><\/p>\n \u2014Page 106, The Prison Letters of Nelson Mandela <\/em><\/p>\n The Prison Letters of Nelson Mandela, Sahm Venter, Penguin Random House, 2018<\/strong><\/p>\n 1.<\/p>\n Like our latter-day, digital-insta neediness\u2014over-sharing, over-confessing, over-fishing for \u2018likes\u2019 and red-hued mini hearts\u2014the art of letter writing was, at its most basic, an earnest but not always honest means of reaching out to the world. In other words, letter writing was a personal, and, in the supplest of hands, an artistic quest to create a sense of community, through the grace and showmanship necessitated by the form.<\/p>\n The era of letter writing\u2014from 1995 backwards, now lost forever\u2014demanded a different set of conditions for the act of creation: solitude, ink bleeding in cutely handcrafted script on to the pages, the \u2018writer\u2019 burdened with the anxiety of filling too many of them, which folded together might not fit into a specific-sized envelope. Envelopes too, as carriers: subject to their own economies, which of course affected not just the length of their contents, but also the frequency that the would-be letter practitioner, letter romantic, could write.<\/p>\n The project of letter writing, then: tactile, performative, urgent, questing, desperate and\u2014depending on the occasion\u2014sometimes one of crafting lullabies with hand-quilted scripts, in a fashion redolent of craft, to win a target\u2019s affections. It was the closest thing to broadcasting your seal of style: your most personal yearnings expressed in the most singular combination of gestures, tones and colours.<\/p>\n Perhaps because of the cruel and inhumane confinement that he and his comrades were subjected to for close to three decades, or simply because of the need to mobilise, reach out to people and express himself, or because he was separated from his wife and children too early, and the soul-wrenching way it happened, or all of the above, Ol\u2019 Dalibunga drew sustenance from writing letters.<\/p>\n In addition to the now well-established multimillion-dollar cottage industry of Mandela Literature (itself part of a humongous global Madibanomics enterprise lorded over by warring legal eagles, family, foundations, publishing houses, copyright raiders, snake-fat salesmen and the like), a sub-genre of Madiba archival literature is emerging, which is inherently limited: his prison letters.<\/p>\n This new hardback collection, The Prison Letters of Nelson Mandela<\/em><\/a>, published by Penguin Random House and edited by Sahm Venter, with a foreword by Zamaswazi Dlamini-Mandela, hit the shelves on the eve of the global centenary celebrations of the man and his legacy. As a concept, the book should not stir up too much excitement\u2014mainly because it is not the first collection of Ol\u2019 Dalibunga\u2019s personal letters. In 2010, Pan Macmillan published Conversations with Myself<\/em>, with a foreword by Barack Obama (the closest heir to the spirit amalgam of Mandela and Martin Luther King the twenty-first century has thus far produced) and so, speaking flippantly or even with a dose of self-righteousness, Prison Letters<\/em> does not immediately evoke a sense of discovery, a whiff of newness or a promise of revelation. The aforementioned Conversations<\/em>, and to an extent Winnie Madikizela-Mandela\u2019s 491 Days: Prisoner Number 1323\/69<\/em> (Pan Macmillan, 2013), are at heart personal testimonies and private correspondences issuing out of, or heading back into, prison. So the Mandela letters literary market\u2014racket?\u2014should by rights be over-traded. No so?<\/p>\n Prison: the anti-home away from home. But, also, a space for organising otherwise rampant, roaming thoughts. Through meditative routine, sheer endurance or implacable indifference to outside luxury, poets, prose writers and activists have made the most of their situations in prison. Some of the most inspired prison writings\u2014The Man Died: Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka<\/em>, as well as the diaries of Kofi Awoonor, Sanyika Shakur (aka Kody Scott), Ng\u0169g\u0129 wa Thiong\u2019o, Wally Serote, among others\u2014have shown how prohibitively small spaces and the concomitant curtailing of movements\u2014the physical and psychological lockdown of all your faculties\u2014can be escaped, if only through the flight of the mind.<\/p>\n Finally, prison is also a place, as Mandela\u2019s letter writing project over three decades illustrates, where the most fertile and determined of freedom-seeking souls can escape at will, even while their bodies are locked inside their cells and forced into demeaning menial labour, also known as the state\u2019s legalised slavery.<\/p>\n 2.<\/p>\n As per the book\u2019s inside flap: Prison Letters<\/em> is organised chronologically and segmented into the four venues in which Nelson Mandela was held as a sentenced prisoner. It begins in Pretoria Local Prison, where Mandela was held following the 1962 Rivonia Trial. In 1964, he was taken to Robben Island, \u2018where a stark existence was lightened only by visits and letters from family\u2019. Then, to Pollsmoor Prison in Cape Town\u2019s southern suburbs, where Mandela and a few of his comrades were held in rooftop cells, separate from the larger population of inmates, and finally to Victor Verster Prison, which was clearly a preparatory holding space and provided some kind of re-induction into the social and cultural fabric of the late nineteen-eighties. This for a man who was intermittently jailed in the late nineteen-fifties and early nineteen-sixties until his final capture, trial and twenty-seven year stretch.<\/p>\n Not that Mandela, before Victor Verster, was totally in the dark about the outside world. If there\u2019s any inmate who, despite spiritually debilitating circumstances, was looked after while inside and treated with utmost respect\u2014and indeed with less fear than, say, the likes of Robert Sobukwe and Jafta Masemola, who inspired pathological levels of that emotion in their captors\u2014then Mandela was that prisoner. But much about his time in prison, his rising above circumstances, is well known. Indeed, so much has been written about Mandela that it seems impossible to unlock fresh water from the boulder to quench our thirst for new insights. This collection is accordingly not exempt from the weight of history and the dullness of too much information, too much knowingness, when it comes to his life.<\/p>\n And yet \u2026 and yet. There is something about its editing, patient archival organisation (dates, full names, nicknames, glossary), original facsimile copies of yellowing and tattered letters and, ultimately, narrative sequencing. There is something here.<\/p>\n Editor Sahm Venter, a veteran of the Mandela archive (housed at the Nelson Mandela Foundation, whose blessing this book necessarily bears), has over the years developed an extra pair of ears for the voluble in Madiba\u2019s most vulnerable silences and whispers. Her experience is discernible in the manner which she hauls over an archival project and renders it into a curiosity-piquing literary assemblage. She intrinsically understands the patience and scholarship it takes to balance the whimsical and the tragic, or separate the fantasy from the realism in a subject\u2019s perpetual self-documentation and (re)writing. With this project, Venter and Dlamini-Mandela (Mandela\u2019s granddaughter, a young woman proving to be her family\u2019s literary custodian) have pulled off quite a risky but ultimately worthy literary trapeze act, which doubles as a vital legacy project.<\/p>\n The book is brimful of Mandela in bloom, in pain, in defiance. Mandela the patriarch dad hoping\u2014at some point seemingly succeeding\u2014to govern his home from the confines of his cell. Mandela the traditionalist invested and well versed in the rural affairs and cultural customs of his native Eastern Cape, then known as \u2018The Colony\u2019. Steadily, starting from one of the first letters Mandela wrote, to Mr. L. Blom Cooper of Amnesty (International), dated 06 November 1962, while Mandela was still on trial, through to the mid-nineteen-seventies and early-nineteen-eighties era of intense black uprisings, something emerges here. Mandela the friend, charmer, dad, brother-in-law, student of life, reader, political strategist: ultimately the book reveals a distinctly unheroic, distinctly vulnerable person. A spirit tearing at the seams but never detached. A soul that is aware of the pitfalls of giving up. A self-assembling persona that understands its freedom and the freedom of its people, as Mandela himself wrote in the famous letter to his then-teenage daughter Zindzi, which she read in Soweto in 1985, \u2018cannot be separated\u2019.<\/p>\n Nelson Mandela scholars and the broader Mandela literary \u2018hive\u2019, as it were, will be familiar with some of these texts. For example, half of the section entitled \u2018Family Correspondence\u2019\u2014themed \u2018Arras\u2019 in Conversations<\/em>\u2014is carried here again without blushes. The book gets away with it, largely, because both books are products of the same archive, and unlike the essay or straight biography, letters remain pretty much the same from work to work. In a literary context, they are their own players and referees.<\/p>\n I found them touching and deeply poetic.<\/p>\n I also felt quite guilty, traipsing around the Madiba interiority map like a trespasser in the witching hour, stealing into another person\u2019s most personal, most anguished, most optimistic and ultimately most self-liberating space. I felt it an invasive act reading, for example, of the harrowing, helpless attempts (and failures) at gluing his family together\u2014the need to be a presence in absentia<\/em>, a magical feat that would test the most accomplished conjurer.<\/p>\n The guilt I felt, though, could not pry me away from feasting on the most personal of Mandela\u2019s writings.<\/p>\n 3.<\/p>\n I perused, ferreted, longed and even yearned for them. Biography addicts are zealots, but collected letters fans are a niche and notch lower: we are scavengers of the soul; we lust, insatiable voyeurs.<\/p>\n In letter after letter to Winnie Mandela, and to daughters from Makaziwe to Zindzi\u2014especially upon hearing the news of his first-born son Thembekile\u2019s death in the spring of 1969\u2014the dad\/husband opens up, drawing the reader into his taut language, which, however, does not do much to hide a soul on the edge of total wilt. And yet, like a stubborn spring flower, he refuses to wilt. Instead, he seems to gain strength with each letter. No matter that a truck-load of of them do not ever reach their destinations; no matter that they are spied upon, censored, desecrated\u2014or kept in pristine conditions, safe in some apartheid apparatchik\u2019s vault.<\/p>\n In this book, Winnie Mandela, once again\u2014no surprise\u2014morphs into a central character: in fact, she is internalised and reimagined as different characters in one\u2014almost a reversal of Njabulo Ndebele\u2019s Homeric The Cry of Winnie Mandela<\/em> (New Africa Books, 2003). Finding himself aflutter between hero-worshipping Winnie, in total exultation at her strength and militant resolve, in her caregiving skills and role as anchor of the family, and total frustration at his own immobility, especially in those moments Winnie herself is subject to lengthy imprisonments, Mandela breaks into heart-piercing arias, calling her: Dadewethu, Comrade, Mentor, Hero, Sister, Love of My Life, and Nobandla, Mhlope and Zami.<\/p>\n Constructed through his pen, Winnie is not really waiting\u2014pace<\/em> Ndebele\u2019s Penelope-Winnie\u2014for Mandela at all. Her hands, heart, soul and house are brimful. She\u2019s on the move, she is everywoman. And yet a piece of her belongs to him and him alone, even though the struggle of her people, his people, has all but consumed her.<\/p>\n In Mandela\u2019s letters, Winnie is the African spirit-alternate in Nina Simone\u2019s \u2018Four Women\u2019.<\/p>\n In this song, from the 1966 album Wild Is the Wind, recorded in the midst of the Civil Rights struggle in America, Simone created a sonic-theatrical tableau inhabited by four women. Four seemingly different women\u2014but who might possibly be the same mutating spirit, y\u2019know. There is \u2018Aunt Sarah\u2019, who portrays the abuse and resilience within and against slavery. Pain is inflicted on her again and again. The second character, Saffronia\u2014think of Toni Morrison\u2019s singular and feisty Sula, a woman in control of her body and desires, even as she was rendered eccentric, a pariah; and think, too, of Gabo M\u00e1rquez\u2019s Remedios the Beauty from One Hundred Years of Solitude<\/em>, a woman who lived in her head so much that one day she took off and floated up in the sky, never to return. She is also, possibly, a product of the systemic rape and abuse of the African woman by Europeans\u2019 \u2018civilising\u2019 power. The third character is that of a woman who is in command of her sexual capital and so no one but herself will determine her currency.<\/p>\n The last\u2014the climax of both the narrative and the music on to which this Negroid and Negri-tudinal socio-cultural spectacle takes place\u2014is Peaches. We are told she is embittered and hardened by generations of enslavement (but that might be disempowering an otherwise radical spirit). I take her name and what she represents as Sankofa, the resilient Akan and Asante symbolical bird simultaneously expressive of the past and the future: Roots and Futurism. Peaches is, in a way, the song\u2019s freest, or at least most freeing character, just by the manner through which Simone screams her name.<\/p>\n