But what Gaur Radebe knew was far more than I did because he learned not only just the facts;7 he was able to get behind the facts and explain to you the causes for a particular viewpoint. And I learned history afresh and I met a number of them. Of course people like Michael Harmel with MAs, you know, and Rusty Bernstein was [a] BA from Wits [University of the Witwatersrand], these chaps…were also very good in history and although I was not a [Communist] Party man, but …I listened to them very carefully.8 It was very interesting to listen to them.

STENGEL: When you first went to the Communist Party meetings…you were very anti-communist then?

MANDELA: Yes quite, oh yes, oh yes.

STENGEL: So when you were going to the meetings it didn’t make you sympathetic to the Communist Party?…

MANDELA: No, no, no, no, no, no. I was just going there because I was invited and I was keen to see. It was a new society where you found Europeans, Indians and Coloureds and Africans together. Something new to me. Which I had never known. And I was interested in that.

STENGEL: You were interested in being a social observer more than you were interested in the politics.

MANDELA: Oh, no, no, no. I was not interested really in the politics. I was interested, you see, yes, in the social aspect of it…I was impressed by the members of the Communist Party. To see whites who were totally divested of colour consciousness was something, you know, which…was a new experience to me.

STENGEL: So did that feel liberating in a way? Was that intoxicating?

MANDELA: No, it was interesting. I wouldn’t say it was liberating. And that is why I attacked the communists, you see, when I [became] involved politically. And I didn’t think it was liberating. I thought Marxism was something that actually was subjecting us to a foreign ideology.

8. FROM A LETTER TO WINNIE MANDELA, DATED 20 JUNE 19709

Indeed, ‘the chains of the body are often wings to the spirit’. It has been so all along, and so it will always be. Shakespeare in As You Like It puts the same idea somewhat differently:

Sweet are the uses of adversity,

Which like a toad, ugly and venomous,

Wears yet a precious jewel in the head.10

Still others have proclaimed that ‘only great aims can arouse great energies’.

Yet my understanding of the real idea behind these simple words throughout the 26 years of my career of storms has been superficial, imperfect and perhaps a bit scholastic. There is a stage in the life of every social reformer when he will thunder on platforms primarily to relieve himself of the scraps of undigested information that has accumulated in his head; an attempt to impress the crowds rather than to start a calm and simple exposition of principles and ideas whose universal truth is made evident by personal experience and deeper study. In this regard I am no exception and I have been victim of the weakness of my own generation not once but a hundred times. I must be frank and tell you that when I look back at some of my early writings and speeches I am appalled by their pedantry, artificiality and lack of originality. The urge to impress and advertise is clearly noticeable.

9. FROM A CONVERSATION WITH RICHARD STENGEL ABOUT THE 1952 DEFIANCE CAMPAIGN AGAINST APARTHEID LAWS

Well, I had been in prison before that, but for minor violations and where I was detained for about a day, not even a full day. I was detained in the morning and released in the afternoon…I was arrested there, not because I had defied, but because I had gone and urinated in a, what-you-call, whites’ toilet room, for whites only. Well we can say I went to wash my hands in a white lavatory and then they arrested me…[chuckles]. It was a mistake on my part; I didn’t read the sign. So then they arrested me, took me to a police station. But at the end of the day they released me. Now, but here were people who were going to jail because of a principle, because they were protesting against a law which they regarded as unjust. Students who were my colleagues left classes and went to defy for the love of their people and their country.