September 3rd 2022

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.....my commitment to my people, to the millions of South Africans I would never know or meet, was at the expense of the people I knew best and loved most. It was as simple and yet as incomprehensible as the moment a small child asks her father, “Why can you not be with us?” And the father must utter the terrible words: “There are other children like you, a great many of them . . .” and then one’s voice trails off.

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"Long Walk to Freedom" is an autobiography of the South African leader, Nelson Mandela. Six hundred plus pages of this Book requires patience or at least a certain degree of interest to peek into the life of a leader who sacrificed his life for his belief. The book takes us into the journey from the young boyhood of Nelson Mandela growing into adulthood enrolling in the college and gaining acquaintance with the oppression by the white people to the black people. The journey then takes us into the rise in political awareness in the mind of young Nelson Mandela. He becomes member of the organization called African National Congress (ANC). The book also describes his experience to work in a law firm and then starting his own law firm with his partner. In Africa, the black people were badly discriminated and they were avoided from man of their basic rights. Nelson Mandela raised his voice and led the people against the apartheid. For taking part in the struggle against the injustice to the black people, he went through lot of hardship. He was imprisoned for about 27 years. All the events which happened during his stay in the prison is so beautifully described, his experience was mostly painful though. He along with his wife and his children suffered equally for his fight against the apartheid. The book is beautifully written and all the pages gripped me to the end.

Although I am not particularly interested in politics, this book kept me spellbound for many reasons. The book gave me a closer view of the South African tribal lives and their customs. There was nasty segregation of the black people. What really interested me was the similarity between the political development in South Africa and in Nepal. After so many times trying to negotiate in peaceful manner and failing, Nelson had to start Armed Struggle against the government. Many people died in the armed struggle in South Africa. Same thing happened in Nepal during the armed struggle in the name of Maoist movement. After the government and the armed struggle force came into peaceful talks, there was election of constituent assembly in South Africa. Same thing happened in Nepal. Mandela and Frederik Willem de Klerk got Nobel peace prize. No wonder Babu Ram Bhattarai, Prachanda and Girija Prasad Koirala were expecting Nobel prize for peace. So many similarities between the political development between the two countries except for the fact that no high level leader in Nepal who were on the side of the armed struggle got imprisoned and non of them had the honesty and integrity as Nelson Mandela.

Although the book is pretty long and detailed I still find some details missing. It is a curiosity in my mind which has not been fully addressed by the book. I wished that Mandela had disclosed minutely about the source of fund for mobilizing armed struggle and how finance was managed. After coming out of the prison, I wonder how he was able to build his house and how his personal finance was managed. It would have been really nice to look into how money is managed under such abnormal circumstances.

Overall, the book is captivating. I really enjoyed every page of it. It is not a long-boring political book. Rather it is a book which takes us into the pain, struggle and sacrifice of the leader for the betterment of the society at large. I would recommend this book to anyone who would like to meet a strong and determined person. If you like this book, you will also love "My Experiments with Truth", an autobiography of Mahatma Gandhi. I would rate this book 4 out of 5 stars.

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A few words extracted from this amazing book:

"I had been taught that to have a B.A. meant to be a leader, and to be a leader one needed a B.A. But in Johannesburg I found that many of the most outstanding leaders had never been to university at all. Even though I had done all the courses in English that were required for a B.A., my English was neither as fluent nor as eloquent as many of the men I met in Johannesburg who had not even received a school degree."

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"I have always believed that exercise is not only a key to physical health but to peace of mind."

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"I had concluded that the time had come when the struggle could best be pushed forward through negotiations. If we did not start a dialogue soon, both sides would be plunged into a dark night of oppression, violence, and war. My solitude would give me an opportunity to take the first steps in that direction, without the kind of scrutiny that might destroy such efforts. We had been fighting against white minority rule for three-quarters of a century. We had been engaged in the armed struggle for more than two decades. Many people on both sides had already died. The enemy was strong and resolute. Yet even with all their bombers and tanks, they must have sensed they were on the wrong side of history. We had right on our side, but not yet might. It was clear to me that a military victory was a distant if not impossible dream. It simply did not make sense for both sides to lose thousands if not millions of lives in a conflict..."

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"Walter considered what I told him. I could see he was uncomfortable, and at best, lukewarm. “In principle,” he said, “I am not against negotiations. But I would have wished that the government initiated talks with us rather than us initiating talks with them.” I replied that if he was not against negotiations in principle, what did it matter who initiated them? What mattered was what they achieved, not how they started. I told Walter that I thought we should move forward with negotiations and not worry about who knocked on the door first."

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"A mother’s death causes a man to look back on and evaluate his own life. Her difficulties, her poverty, made me question once again whether I had taken the right path. That was always the conundrum: Had I made the right choice in putting the people’s welfare even before that of my own?"

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“We watched our children growing without our guidance,” I said at the wedding, “and when we did come out [of prison], my children said, ‘We thought we had a father and one day he’d come back. But to our dismay, our father came back and he left us alone because he has now become the father of the nation.’ ” To be the father of a nation is a great honor, but to be the father of a family is a greater joy. But it was a joy I had far too little of.

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