Knowing Mandela via letters

CAPE TOWN, August 21: A book giving an inside and as yet untold account of life on Robben Island for political prisoners, including forme...

CAPE TOWN, August 21: A book giving an inside and as yet untold account of life on Robben Island for political prisoners, including former president Nelson Mandela, was launched here on Friday by its author Ahmed Kathrada.Letters From Robben Island is a collection of 86 of Kathrada’s letters written from the apartheid-era jail, where he and Mandela spent 18 years after being convicted of conspiracy against the state in 1963.

Those years together brought Kathrada and Mandela closer to each other, an emotion reflected in the letters, many of them smuggled past the prison’s censors.

In one he writes how Mandela took to the stage for a makeshift prison production of Jean Annouilh’s Antigone. As Creon, Mandela turned in a performance that "more than made up for his dethronement of the (prison’s) domino champion in 1973".

Later, in 1986, he writes to the daughter of Fatima Meer, Mandela’s official biographer, how "Uncle Nelson’s" exaggerated calm exasperated his fellow anti-apartheid inmates.

"We areconvinced that if he were told that he was to be released tomorrow, he would return to his cell and tell us after an hour or two, as if it were simply another one of those everyday things," he wrote.

In 1988, he gossips that life with the "old geezers" – such as Mandela and stalwart Walter Sisulu – was a mixed blessing. They were "a constant source of inspiration and encouragement", but rather prudish. Rude jokes and four-letter expletives were "absolutely prohibited".

They rarely got angry, he recalls, but when one of them did, the worst insult he could hurl was "you facist".

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But Kathrada’s letters also bring home the suffering endured by the jailed men, most of them now considered South African heroes.

He writes how he was too overwrought to hold his young niece when she was brought to him in prison as he had not seen a baby for 20 years.

Kathrada, 70, insisted that the letters be published uncensored, but confesses that he now worries some South Africans will be offended by such frankoutpourings. Publishing was not easy in other ways too, he said as the smuggled letters are written in a special code which he had partly forgotten. He had to enlist researchers and his old comrades to help decipher the missives.

"This book contains my innermost thoughts, my love, my hate, my desires, my longings, my deprivation, my pettiness," Kathrada said at the book launch.A guest at the function, President Thabo Mbeki thanked Kathrada for giving a glimpse of how principled his generation was. "The people in this book are very human human beings, but I think that is part of what gave them a particular (political) view," he said.