Invictus - Carlin [14]
When the ANC took up the armed struggle in 1961, largely at his behest, and he became commander in chief of the ANC’s Umkhonto we Sizwe, he shed the suits and took up liberation chic, modeling himself on one of his heroes, Che Guevara. At the very last public function he attended before his arrest in 1962, a party in Durban, he appeared in green camouflage guerrilla dress. He was the most wanted man in South Africa at the time, but such was the importance he gave to striking the right note of defiance, as well as the pleasure he derived from standing out in a crowd, that he refused his comrades’ advice to shave off the imitation “Che” beard he sported in police Most Wanted photographs.
If his vanity was, in part at least, his downfall, he also put it to good use. In jail, facing charges of sabotage, he determined that at his first appearance in court he would again steal the show. He entered the courtroom with deliberately magisterial slowness, dressed, as befitted his status in the Xhosa clan where he was raised, in the elaborate garb of a high-ranking African chieftain—an animal skin across his chest, beads around his neck and arms. As he strode to his seat, a hush fell over the room; even the judge struggled briefly to find his voice. He sat down, then, on a nod from the judge, stood up, slowly surveying the room before beginning what would turn out to be an electrifying speech. It began, “I am a black man in a white man’s court,” and it achieved precisely the national purpose he sought, generating a mood of unbowed black defiance.
It was an important discovery. Prison could also serve as a political stage; even from behind bars he could make an impact. It transformed his outlook on the sentence that lay before him, and from then on, building on the skills he had acquired as a lawyer defending black clients in white courts during the fifties, he used prison as his practice ground, the place where he trained himself for the grand game that awaited him outside. He honed his natural ability for theater toward the achievement of his political ends, rehearsing his role among his jailers and fellow prisoners for the triumphant destiny he had the temerity to believe awaited him outside.
The first challenge was to get to know his enemy, a task to which he applied himself with the same rigor he devoted to his physical exercises. He had two tools at hand: books—through which he learned about the history of the Afrikaners and taught himself their language—and the Afrikaner prison guards, simple men, occupants of the lowest rung in apartheid’s great white labor preferment scheme. Fikile Bam, who spent time in prison with Mandela, remembered vividly the seriousness with which, right from the start of his sentence, Mandela set about understanding the Afrikaner mentality. “In his mind, and he actually preached this to us, the Afrikaner was an African. He belonged to the soil, and whatever solution there was going to be on the political issues was going to involve Afrikaans people.”
At the time, the standard ANC position was that Afrikaner power was an updated version of European colonialism. For Mandela to challenge that view, to declare that the Afrikaners had as much right to be called Africans as the black Africans with whom he shared his cells, took some pluck. Nor did he disguise his newfound passion for finding out about the Afrikaners’ past. “He had this very intense interest in historical Afrikaner figures, not least Afrikaner leaders during the Anglo-Boer War,” Bam said. “He knew the names of the various Boer commanders.”
In prison, Mandela took an Afrikaans language course for a couple of years, and he never missed an opportunity to work on improving his proficiency in the language. “He had absolutely no qualms about greeting people in Afrikaans, and about trying his Afrikaans out on the warders. Other prisoners had their doubts and inhibitions, but not Nelson. He wanted to really get to know Afrikaners. The warders served his purpose wonderfully well.”
And not just for