Invictus - Carlin [15]
Sisulu had observed him out of prison, observed him in prison, and—like the trainer who spots the young boxer who becomes heavyweight champ—congratulated himself on the astuteness of his choice. Sisulu was always, by preference, in Mandela’s shadow, yet Mandela relied on him for advice on matters personal and political all his life. It was Sisulu, for example, who best understood how to thaw the white jailers’ hearts. The key to it all, as he would explain much later, was “respect, ordinary respect.” He did not want to crush his enemies. He did not want to humiliate them. He did not want to repay them in kind. He just wanted them to treat him with no-frills, run-of-the-mill respect.
That was precisely what the rough, undereducated white men who ruled over his prison wanted too, and that was what Mandela endeavored to give them right from the start, however hellish they made life for him. His cell, his home for eighteen years, was smaller than the average white South African’s bathroom. Eight feet by seven feet, or three Mandela paces long and two and a half across, it had one small barred window a square foot in size that looked onto a flat cement courtyard where the prisoners would sit for hours at a time breaking stones. Mandela slept on a straw mat, and three threadbare blankets provided the only protection against the windy cold of the Cape winters. Like the rest of the political prisoners, who enjoyed fewer privileges than the criminal occupants of the island’s plusher wing, he was obliged to wear short pants (long ones were provided only for the Indian or coloured prisoners, not for the black Africans), and the food was as scarce as it was grim: a corn gruel laced, on good days, with gristle. Mandela soon lost weight and his vitamin-deprived skin became sallow, yet he was forced to engage in hard labor, either working with a pick on the island’s lime quarry or collecting seaweed that would be exported to Japan for use as fertilizer. To wash they were given buckets of cold Atlantic seawater.
Two months after Mandela’s arrival on Robben Island, his lawyer George Bizos had his first chance to see the toll that prison had taken on him. Mandela was now much thinner and humiliatingly dressed in those short pants and shoes without socks. Forming a box around him were eight smartly uniformed guards, two in front, two behind, and two on each side. But from the moment Bizos spotted his client, he could tell that Mandela carried himself differently from the typical prisoner. When he emerged from the prison van with his escort, he, not his guards, set the pace. Bizos threaded his way past the two guards in front and embraced his client, to the confusion of the guards, who had never conceived of the notion of a white man hugging a black one. The two men chatted briefly, Mandela asking after his old friend’s family, but with a start he interrupted himself and said, “George, I’m sorry, I have not introduced you to my guard of honor.” Mandela identified each of the officers to Bizos by name. The guards were so stunned, as Bizos would recall many years later, “that they actually behaved like a guard of honor, each respectfully shaking my hand.”
It was not always thus. The guards and the commanding officers of the prison inevitably rotated, and some regimes were brutal, some relatively benign. Mandela, recognized by his fellow political prisoners as their leader from day one, refined the art of manipulating all of them, irrespective of their character. He strove to persuade the prisoners that deep down all the guards were vulnerable human beings; that it was the system that had made many of them brutish. But that did not mean that when the occasion required it Mandela failed to stand up aggressively for his rights. The one