Nelson Mandela: The Prison Years
During the 1950s and early 1960s, Nelson Mandela frequently found himself in police station cells, court holding cells and prison cells for due to his political work in regards to the Apartheid regime that was in place in South Africa at the time. Apartheid was the political, social and racial segregation of the people of South Africa that was in place from 1948-94. So after the banning of the African National Congress in 1960, he went underground in ‘61 and became the leader of ‘Umkhonto we Sizwe’ (MK), the armed wing of the Congress.
In ‘62 he was captured for leaving the country illegally and inciting a strike, and thus sentenced to five years in prison at the age of 44. In ‘63 he joined other MK leaders
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It also helped him to choose the right time to initiate talks with the Apartheid regime – which was a continuation of efforts made by the ANC since the early 1900s and up to 1961.
While Mandela and his comrades were imprisoned on Robben Island, efforts to campaign for their release were growing not only in South Africa, but worldwide. Since the prisoners were deprived of newspapers for most of the time they were in jail, the campaigners could not expect them to know about their work to publicise their plight. Mandela however, made it very clear that not only was he aware of these efforts despite the stringent censorship of letters and visits, he derived strength from them.
Perhaps the most harrowing time in prison for Mandela was when his wife Winnie was arrested and detained for more than 17 months from May ‘69 to September ’70. At that time their daughters Zeni and Zindzi were nine and ten respectively and their father wrote to them from Robben Island trying to comfort them even though he knew it was highly unlikely that the letter would ever reach
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He showed, on the one hand, that from day one, the prison warders were determined to treat the prisoners as nothing more than cattle as they tried aggressively to bring them under their control. It was not to be. Mandela immediately took charge and showed how one can turn the tables even in the more dire circumstances. It was with this dignity and strength that was demonstrated by Mandela and that of his colleagues later that marked their imprisonment and subsequent