Conversations with Myself by Nelson Mandela Read Free Book Online Page A

was interested, you see, yes, in the social aspect of it…I was impressed by the members of the Communist Party. To see whites who were totally divested of colour consciousness was something, you know, which…was a new experience to me.
    STENGEL: So did that feel liberating in a way? Was that intoxicating?
    MANDELA: No, it was interesting. I wouldn’t say it was liberating. And that is why I attacked the communists, you see, when I [became] involved politically. And I didn’t think it was liberating. I thought Marxism was something that actually was subjecting us to a foreign ideology.
    8. FROM A LETTER TO WINNIE MANDELA, DATED 20 JUNE 1970 9
    Indeed, ‘the chains of the body are often wings to the spirit’. It has been so all along, and so it will always be. Shakespeare in As You Like It puts the same idea somewhat differently:
    Sweet are the uses of adversity,
    Which like a toad, ugly and venomous,
    Wears yet a precious jewel in the head. 10
    Still others have proclaimed that ‘only great aims can arouse great energies’.
    Yet my understanding of the real idea behind these simple words throughout the 26 years of my career of storms has been superficial, imperfect and perhaps a bit scholastic. There is a stage in the life of every social reformer when he will thunder on platforms primarily to relieve himself of the scraps of undigested information that has accumulated in his head; an attempt to impress the crowds rather than to start a calm and simple exposition of principles and ideas whose universal truth is made evident by personal experience and deeper study. In this regard I am no exception and I have been victim of the weakness of my own generation not once but a hundred times. I must be frank and tell you that when I look back at some of my early writings and speeches I am appalled by their pedantry, artificiality and lack of originality. The urge to impress and advertise is clearly noticeable.
    9. FROM A CONVERSATION WITH RICHARD STENGEL ABOUT THE 1952 DEFIANCE CAMPAIGN AGAINST APARTHEID LAWS
    Well, I had been in prison before that, but for minor violations and where I was detained for about a day, not even a full day. I was detained in the morning and released in the afternoon…I was arrested there, not because I had defied, but because I had gone and urinated in a, what-you-call, whites’ toilet room, for whites only. Well we can say I went to wash my hands in a white lavatory and then they arrested me…[ chuckles ]. It was a mistake on my part; I didn’t read the sign. So then they arrested me, took me to a police station. But at the end of the day they released me. Now, but here were people who were going to jail because of a principle, because they were protesting against a law which they regarded as unjust. Students who were my colleagues left classes and went to defy for the love of their people and their country. That had a tremendous impact on me.
    10. FROM A CONVERSATION WITH RICHARD STENGEL
    [I don’t]…interfere in the affairs of others, unless I’m asked. Even when I’m asked, my own concern is always to bring people together. Even as a lawyer, when…a man or his wife comes to me to institute divorce action, I always say, ‘Have you done everything in your power to resolve this problem?’…Some people welcome that, and in fact I have saved marriages in that way. And then some people of course resent it. She comes to you because they have quarrelled…and she feels bitter, and when you say, ‘Can I call your husband?’ You see? Oh, she gets terribly agitated. And from that moment even when you go to court she does not even want you to look at her husband…You see she wants you to adopt exactly the same position which she adopts. It becomes very difficult. But the point is that I have always tried to bring people together, you know?…But I don’t always succeed.

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    From a letter to Winnie Mandela,