Long Walk to Freedom and the Mutating Face of the Epic

Abstract

Summary The encounter with Nelson Mandela's voluminous Long Walk to Freedom (1994) in a vibrant post-apartheid society that is effervescent with the “Rainbow” identity and the “Renaissance” spirit, easily beckons the critical examination of such a work to establish its exact value and relevance, if any, to this post-independence state, Renaissance South Africa. To ascertain the significance of Long Walk in presentday South Africa, this article therefore first seeks to establish the generic family of Long Walk before exploring its actual impact in the era of its epiphany. Using the hypothesis that Long Walk is not only an autobiography but is also an epic, this article employs a comparative approach to highlight the epic qualities of the text, first for literariness and then for comparison with similar “classical” literary writings in other societies such as England, Italy and Mali with the view to foreground the text's primordial social function. The aim is to canvass for the recognition of this autography as a typical African epic whose functional remedies can be applied to the very society from which it comes. The critical argument advanced in this article is that modern society can garner valuable models of human behaviour from the mirrors of societies found in literary texts of grandeur such as Long Walk, as literature continues to exhibit many tools that can be used to challenge the plethora of current socio-ethical ills. The pivotal point is the value of humanness and the role of responsible governance which great leaders of human history have always exhibited or encouraged to emulate in these literary expressions of note.