'THE STRUGGLE IS MY LIFE': NELSON MANDELA'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Abstract

IN ANY AUTOBIOGRAPHY the life is shaped and constructed in terms of the outcome and this one is no exception. A review, is, by necessity, even more selectively constructed. When the subject is Nelson Mandela, any reader is bound to read, as the title itself suggests, with the story's conclusion in mind. This is, therefore, an active political document as well as a political history. Although Mandela gives some insight into his private life, especially with respect to his marriage to Winnie, and its breakdown, the struggle against apartheid, and his personal growth within it, quickly become the focus. Mandela's childhood is spent in a well-organized, royal household, within the confines of Xhosa social assumptions. He clearly likes rural life and in his imagination returns there at the end of the book. He tells of his lack of experience, awkwardness with cutlery and the difficulties he has walking in his first pair of 'adult' boots. He also tells of his circumcision, his ritual passage to manhood, without over romanticism. But trouble at school and at home with his uncle, exposes his lack of maturity. Unable to face his uncle, he runs away to Johannesburg where the real growing begins. He finds work in a lawyer's office and studies law. Walter Sisulu introduces him to the ANC. By 1944, he has made friends with many of the names who are to be associated with the freedom struggle during the days when the apartheid state was equipping itself with repressive legislation. Through Sisulu, he meets Antone Lembede, whom he describes as a mystic intellectual, widely read in the works of black writers and who saw in Afrikaner nationalism a model for African nationalism, and others whose names were to become synonymous with the ANC. With them, Mandela is involved in launching the Youth League, on Easter Sunday 1944. They are intent on shaking up the conservative ANC, making the Youth League the 'brains trust and power-station' of the organization (p. 93). Lembede, 'a fount of ideas', dies suddenly at the age of thirty-three (p. 101). The Youth League quickly recruits new members and Mandela is elected on to the Executive Committee of the Transvaal ANC. The result of the election which brought the Nationalist Party to power shocks