Long Walk to Freedom Study Guide

Nelson Mandela was born in 1918 into the Thembu royal family in the Xhosa people of South Africa. After studying to become a lawyer, he became increasingly involved as an activist against apartheid, the racist set of laws that governed life in South Africa during much of Mandela’s lifetime. Mandela’s participation in activist groups like the African National Congress made the government view Mandela as an enemy, culminating in him being sentenced to life in prison. During this time in prison, Mandela didn’t give up hope and began writing an autobiography that would later for the basis for his book Long Walk to Freedom (later published in 1994). Mandela eventually achieved freedom in February 1990, and he went on to become the first president of South Africa to be democratically elected in a free election. He became less active in public life starting around 2004, although he continued to make occasional appearances and published a collection of his speeches and letters called Conversations with Myself in 2010. He died in 2013 at the age of 95.

As Mandela describes in his novel, the South African policy of apartheid—or legally sanctioned racial segregation—was first instituted in 1948. It ensured that South Africa’s minority White population remained in power in politics, economic concerns, and when it came to housing and employment opportunities. Numerous acts throughout the late 1940s and into the 1950s banned interracial marriages and sexual relations and required South African citizens to register their race. Beginning in the 1960s, then, the government began to move Black South Africans into segregated neighborhoods and eventually into bantustans—a group of 10 segregated tribal areas—that were conceived of as independent states. People who moved into bantustans lost their South African citizenship. The African National Congress (the political party Mandela would later join) was founded in response to South Africa’s long history of anti-Black racism in 1912, and it remained the leading political organization opposing apartheid until the policy’s end in 1990. After a transition period, Mandela won South Africa’s first free and open election in 1994, making him the country’s first democratically elected president. In 1996, Mandela commissioned the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to study the effects of apartheid, which found 21,000 deaths occurred during the apartheid period as a result of political violence.

Nelson Mandela’s earliest literary influences were often writers that he felt could help him in his political ambitions. In Long Walk to Freedom, Mandela mentions reading writing both by and about radical politicians such as Che Guevara, Mao Tse-Tung, Fidel Castro, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Mahatma Gandhi. He was not allowed to read political books in prison, but he does cite reading The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck and War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, books that, while fictional, combine political ideas with narrative in a way that is similar to what Mandela does in his autobiography. Mandela’s work went on to have a big influence on the genre of political autobiography, which has only grown in popularity in recent years, becoming a regular part of political campaigns around the world. Of the many recent political memoirs, Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father is perhaps the one most influenced by Mandela, with Obama eventually writing the foreword for Mandela’s Conversations with Myself. Mandela’s ideas and writing also had an influence on the development South African literature, specifically among novelists who condemned apartheid, including Alan Paton (Cry, the Beloved Country), Nadine Gordimer (Burger’s Daughter), and J. M. Coetzee (Age of Iron).