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Chapter 6
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Long Walk to Freedom, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Racism and Division
Negotiation, Democracy, and Progress
Nonviolent Protest vs. Violent Protest
The Value of Optimism
Summary
Analysis
Mandela goes on to study at University College of Fort Hare, which for a Black South African is like Oxford or Harvard. He knows many of the 150 students there from his time at Clarkebury and Healdtown. Mandela studies a wide range of topics, from English to politics. Although he learns a lot from prestigious professors, he also sometimes witnesses elitism and hazing.
Mandela’s description of his education continues to show both the triumphs and the limitations of schools like Fort Hare. The high quality of his education is nevertheless tainted by the elitist attitudes and hazing that he witnesses around him. For Mandela, this elitism seems to suggest that while students are learning the positive aspects of European-style education, they’re also learning the negative ones.
Themes
Mandela also learns a lot outside the classroom. At one point, he sneaks out to a dancehall with some friends and accidentally ends up dancing with the wife of his famous professor. He is embarrassed but never faces any punishment. Mandela also befriends a boy named Paul Mahabane. Mandela is shocked how Paul acts around a White magistrate who asks Paul for a favor, with Mandela finding Paul disrespectful. But later Mandela realizes that Black men like him and Paul have to put up with lots of minor indignities like the favor the magistrate asked.
Mandela presents himself as someone who is not naturally a rebel but who came to develop rebellious ideas based on the things that he witnessed. Mandela initially finds Paul shocking because, in Mandela’s quest to do the right thing, he believes that respecting the authority of the magistrates is just what one does. This passage hints at Mandela’s growing awareness that sometimes doing the right thing doesn’t just mean doing what he’s “supposed” to do.
Themes
During his final year, Mandela gets involved in a boycott about the food at the college and about the amount of power that the student representative board has. He later gets elected as a student representative, but he resigns out of support for the boycott. This angers Dr. Kerr, who is the main founding figure of Fort Hare, but Mandela sticks to his beliefs and refuses to serve on the student council. Mandela ends up having to leave the college.
Mandela’s involvement in the boycott is a foreshadowing of events that will happen later in his life. Mandela’s refusal to serve as a student representative shows how Mandela is not someone who is eager for power at any cost. Rather, he’s someone who is very conscientious about trying not to become a puppet for forces he disapproves of—even if that means making sacrifices, like the end of his education at Fort Hare.
Themes
