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Chapter 80
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
In 1977, after two years of a go-slow strike by prisoners in the quarry, Robben Island finally ends manual labor. Mandela is happy to devote himself more to studying and even gets permission to make a small garden. He orders gardening books and soon improves his yields. Without quarry work, Mandela gains weight, so he starts to take exercising seriously again. Although Mandela is still barred form studying at this point, he has access to other books, mostly novels like War and Peace and The Grapes of Wrath.
Mandela’s gardening work is a way of reconnecting with his rural upbringing as well as yet another way for him to do things that will pay off in the future. The books that Mandela reads, War and Peace and The Grapes of Wrath, are set in very different times and places from contemporary South Africa. But they both contain realistic portrayals of societies in crisis, which would certainly be of interest to Mandela.
Themes
