Life

I’m reading Nelson Mandela’s autobiography Long Walk to Freedom. I highly recommend it, though it is quite a long book (I guess Nelson Mandela has had a busy life).

 I just finished reading about the trial of Mandela along with several other leaders of Umkhonto weSizwe (an organization that was founded in conjunction with the ANC for the purpose of waging acts of violence against the state because decades of nonviolent protest had only resulted in harsher legislation from the government). They were charged to have “recruited persons for sabotage and guerrilla warfare for the purpose of starting a violent revolution,” and they were prepared for the death penalty, “not because we were brave but because we were realistic.”

Perhaps in part because of pressure on the court from the rest of the world, they were instead sentenced to life in prison. There was so much commotion in the court room when the judge announced that they would not be sentenced to death that the wife of one of the prisoners didn’t hear the actual sentence and called out to her husband asking what it was. “He yelled back grinning, ‘Life! To live!’” 

This happened the year my dad was born. Four months before I was born, Nelson Mandela was released.