Chicago Tribune - December 7, 2004
Laurie Goering, Tribune foreign correspondent

JOHANNESBURG -- In the 1980s, while in jail on Robben Island, Nelson Mandela wrote a letter to the wife of one of his prison guards. In it, he said he respected her husband, Christo Brand, as a man of integrity. But he was concerned that Brand, an Afrikaner, didn't understand the value of education.

"You must put some pressure on your husband to study further. That's the future of the country," Mandela wrote in perfect Afrikaans.

Mandela, 86, is best known for his remarkable courage and forgiveness after 27 years of imprisonment and for his success in guiding South Africa through a peaceful transition from apartheid to black majority rule.

But what is slowly emerging from a newly released collection of his letters and diaries is a picture of an equally remarkable private man who during decades in prison worried endlessly about an education for his grandchildren and others, studied everything from price theory to European history and who kept a photo of a nearly naked woman, torn from National Geographic, in his cell.

Mandela was an obsessive record keeper. For decades he recorded on a daily calendar his weight, health, books read, legal consultations made, visitors seen, political events happening in South Africa and elsewhere, even his nightly dreams.

He rarely threw anything away. Archivists have turned up his 1929 membership card to South Africa's Methodist Church and piles of student identity cards, telegrams, receipts and diaries.

Nothing is missed

"He documents everything, and that's held right through his life," said Verne Harris, who is analyzing and organizing more than 45,000 prison documents and other Mandela papers for what will become a master archive at the Nelson Mandela Foundation in Johannesburg. South Africa's first democratic president, he believes, had a sense early on that "this is part of our history that needs to be recorded."

South Africa's apartheid regime unwittingly lent history a hand. The government "was also obsessive about record keeping," Harris said, and kept duplicate copies of every letter Mandela sent from prison or received, as well as registers of all his visitors and copies of the numerous letters he sent authorities complaining about prison conditions and seeking privileges for inmates. Those copies also are part of the archives.

The combined documents yield a portrait of a man tough and vulnerable, meticulous, disciplined and romantic, and quick to offer praise or criticism to anyone regardless of their skin color or position of power.

"I have never regarded any man as my superior, either in my life outside or inside prison," Mandela wrote in one letter to prison authorities. "My respect for human beings is based not on the color of a man's skin nor authority he may wield but purely on merit."

Perhaps the most remarkable part of the archive is a series of letters Mandela wrote while in prison not just to his immediate family but to in-laws, childhood friends and far-flung members of his extended family.

In one, to the common-law wife of his eldest son, Thembi, who died in a car accident, Mandela expresses his fears that his grandchildren won't get proper guidance toward advanced education.

"I am anxious that you put yourself in a position whereby you will be able to guide the children in the choice of careers and in preparing them for such careers. The home atmosphere must exist which will encourage them to strive for the highest ideas in life and this depends largely on you," he writes, lamenting that he is "leaving you to fight all alone."

He also remarks on the luxuriant green vegetation in the background of a child's photo sent to him, lamenting how it "reminds me of the happy and romantic days of my childhood. I can almost smell the sweet perfumes." He signed his note "Tata," or "Grandfather" in Xhosa, his native language.

In another letter, apparently to a childhood friend, he passes on tales of a mischievous youth spent stealing ears of corn from the local reverend's garden, before admitting to missing home.

"Why should I yearn so much for you? There are times when my heart almost stops beating, slowed down by heavy loads of longing," he writes in the 1971 letter.

Mandela's papers also show a quick sense of humor. In the early 1970s, while still a young man in prison, he spotted a photograph in National Geographic of an African woman from the Andaman Islands east of India. The woman runs along a beach, naked except for a thin string skirt and a red bandana tied around her head.

Fellow political prisoners tore out the photo for him and carved a frame from an old tomato box. For years, the unidentified woman kept Mandela company in his tiny cell, particularly before he and other prisoners were allowed photos of their wives.

Recently, Mandela visited a first exhibit of his papers in Johannesburg with American actor Will Smith. As he passed the photo, Mandela leaned over to point it out to Smith. He had always liked the woman, he told Smith, "because she's got no clothes on at all!"

Accidental survival

Some of Mandela's papers survived through remarkable coincidences. Two bound notebooks of his letters, written from 1969 to 1971, endured largely because they were accidentally sent to a security police detective who had recently quit his job. The man, who for years analyzed such documents for strategic information, tucked them away rather than returning them to the police.

The archive also includes segments of Mandela's autobiography, "Long Walk to Freedom," written on small sheets of notebook paper during his years in prison and surreptitiously tucked away in Cadbury cocoa canisters in the prison garden.

Archivists also have turned up never-before-seen film footage of Mandela taken in 1977 by journalists invited to see prison conditions. The image is the only one known of him from his prison years, apart from a 1968 photo with fellow activist Walter Sisulu.

Harris and other document specialists plan to digitize much of the Mandela archive--and many of his other papers, scattered around the world--and create a central document clearinghouse on the foundation's Web site.

Mandela, who has retired, has hardly slowed in his activism and concerns. Besides supporting efforts to fight AIDS and improve life for children, he recently wrote a new letter to Brand, his former guard, insisting that Brand's son receive more education.

"He's still doing the same thing, yes," said Brand, who runs the gift shop at Robben Island Museum, referring to Mandela. "Now even I put pressure on my son I wouldn't have before."

His son intends to study marine biology, he said.

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