Long walk to freedom book5/12/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The colour-consciousness of the South African prison authorities was such that white prisoners received white sugar and white bread while coloureds were given brown sugar and brown bread. The lunacy of apartheid ensured there was an endless supply of grotes querie for Mandela's humour to feed on. Mandela relates the incident with a wicked sense of amusement at the absurdity of his reaction, a sense which enabled him to find humour in a life so overflowing with grimness and deprivation that a lesser mortal would have died many deaths as each decade segued into the next with no sign of joy or success in sight. Could a black man fly aplane, he asked himself? It took just a second for Africa's greatest nationalist to realise how some of the seeds of apartheid had sneaked into his own mind while he wasn't looking, making him think that Africans were inferior and flying was a white man's job. In South Africa, he had never seen a black pilot. When Nelson Mandela went on his first trip abroad in 1962 to enlist support from sympathetic African nations and travelled from Ghana to Ethiopia, he felt a surge of panic when he saw the pilot. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |