"Long Walk to Freedom"

I finally got my hands on a copy Nelson Mandela's autobiography, "Long Walk to Freedom"--just in time to learn more about his life before going to Robben Island (where he was imprisoned for spearheading the struggle against apartheid; apartheid literally means "apartness") next week in South Africa.

Mandela's autobiography is the first political autobiography that I have ever read (and it is actually quite exciting to read). I find it so relative to read accounts of his life, while I myself am simultaneously experiencing a culture that seems very similar to one he grew up in.

While we traveled to Northern Ghana this past weekend, I felt it was as if I was looking out of the bus window and into the mud hut village that Mandela once lived in. There are still so many areas of Ghana that today remain so primitive (walls of red clay, roofs of straw and grass, children running around barefoot, fires fueling ovens, etc.), especially in the north.

A few excerpts from Mandela's book so far...

"There is little to be said in favor of poverty, but it was often an incubator of true friendship. Many people will appear to befriend you when you are wealthy, but precious few will do the same when you are poor. If wealth is a magnet, poverty is a kind of repellent. Yet poverty often brings out the true generosity in others." (page 90)

"Without language, one cannot talk to people and understand them; one cannot share their hopes and aspirations, grasp their history, appreciate their poetry or savor their songs. I again realized that we were not different people with separate languages; we were one people with different tongues." (page 97)

"I had no epiphany, no singular revelation, no moment of truth, but a steady accumulation of a thousand slights, a thousand indignities and a thousand unremembered moments produced in me an anger, a rebelliousness, a desire to fight the system that imprisoned my people." (page 109)