Book Review of Long Walk to Freedom

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Mandela describes a life of atrocity, intense solitude, and humiliation at the Robben Island Prison. Guards urinated down on their prisoners. Every day the prisoners labored in the dust and scarcely received letters and visitors. For 21 years, Nelson Mandela didn’t even touch his wife’s hand. Nelson Mandela recalls that the most painful was the impotence to know that families were harassed and expulsed from jobs and schools or imprisoned. At Robben Island, Mr. Mandela even wrote a secret autobiography that was the core of this book.

From the prison, Nelson Mandela negotiated with the apartheid regime, without even checking first with his ANC comrades because he knew they would reject that. Once the regime and Nelson Mandela decided to do business with each other, he got transferred to a less cruel prison. The book gives rich details of this secret diplomacy.

Nelson Mandela explains his remarkable lack of bitterness to his jail experiences. He has an excellent ability to empathize with his adversaries, who, like him, are driven more by pragmatism than by ideology. For example, he doesn’t like F. W. de Klerk, the president of the Apartheid regime; he portrays him as an untrustworthy man but he negotiated with him and both two men Mandela shared the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize.

Nelson Mandela also shares anecdotes, such as his attempt to teach his strong-willed wife Winnie to drive a car, his pain over the death of a son in a car accident, and his continuous remorse at neglecting his family for the liberation cause. "Where does Daddy live?" one of his children asks when Mr. Mandela disappears for another organizing trip (Mandela, 1995)

In the last 50 pages, Nelson Mandela narrates the years after his release in 1990: the negotiations, the Nobel Peace Prize, the election campaign and his election as president. The following paragraphs describe the three leadership lessons learned from the Nelson Mandela autobiography book.

First, in leadership, the character is more important than strategy. Nelson Mandela often made up for some dubious strategic decision. For example, his open support for the former Libya’s ruthless and eccentric president Qaddafi and his dealing with his former wife Winnie charged with murder, kidnapping, and torture. Those strategies could easily have led to Mandela fall into disgrace, but his character strength as a leader counted more than his occasional lack of judgment. He was offered his freedom if he would renounce his commitment to armed struggle but he refused. He was courageous and a pattern-breaker. His most enduring legacy is for not the things he did but the things he didn’t do, he refuses to succumb to revenge and to hatred politics and so South Africa got saved from a civil war. He is a transformational leader.

Second, leadership is behavioral and no positional. Nelson Mandela only served as South Africa’s president for five years, but his life is a classic case of how one can lead without formal authority. He could integrate, motivate, and mobilize people to bring a common aspiration to life. That is what leadership is about, and not holding positions of formal authority.

Last, never give up. I was a seemingly impossible ideal to achieve a South Africa free of apartheid. But Nelson Mandela once quoted “it always seems impossible until it’s done.” His perseverance triumphed over inhumane persecution shows. If Mandela teaches us anything, it is to commit our lives and our leadership practice to push for the seemingly impossible.

Reference

Mandela, N. (1994). Long walk to freedom: The autobiography of Nelson Mandela. Boston: Little,