Word: robben
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...each day at 6:45 a.m., usually meeting at Mandela's African National Congress office in downtown Johannesburg or his suburban home. On his own, Stengel tracked down and interviewed more than 50 of Mandela's friends, colleagues and family members, including the President's former prison mates at Robben Island, his sisters and a white lawyer who hired the young Mandela as an apprentice...
...Mandela, consensus must be its own reward, for he does not always get his way. During his imprisonment on Robben Island, he wanted to stage a strike to force the warders to address prisoners with the honorific "Mr." But he was always turned down by his comrades. Last year he urged the A.N.C. to reduce the voting age to 14, but his colleagues refused. Once he has lost, he publicly speaks in favor of the position he opposed. "I sometimes come to the National Executive Committee with an idea and they overrule me," he recently observed. "And I obey them...
...ought to be doing it much. the same way, because if you don't if you leaveit on a solely bargaining basis with a givenindividual...[then the price of [an individual's]doing better is that another individual who alsohas need may not get any" because of limitedfunds, Robben Fleming, president emeritus of theUniversity of Michigan said...
...days of solitude may have helped solidify the marriage and increase Nelson's dependence on his wife. "Had it not been for your visits, wonderful letters and your love, I would have fallen apart many years ago," Nelson wrote Winnie from his Robben Island prison cell in 1979. His sense of family and corresponding feelings of guilt at having left her and their two daughters behind also helped cement the relationship. "I have often wondered whether any kind of commitment can ever be sufficient excuse for abandoning a young and inexperienced woman in a pitiless desert," he wrote in another...
Mandela's busy life at Victor Verster contrasts sharply with the years of hard labor he endured on Robben Island, a penal colony across from Cape Town Harbor where he was incarcerated for nearly two decades. For the first ten years he swung a pickax in a limestone quarry, breaking boulders into gravel. But the harsh punishment only strengthened his resolve, and he directed his anger into a crusade for better prison conditions. "To us," says Steve Tshwete, an A.N.C. guerrilla leader imprisoned for 15 years, "he represented the correctness of our cause and the inevitability of our victory...