107 pages • 3 hours read
Nelson MandelaLong Walk to Freedom
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1994A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Part 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “Johannesburg”
Chapter 9 Summary
Mandela and Justice head for Crown Mines to get jobs, and Mandela is surprised by the dirty reality of mining. The boys are soon fired when the manager discovers that they came without Jongintaba’s permission. With nowhere to stay, they eventually find lodging with an acquaintance from the Transkei.
Mandela secures a referral from a realtor and activist named Walter Sisulu and becomes a legal secretary for Lazar Sidelsky, a liberal, white lawyer who believes in African education. To become a lawyer, Mandela must apprentice for several years and, because he left Fort Hare early, complete his bachelor’s by correspondence. Sidelsky encourages Mandela to be a model citizen by becoming an educated attorney and avoiding politics.
The only other African employee is Gaur Radebe, a proud and strong-willed man known as a “troublemaker” who refuses to show deference to white people. Mandela soon learns that Gaur is a member of both the African National Congress (ANC) and the South African Communist Party (SACP). From Gaur, Mandela learns that when it comes to leadership, a degree is worthless unless one goes “out into the community to prove oneself” (73).
Another clerk, a young white man named Nat Bregman, begins introducing Mandela to the foundational concepts of communism. Mandela asks many questions about the political theory but demurs from joining because of both his personal religiosity and Sidelsky’s advice.
Mandela nevertheless attends communist party meetings and lectures, where he first hears analyses of South Africa’s inequalities that focus on class lines rather than racial ones. He learns much and enjoys the colorblind social gatherings thrown by party members but remains unconvinced.
Chapter 10 Summary
Mandela lives in Alexandra, a ghetto suburb of Johannesburg. Crime, over-policing, drunkenness, and filth are commonplace. Despite these conditions, Alexandra is one of the few areas near the city where Africans can own their land outright. Additionally, its thriving multitribal, and multiethnic population actively disputes the government’s claim that “Africans were by nature a rural people, ill suited for city life” (76).
Mandela is extremely poor during this period, barely able to balance the expenses of housing, commuting, education, lighting, and food. When the regent visits at the end of 1941, he does not mention Mandela’s disobedience and seems to acknowledge that Mandela has grown into his own man. When Jongintaba dies six months later, Justice returns to Mqhekezweni to take up his position as chief, but Mandela remains in Johannesburg.
At the end of 1942, Mandela earns his bachelor’s degree. He is becoming closer to Gaur, who stresses that education is not enough to liberate Africans and urges Mandela to get involved with the ANC. Despite his lack of formal education, Gaur can piece together the bare facts Mandela learned in school into a coherent narrative that explained current conditions. Mandela writes, “I felt as though I was learning history afresh” (86).
In August 1943, Gaur is one of the leaders of the Alexandra bus boycott, and Mandela witnesses a mass mobilization campaign for the first time. Sidelsky tries to dissuade him from these activities:
‘[i]f you get into politics […] your practice will suffer. You will get into trouble with the authorities who are often your allies in your work. You will lose all your clients, you will go bankrupt, you will break up your family, and you will end up in jail. That is what will happen if you go into politics’ (87).'
Later, Gaur informs Mandela that he is quitting to set up his own estate agency, explaining that the firm will never article Mandela as a lawyer so long as Gaur remains at the firm.
At the graduation at Fort Hare, Mandela reunites with his old friend K.D. Matanzima and realizes how much he has changed since leaving. He is no longer the country boy whose dreams are bound by the kingdom of Thembu, and his values are changing dramatically. Success and comfort are no longer as appealing to Mandela as a life of political struggle.
He enrolls at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg to earn his bachelor of law degree. For the first time, he attends classes with white students. Most of the white students are opposed to his presence and treat him with disdain. However, Mandela encounters a small group of liberal white students sympathetic to African liberation and makes his first Indian friends.
Part 2 Analysis
In Johannesburg, the horizons of Mandela’s world expanded greatly. Working in a law office brought him into contact with Africans and white people whose unfamiliar ideas challenged his preconceptions. Gaur Radebe was particularly integral to shattering Mandela’s acceptance of the political economic limitations imposed on Africans. Prior to meeting Radebe, Mandela saw a few Africans assert their dignity and reveal their fury at their colonized position, but Radebe was the first to articulate these sentiments in a manner that drew together Mandela’s own knowledge and experiences into a coherent narrative.
Mandela realized his education to date had focused on facts as discrete pieces of data rather than connected parts of a broader context. This was probably a deliberate strategy employed by the white people in charge to keep Africans from questioning or even rebelling against their lowly social status.
Mandela’s experiences working for liberal white lawyers and attending classes at Wits provided his first close social relationships with white South Africans. Meeting sympathetic white people, some of whom would later spend their entire lives working on behalf of the liberation struggle, was a formative experience for Mandela. Most white South Africans were unrelentingly hostile to equal rights for Africans, so Mandela’s early friendships with open-minded white people were critical. They are the reason he later adopted a policy of reconciliation with white South Africans as he pursued the end of apartheid.
This period in Johannesburg was also critical in broadening the range of Mandela’s politics. Because of Radebe and Nat Bregman, Mandela was exposed to the tenets of communism. This greatly influenced his understanding of power in South Africa, as did the bus boycott of 1943, which was his first time participating in political action. Debates about ideology and strategy continually arose during his future position as leader of the ANC, and this time in his life prepared him well for it. As he writes:
Wits opened a new world to me, a world of ideas and political beliefs and debates, a world where people were passionate about politics. […] I discovered for the first time people of my own age firmly aligned with the liberation struggle, who were prepared, despite their relative privilege, to sacrifice themselves for the cause of the oppressed (92).
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