It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
These are the closing lines of ‘Invictus’ by William Ernest Henley, the poem that was Nelson Mandela’s favourite. Beautifully illustrated as a comic by Gavin Aung Than, it snappily sums up the intention of Mandela to be his own man.
Mandela spent 27 years in prison, on the charges of ‘sabotage’ and ‘conspiracy to overthrow the government’. He was not incarcerated unwillingly, as his famous “I am prepared to die” speech, testifies. He confessed to some of his crimes, which included planning acts of sabotage against the Apartheid government. He denied the ones that denied him his own agency – the charge that he acted to “further the objects of communism.”
Mandela, along with other members of the African National Congress (ANC), spent 18 years in South Africa’s Robben Island prison. One of the warders told him on entering the prison,
This is the Island. This is where you will die.
Mandela didn’t let it get to him. He went about his sojourn in prison, what he called a 27-year holiday, as determined as ever to chart his own course. Mandela washed his own clothes, cleaned the floor himself and performed all the tasks a prisoner was expected to do. He crushed rocks in a limestone quarry, losing his tear glands from the alkaline limestone particles.
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