Tafelberg Short: Moments with Mandela: And the challenge of his legacy

By Wilmot James

Reading the script of Invictus, finding a new - anti-slavery Afrikaans - name for Mandela's Cape Town home, discussing awkward issues like HIV or coloured politics: through all these Wilmot James's admiration for Mandela's values and fearlessness g

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tafelberg
• Release date: Oct 29, 2012
• ISBN: 9780624057161

Book preview

Chapter 01

An invincible morality

Dotted-Line

An almost immodest conviction wells from the page in William Ernest Henley’s gritty, four-stanza poem, Invictus, a forthright declaration of the poet’s resolve in the face of what he describes as ‘the fell clutch of circumstance’ and ‘the bludgeonings of chance’.

We all know now the special South African connection to these stirring verses – mirrored in the life and what I think of as the invincible morality of Nelson Mandela, who is memorably portrayed by Morgan Freeman in the Clint Eastwood film named after the poem. Invictus the movie achieved deserving acclaim.

For me, personally, there are meaningful associations with Invictus. Some are coincidental, but the most inspiring association has been a gathering appreciation of the sentiments of the poem through the impulses and achievements of the man who, perhaps more than any other, has truly lived up to them.

Nelson Mandela, of course, is a very different man from the Victorian poet who inspired him.

Henley was born in 1849, and his widely quoted poem, first published in 1875, bears the hymn-like stamp of its time. Initially it appeared without a title in a book called Book of Verses, but was given the name Invictus – from the Latin for ‘unconquered’ – by editor Arthur Quiller-Couch when it was later included in The Oxford Book of English Verse.

For Henley, Invictus was his statement of personal bravery as he confronted and dealt with the consequences of a debilitating medical condition. He had contracted tuberculosis of the bone, also known as Pott’s disease, at the age of twelve. Five years later, he was compelled to have one leg amputated just below the knee and, immediately after, intensive surgery on the other if he was to live. He wrote Invictus while recovering in the infirmary.

Remarkably, this young man’s poem, virtually the only one he is known by, has inspired many over the years; it has cropped up in songs and declarations, novels, films and autobiographies.

Most memorably, perhaps, Henley’s four stanzas of defiant fortitude reached across an ocean of time and geography, nearly a century after they were written, to enthral the man to whom we in South Africa are indebted, and whose challenge to us – his primary legacy, if you like – remains vivid.

The historic and monumental task Mandela began, of reconciling a nation forged through conflict, is ours to continue if we are to succeed in achieving anything of value and to match the vision for which he gave up so much.

The poem tells us something about that, too.

One can imagine how, perhaps reading it aloud to himself in the spare cell he had every reason to believe would be his home for life, Mandela found in Henley’s stirring cadences some essence of courage and self-mastery, and the inspiration to endure.

The poem is a perfect match for the man, right from its opening stanza: ‘Out of the night that covers me / Black as the pit from pole to pole, / I thank whatever gods may be / For my unconquerable soul.’

We recognise much else too: ‘I have not winced nor cried aloud. / Under the bludgeonings of chance / My head is bloody, but unbowed’; that for all the ‘wrath and tears ... the menace of the years / Finds and shall find me unafraid’. Yet, if like all of us, really, when we read them, Mandela felt the transcendent lift of Henley’s closing lines – ‘I am the master of my fate; / I am the captain of my soul’ – there is little doubt that the man apartheid South Africa turned into the 20th century’s most famous prisoner understood them less as an instance of inspirational sentiment, of piercing poetic effect, than as the confirmation of his credo, that he must remain unbowed,