As a Times correspondent in South Africa during the final violent spasms of the apartheid regime and the jubilant election of the country’s first black president in 1994, I noticed something odd about Nelson Mandela’s speeches.

Mandela would get thunderous cheers when he took the stage. The world’s most famous former political prisoner was instantly recognizable: taller and broader than most Africans, beaming his 1,000-watt smile and always sporting one of the flamboyant “madiba” shirts designed especially for him. But the crowd would grow restless after he began to speak. He had a stilted, droning cadence and invariably got more applause at the start than at the end.

So it was with delight and relief that I read “The Prison Letters of Nelson Mandela,” an outpouring from his 27 years in prison. Many of the 255 letters have never been published, and because they articulate his thinking and feelings in real time, they provide a new lens to view his personal and political growth.

Almost from the day he was arrested in 1962, Mandela took pen to pad and in cramped cursive wrote missives to his wife and five children (and later numerous grandchildren), defiant letters to prison authorities and government ministers, condolences to the families of fallen freedom fighters, explorations of African and colonial history, even a wistful letter about amasi, a traditional fermented milk.

Underlying them all was his optimism in the inevitability and righteousness of his cause: the end of white supremacy and the democratic self-rule for the black African majority. “Our cause is just. It is a fight for human dignity & for an honorable life,” he wrote his wife, Winnie. He warned the apartheid government through the decades that it must relent, not him. Ultimately it did.

Never once did he express self-pity or regret about his plight. Instead he engaged in a drawn-out legal battle to block the government from disbarring him as an attorney (he won), pleaded for permission to attend the funerals of his mother and then his eldest son (denied both times), tried desperately — mostly in vain — to protect his wife from persecution, and advocated for his fellow prisoners on Robben Island, South Africa’s Alcatraz, and three other prisons where he was kept.

“For 13 years I have slept naked on a cement floor that becomes damp and cold during the rainy season,” Mandela noted in a 1976 letter seeking the pajamas routinely issued to white prisoners. Until the 1980s, black prisoners also were denied hot water, newspapers, radios, proper food, simple medicines and other basic amenities.

For the first decade, he and other black prisoners were allowed one family visitor every six months (children were barred until they were 16) and could send and receive one letter of 500 words every six months. After 1973 he was allowed to write more frequently, and his correspondence turned into a torrent. He also drew solace from his incoming mail.

But authorities at Robben Island censored many letters beyond recognition, or arbitrarily withheld mail and photographs. Some were found in government files decades later. Many more disappeared.

The most painful letters are those to his wife and children. In 1969, after Winnie was also arrested and jailed, he warned his two youngest daughters about the hardships ahead. “For long you may live like orphans without your own home and parents, without the natural love, affection and protection Mummy used to give you. Now you will get no birthday or Christmas parties, no presents or new dresses, no shoes or toys.” It goes on like that for several pages.

Mandela was loath to speak of himself in interviews. His letters, often filled with sadness, fill out some of those details. “I am neither brave nor bold” and have “no desire to play the role of martyr” but am “ready to do so” if need be. He added that nearly every letter he wrote in the previous seven months had failed to reach its destination. Knowing censors would read this letter as well, he appealed to their “considerations of fair play & sportsmanship to give me a break & let this one through.” Apparently it worked.

In prison, he was always seeking to learn, taking correspondence courses and earning an advanced law degree despite a struggle to get the textbooks. Locked in a cell so tiny his head touched one wall and his feet the other at night, he found room to praise his isolation, calling it “an ideal place to learn to know yourself, to search realistically and regularly the process of your own mind and feelings.”

But he also escaped his dank cell by dreaming he was anywhere else. “I never really live on this island,” he revealed in another letter. “My thoughts are ever traveling up & down the country, remembering the places I’ve visited.”

Perhaps the most remarkable letter is one Mandela wrote in 1976 to the commissioner of prisons. More than 20 pages long, it reads as an indictment of the corruption, abuse and indignities that black prisoners faced on Robben Island. Yet he held out an olive branch: “Even when the clash between you and me has taken the most extreme form, I should like us to fight over principles and ideas and without personal hatred, so that at the end of the battle ... I can proudly shake hands with you because I felt I have fought an upright and worthy opponent who has observed the whole code of honour and decency.”

Bob Drogin was the Los Angeles Times bureau chief in South Africa from 1993 to 1997.

bob.drogin@latimes.com

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