The Last Days of Nelson Mandela.
New Statesman, 10 October 2013. Cover Story.
In 1977 a group of journalists was permitted to visit Robben Island as part of a government attempt to convince the outside world that conditions there were not as bad as widely believed. There is a photograph of Nelson Mandela from that outing, one rarely included among iconic images of the man. He leans on a spade, his face closed with anger or disdain. Rediscovered in the archives long after the fall of apartheid, the photograph has a caption that reads: “466/64 ’n Gevangene werksaam in die tuin” – “a prisoner industrious in the garden”.
There are several ironies surrounding this image. Mandela wears sunglasses here; we now know that years of working in the lime quarries of the Island damaged his eyesight permanently, affecting his tear ducts and even (so it is said) making it impossible for him to cry. The Afrikaans caption tries, absurdly, to make the world’s best-known political prisoner into an anonymous labourer – or, to use a phrase that has not entirely disappeared from some corners of South Africa, into a “garden boy”.
Prisoner 466/64 did have a vegetable patch in the prison courtyard on Robben Island where he tended chilli and tomato plants. When transferred to another prison on the mainland in 1982, Mandela presided over a large and productive rooftop garden, made from sawn-off oil drums filled with soil. “The Bible tells us that gardens preceded gardeners,” we read in his 1994 autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, “but that was not the case at Pollsmoor.” But the 1977 photograph was taken against his will, and the strip of gravel shown in it was no garden – hence, perhaps, the look of disdain at this tawdry attempt to manipulate and meddle in his own careful, self-created mythology.
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