One of the most important documents for reworking the concept of the freedom fighter into a model for post-apartheid citizenship is undoubtedly Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom, where the prison functions as a kind of rehearsal space for the creation of a post-apartheid nation. “In a way that even the authorities acknowledged,” Mandela observes, “order in prison was preserved not by the warders but by ourselves.” The prison as a space of reform, where both prisoners and warders strive towards a form of normative “humanity” under the gracious and understated guidance of the ANC, becomes the blueprint for a new nation.
Ultimately, the collective struggle for rights in prison is replaced by Mandela’s experience and exercise of individual autonomy. As much as the Mandela of Long Walk to Freedom is a product of a revolutionary movement of the African people, he is also a product of the liberal rationalism of the mission school—the same rationalism that underpins the Enlightenment fantasy of the prison as a space for the manufacture of individuals through a process of isolation, self-reflection and reform.
This paper, then, seeks to elaborate on the ways in which the ethics of the post-apartheid nation intersect with the discourse of the prison. Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom will be contrasted to other Robben Island writing from the same period to show alternative understandings of the ethics of community and resistance that have subsequently become marginalised in South African society by the dominant bildung of Mandela’s memoir.