How Nelson Mandela Secretly Wrote 'Long Walk to Freedom' in Prison

Nelson Mandela was the president of South Africa from 1994 to 1999. He is best known for helping to end the nation’s segregated apartheid system and fostering a peaceful transition to democracy. 

Prior to his election, he spent 27 years in prison for opposing the apartheid system. While there, he managed to pen a draft of his autobiography in secret. That book continues to inspire changemakers and visionaries around the world, but it almost didn’t make it into existence at all.

Nelson Mandela’s time in prison

Mandela was sentenced to life in prison in 1964 for his work in the Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the armed faction of the African National Congress. Originally sentenced to five years for leaving the country illegally and inciting a strike, his life sentence arrived as part of the Rivonia Trial after he was discovered in hiding at Liliesleaf Farm. 

Mandela spent 18 years of his sentence imprisoned on Robben Island, an island in South Africa’s Table Bay. There, he faced extreme racism and harsh treatment, and spent a decade performing backbreaking labor in a lime quarry. Only permitted to write one censored letter every six months during his imprisonment, Mandela was also unable to attend the funerals of both his mother and his son, who died in a car accident at 24. 

Writing in secret

It was there at Robben Island that Mandela began writing Long Walk to Freedom. He penned the book with the help of fellow prisoners Ahmed Kathrada, Mac Maharaj, and Walter Sisulu, who were also part of the African National Congress.

“Mandela had to write every night. He wrote on average 10-15 pages with very little reference material—he wrote by discussion and recollection,” Maharaj told the BBC in 2011. “The next morning it would circulate to Kathrada and Sisulu for their comments, which would come back to me to transcribe. And the next night he would write another 10-15 pages.”

According to Maharaj, Mandela only wrote at night, though sometimes the two men would feign illness to squeeze in a discussion of the book during the day. They wrote in tiny handwriting on paper provided to prisoners, and Maharaj hid his transcribed copy of the book draft in a file used for maps. Mandela buried his handwritten original draft in a vegetable patch, but the manuscript was later discovered and confiscated, and Mandela, Kathrada, and Sisulu were implicated.

Meanwhile, in October 1976, Maharaj was suddenly told he would be leaving the prison without his belongings, which included his copy of the manuscript. He was able to persuade guards that his belongings included other prisoners’ items, and Kathrada and Sisulu were allowed to sift through them. They successfully found Maharaj’s transcript and managed to get it into the hands of fellow anti-apartheid activist Rusty Bernstein. 

In 1977, after six months of house arrest, Maharaj fled South Africa for the UK. There, he met up with Bernstein, who had hidden the file in the Communist Party offices he worked at, and another collaborator named Yusef Dadoo. 

“I ripped the covers and out came all these pages. Rusty and Dadoo—both their mouths were agape,” Maharaj recalled. “It was mission accomplished. We had successfully smuggled it out. It had come out intact.”

A long wait for publication

It would take another 18 years for the autobiography to be released, as the African National Congress was insistent that Mandela needed to be out of prison upon its publication. Still, the smuggled manuscript became the basis of Long Walk to Freedom, which was published in 1994. 

The book chronicles Mandela’s upbringing, life, and imprisonment, as well as the history of European colonization of South Africa, and braids the two together to reveal the root of Mandela’s commitment to activism and ending apartheid.

“We were living in a society where the history of our struggle was not covered anywhere—not even in academia,” Maharaj reflected regarding the transcript’s importance. “Everything in history was the history about the white man. So that in itself was an exciting exercise to put down on paper the life of one man who was so central [to the struggle], and whose autobiography was really a political autobiography. One had a sense that Mandela had already become a national and international figure and that it would be an inspiration to read our history.”

The same year that the book was published, Mandela won South Africa’s first fully democratic elections and became president. He also helped to establish the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which explored human rights violations during apartheid, and left behind a transformed South Africa when he left office in 1999.

The book he'd written during his incarceration proved to be an important piece of Mandela’s campaign and justice initiatives, helping to provide a counternarrative to those who depicted him as a dangerous terrorist and explaining the deeper reasons for his beliefs.

Mandela, who was born July 18, 1918 and died on December 5, 2013, remains a powerful symbol of justice and peace to this day. In 2024, 14 locations in South Africa connected to Mandela’s life were designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

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