Today, free people and people throughout the world pay homage the memory and legacy of Nelson Mandela, whose courage, foresight and spirit transformed a nation.
Yet in another sense, you did not have to be South African to have been affected by Mandela’s fight against oppression. All people of good will, wherever they live, are a little more free because of Nelson Mandela.
In a world where might generally makes right he was one of those rare people who prevailed over injustice and oppression through a morally impregnable argument. His weapons were unconventional — love, forgiveness, humility.
All people of conscience can relate to those great themes of Mandela’s life and legacy.
But I can relate to Mandela in ways that are not quite so universal.
Like Mandela, I was once a prisoner and while any direct comparison to the two prison experiences is laughable, my own short prison experience certainly adds another dimension of awe in my estimation of the man.
There are two aspects of Mandela’s prison experience that especially resonate with me when I reflect on my own time behind bars.
First, I find it almost incredible that Mandela could serve 27 years in harsh prison conditions and emerge as a whole, fully-functioning human being, let alone a man with the ability to lead and inspire a nation.
As a prisoner, I came in contact with many men who were serving fairly substantial sentences and there was no question that these men had been emotionally and psychological crippled after having served eight or 10 years behind bars.
One cell mate, in particular, comes to mind. Ramon had served 14 years in prison and I was instantly struck by how defeated he was. I’ve never met a man with lower self-esteem or a man who lacked any semblance of genuine optimism. He was to be released from prison in six months, but his excitement over being reunited with friends and family was muted by an almost palpable fear that he would not be able to find his way in the world. After 14 years, his family members were little more than acquaintances. He knew he would be returning to a torn family, one economically devastated by his incarceration. He wondered who sort of job a 50-year-old ex-convict could reasonably hope to find. He hoped for a better life, but expressed no real confidence he would achieve it. He was a beaten man.
Mandela served almost twice that long, under conditions far more brutal than we experienced, for a crime that was not a crime at all. And yet somehow he emerged a stronger, more fully developed human being than he when he entered prison. Anyone who has spent even a short stay behind bars understands how truly remarkable that is.
The other thing that probably only a prisoner would take much note of was that when Mandela was sent to prison, he was given short pants to wear. In the South African culture of the time, forcing a prisoner to wear short pants was a sign of great disrespect. Only children wore short pants.
This was not an accident. Mandela was given short pants to wear as a means of marginalizing and shaming him, adding insult to injury.
I’m familiar with that tactic, too. Before being sent to prison, I spent 34 days in the Maricopa County Jail, under the authority of the county’s infamous sheriff, Joe Arpaio. Thev less you know about Arpaio, the more you like him. He has achieved an almost heroic status in some circles.
Arpaio’s genius lies not in his abilities in law enforcement, which are marginal at best, but in his masterful manipulation of public opinion. He is a consummate politician.
What Arpaio realized very early on is that subjecting prisoners to humiliation and degradation is good public relations. He carefully cultivated his reputation as “America’s Toughest Sheriff” by subjecting county prisoners to petty, mean-spirited and pointless acts of humiliation.
Thus, county inmates were subjected to such ridiculous measures as being forced to wear pink underwear and dining on green bologna. Arpaio made much of the fact that it cost less to feed his prisoners than it did to feed the animals in the county shelter. From the perspective of a county inmate, it seemed to me that he must lay awake at night thinking up new ways to circumvent the rules regarding jail conditions and invent new humiliations to heap on his inmates.
The real kicker, of course, was that every act of cruelty was played out before the media. And each of those acts was gleefully applauded by citizens whose fear and frustration over crime was easy to exploit by so skillful a politician as Arpaio.
What Arpaio understood from the start is that people generally do not care whether prisoners are treated humanely. In fact, the worse you treat prisoners, the more popular you are.
For some of my fellow prisoners, the mean-spirited tactics employed by Arpaio created the desired effect. They were humiliated, embarrassed and embittered.
When I think of Mandela, imprisoned for his political views and dressed out in shorts, a symbolic act of denying him his manhood, I marvel that he endured so much for so long and emerged so strong and triumphant.
For most of the world, Mandela will be remembered most of all for who he became after he emerged from 27 years of captivity.
But I will remember Mandela the prisoner.
I am awed by that man.
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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