The man who forgave his jailers - excerpts from a book on South African statesman Nelson Mandela

After three decades in prison - his spirit unbroken - Nelson Mandela led South Africa to end apartheid, creating the free and egalitarian society he'd always dreamed of. His is an epic life, but the myth cannot eclipse the man himself, whose human gifts of dignity and forgiveness saved a nation. In his new book, Mandela: The Authorized Biography, excerpted here, Anthony Sampson gives an intimate portrait of this exceptional citizen of the world

Just before Nelson Mandela was sentenced to life, in June 1964, he gave a four-hour speech from the prisoner's dock in the Pretoria courtroom, by all accounts the most moving of his political career. He concluded it with these words: "During my lifetime . . . I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony with equal opportunities, it is an ideal which I hope to live for and achieve," he said. "But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die."

These convictions were unshakable, as he proved to the world during the almost three decades he spent as a political prisoner. Mandela, who was born the son of a Xhosa chieftain in the Transkei, one of the poorest regions in South Africa, rose to leadership in the African National Congress (ANC) and dedicated his life to fighting white sovereignty and the system of apartheid. Sentenced at the age of forty-six (he'd already been in jail on separate charges for two years at the time) he was not released until he was seventy-one.

In an electrifying turn of events, Mandela was elected president of South Africa in 1994, taking the first steps toward healing a country long torn apart by its legacy of oppression. He passed the torch to his successor, Thabo Mbeki, earlier this year, but will always be remembered as the extraordinary man who was able to bring vision, integrity, and ultimately forgiveness to a country in desperate need of all three.

This month British journalist Anthony Sampson, who has known Mandela since 1951, publishes Mandela: The Authorized Biography (Knopf). In the passage excerpted here, Mandela, who had just been convicted for "sabotage" at the Rivonia trial (named after the Johannesburg suburb where the ANC leaders plotted their antiapartheid strategy), began his long incarceration along with six other political prisoners, at the Robben Island jail.

Mandela's life sentence was a more serious test of his resilience than his two previous years in jail. He was now cut off from the world in his prime, at the age of forty-six, with no end in sight. He had never been an ascetic like Gandhi or Lenin: in his letters he would constantly hark back to the delights of Soweto or the Transkei; to the food, the landscape, the women, the music. Now all the bright scenery and characters would contract into the single bare stage of his cell and the communal courtyard.

But there was a powerful consolation: he was not alone. With him were some of his closest friends, who could reinforce each other's morale and purpose, and develop a greater depth and self-awareness. At an age when most politicians tend to forget their earlier idealism in the pursuit of power, Mandela was compelled to think more deeply about his principles and ideas. In the microcosm of prison, stripped of all political trappings - platforms, megaphones, newspapers, crowds, well-tailored suits - and confined with his colleagues every day, he was able, as he put it, to stand back from himself, to see himself as others saw him. He learned to control his temper and strong will, to empathize and persuade, and to extend his influence and authority, not just over the other prisoners, but over the warders.

Between the black prisoners and their white guards, the balance of influence was constantly shifting inside the closed world. But gradually the prisoners, with much stronger motivation and cohesion than the warders, established their influence, with Mandela as their leader. There were many parallels with other twentieth-century political prisoners - with Gandhi in India, or the IRA in Northern Ireland's H-blocks - but the letters, prison records, and recollections of the Robben Islanders over the next twenty years provide a unique record of the psycho-politics of a jail where the prisoners could ultimately dominate their guards.

The seven prisoners stayed for a few days in Pretoria Local, still buoyant after escaping the death sentence. At 1 a.m. on June 12, 1964, they were told to pack their belongings, because they were going immediately to Robben Island. The other six were put in handcuffs and leg-irons like slaves; but Mandela was not manacled. They were herded into a police van and driven to the military airport. They were flown in an old, unheated military Dakota, landing just after dawn on a cold, windy island airstrip, surrounded by armed guards.

Robben Island had become a more inhuman place since Mandela had been there two years before. It had been prepared to receive many more long-term prisoners, and reorganized on strict apartheid principles, with the warders, all white, determined to impose their racial supremacy. There had been some brutal "carry-ons" - as the warders called their assaults. They had recently beaten up the political prisoners, leaving one ANC activist, Andrew Magondo, with serious wounds.

Mandela once again began with a confrontation. This time it was on the question of clothes, which he always saw as a part of his dignity which he would not give up. The seven were issued with the standard short khaki trousers - the uniform of the "native boy" - except [Ahmed] Kathrada, who as an Indian was entitled to long trousers. Mandela protested about the shorts, and a few days later found a pair of long trousers dumped in his cell. "No pin-striped three-piece suit has ever pleased me as much," he wrote. But when the other prisoners were denied long trousers he protested again, and had his own taken away. It was not until three years later that they all wore long trousers.

Mandela was treated more carefully than the others: he suspected that the prison authorities were concerned about his important friends and royal connections. On the plane he had not been manacled, and when he arrived on the island he was offered a special diet because of his medical condition. He was allowed to continue his correspondence studies for his LL.B. at London University. He received law books via the British Embassy, arranged again by David Astor in London. "I will do everything in my power," he wrote to the Ambassador, "to justify the confidence he has in me." Mandela was soon given a table and chair for his cell, though he was not allowed certain crucial books. Granted these rare privileges, he felt all the more need to keep very close to his colleagues.

After a few days in the old jail building, the seven men were moved on June 25 - the day before the traditional protest day of the ANC. They were driven to a bleak new structure which had just been completed: a low rectangle built around a stone courtyard, with three sides containing rows of small cells; the fourth was a high wall which provided a catwalk for a warder with a gun. They were all given similar cells along one side, called the isolation section, or Section B. Mandela's cell was eight feet by seven feet, with a small barred window looking onto the courtyard, and was equipped with a straw mat and three threadbare blankets. It would be his home for the next eighteen years.

At first the prisoners and their lawyers expected they would serve ten years at the most. On their way to Robben Island from Pretoria the friendly young investigating officer, Lieutenant Van Wyk, had assured them that world opinion would get them out in five years: "the girls will be waiting for you." Some of the prisoners, Mandela noted, were seriously asking whether they would still be there at Christmas. But they soon had to face the fact that they would be on Robben Island for a long time, and that their life would be "unredeemably grim." He still had something to learn about brutality. "You have no idea of the cruelty of man against man," he said later, "until you have been in a South African prison with white warders and black prisoners." They had no access to radio or newspapers, and at first could only write and receive one letter, of a maximum of five hundred words, every six months. They could only correspond with their immediate family; and Mandela's first letter - from [his then-wife] Winnie - was blotted out by the censor. Censored portions of letters would be sent on to the Commissioner of Prisons to provide political background, while some letters to and from prisoners containing supposedly political information would be withheld, examined and then retained in the prison records - revealing both the doggedness and the pettiness of the surveillance.

The political prisoners remained extraordinarily sure of the power of their cause and of their ideas, in total contrast to the common-law prisoners in other cells. "What was important," said Mandela after his release, "was the fact that the ideas for which we were sent to Robben Island would never die. And we were therefore able to go through some of the harshest experiences which a human being can have behind bars - especially in a South African prison where the warders were drawn from a community which has always treated blacks like pieces of rag." "We never lost confidence," [former secretary general of the ANC and Mandela's political mentor, Walter] Sisulu recalled. "Analyzing Rivonia, we thought the policies for which we stood could be sustained, whether we were alive or dead. We had confidence in ideas." "If you enter prison in a negative spirit every moment can be hell," said Kathrada. "Nobody had in mind that Mandela would be president, but we knew we would win." Despite the setbacks, Mandela was convinced, as he wrote in 1975, that "In my lifetime I shall step out into the sunshine, walk with firm feet." "Man can adapt to the worst of conditions if he feels he is not alone," said Mac Maharaj, who arrived on Robben Island early in 1965, "if he feels he has support in what he is doing."

After two weeks on the island the prisoners had a tantalizingly brief contact with the mainland when their lawyers Brain Fischer and Joel Joffe were allowed to visit them, to ask again whether they wished to appeal. They all said no, believing that a second trial would be an anticlimax; while Mandela was sure that an appeal would not succeed anyway. He was delighted to see Fischer again, but was puzzled that when he asked Fischer about his wife, Molly, he turned away. After the lawyers had left, Mandela was told that Molly Fischer had just been killed in a car crash. He was allowed to write a letter of condolence, but the prison never posted it. Soon afterward Fischer - whose code name was "Shorty" - disappeared underground; when George Bizos, Mandela's other lawyer, visited the island, Mandela gave a questioning gesture with one hand, while holding the other hand low, meaning "What's happened to Shorty?"

The prisoners' routine was deliberately harsh, as part of the punishment. They were woken at 5:30 a.m. to clean their cells and wash and shave in cold water in an iron bucket. They were given breakfast in the courtyard, from a drum filled with maize porridge, which Mandela found almost inedible, accompanied by a drink of baked maize brewed in hot water. They were inspected by a warder, to whom they had to doff their hats. Then they worked till noon in the cold courtyard in midwinter, sitting in rows hammering stones into gravel while the warders watched them. It was a punishment which could (wrote Neville Alexander [who was imprisoned on Robben Island in 1962] in his subsequent report) "drive the most phlegmatic man into a state of fury. . . . To have to sit in the sun without moving and (for months at the beginning) without being allowed to speak to one's neighbour was hell on earth."

At noon they had lunch of more maize, boiled in kernels. Then they worked again until four, when they washed for half an hour with cold seawater in a bathroom, where they could exchange a few words. Then they had supper of more maize, sometimes with a soggy vegetable or gristly meat, in their cells. At eight the night warder patrolled the corridor to ensure that they were not reading or writing; though they could sometimes whisper to each other, and prisoners who were studying were soon allowed to read till later. A bare forty-watt bulb burned all night in each cell, and the prisoners were left with their bare beds and lonely thoughts until morning.

In January 1965 they began much harder labor in the lime quarry, which was to be the center of Mandela's daily life for the next few years. There they had to hack away the rock to reach the layers of lime, which they then dug out with a pick and shovel. As a workplace it was pitiless, with no escape or protection from the cold in winter or the dazzling glare and heat of midsummer. "I was always thankful I never had to go into that hole, a veritable furnace," said the warder James Gregory. "In summer the walls deflected any cooling breeze sweeping in off the ocean. Not only were they being burned from above by the sun, but also within the quarry where the sun's glare rebounded off the white stone, reflecting into their eyes and burning them." For three years they were refused dark glasses, and many were left with damaged eyesight. Kathrada was refused dark glasses because, according to a letter from the Commissioner of Prisons, he belonged to the category of persons who wanted to be above his fellows by wearing dark glasses and carrying a folded umbrella and a briefcase. After three years they were allowed sunglasses if they paid for them; Mandela's eyes never recovered, and even after an operation, he reads with difficulty.

Mandela preferred the exertion, the open air and the glimpses of nature in the quarry to enclosure in the courtyard. The prisoners were soon able to work at their own rhythm - for a short time with the help of African work songs, which became a political contest. In 1965 they were joined in the quarry by three hardened criminals, who began to provoke them - clearly with the warders' approval - with a mocking work song, "Befunani e Rivonia?" (What did you want at Rivonia?) The political prisoners responded with their own work songs, which became bolder, including a Xhosa song which said: "the white man's work is never finished: hold your knees" - that is, go slower. But one warder, Jordaan, understood Xhosa, and singing was soon banned.

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