Unconquerable

Nelson Mandela helped bring apartheid to an end and it his actions in being a leader of peaceful protests and armed resistance, that landed him in prison for nearly three decades.

He spent the first 18 of his 27 years in jail at the brutal Robben Island Prison, a former leper colony off the coast of Cape Town, where he was confined to a small cell without a bed or plumbing and compelled to do hard labor in a lime quarry. As a black political prisoner, he received scantier rations and fewer privileges than other inmates.

He was only allowed to see his wife, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela (1936-), who he had married in 1958 and was the mother of his two young daughters, once every six months. Mandela and his fellow prisoners were routinely subjected to inhumane punishments for the slightest of offenses; among other atrocities, there were reports of guards burying inmates in the ground up to their necks and urinating on them.

It is during these hard times that his inspiration came from one of the poems by W E Henley, Invictus.

Here is a copy of the words from the poem:

Out of the night that covers me

Black as the pit from pole to pole

I thank whatever gods may be

for my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

my head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears

looms but the horror of the shade,

and yet the menace of the years

finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate

how charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate:

I am the captain of my soul.

It is indeed his unconquerable spirit that got him through his years of imprisonment, and after his release into becoming the country’s president. Even in your death, your spirit lives on Tata Madiba.