After Mandela Day appeared on the end of the Podcast where we discussed the Green Brigades William Wallace \/ Bobby Sands banners, CarlJungleBhoy sends us this piece on the man once viewed by the British State as a Terrorist\u2026.we thought it worth sharing\u2026<\/p>\n
Someone else Mrs Thatcher had her own views on…<\/p>\n
Back in the early 80\u2019s the political climate was very different. You would have had to experience it yourself to know just oppressive\/depressive things were then. I\u2019d recently outlived a(nother) rebellious stage and \u00a0moved out of the Amsterdam squat we were living in, \u00a0to go \u201cworking for the yankee dollar\u201d to subsidise my nightlife escapades. Thatcher (excuse me whilst I spit) \u00a0was in power, Apartheid was still in place, and the most powerful man on the planet was an actor\/cowboy who\u2019d been outshone by the eponymous hero \u2013 a chimp \u2013 in the film Bedtime for Bonzo. \u00a0This sounds like a plot from a novel by the late, great, Kurt Vonnegut Jnr \u2013 the man who (in Breakfast For Champions) re-defined the use of the asterisk on the printed page, by using an * to describe an asshole – One of my all time literary highlights.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
At that time, I was working for what was then known as TIME Life \u2013 running their Agent Subscription Dept -which involved the processing of orders + customer service and correspondence- \u00a0a now extinct medium, whereby words are written or typed onto pieces of paper and passed from one person or company to another \u2013 from agents who sold magazine subscriptions on a commission basis. Anyway, one day, a Dutch lady working for me asked if I could take a look at something and advise her on what to do. She\u2019d been passed a hand-written letter from a subscriber in South Africa, telling us he had been receiving duplicate copies of the magazine for some weeks and asking us if we could investigate and take appropriate action. He\u2019d also enclosed the address labels from the covering envelopes in which the magazines are delivered which contained the relevant customer reference numbers, which after looking up showed that we\u2019d received 2 different orders, from 2 different agents. Hence the fact it has been passed on to my wee department.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
At first glance, this didn\u2019t look like anything out of the ordinary \u2013 until I took a closer look. The letter had a stamp from a prison censor confirming that it had been approved for mailing. The address labels showed that the magazines had 2 different delivery addresses for Pollsmoor Prison \u2013 one a P.O Box number, the other a street address \u2013 and with slightly different names. One said Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, the other Mr N Mandela. The letter itself was also signed and dated. When I saw this I was totally taken aback –<\/p>\n
\u2018Don\u2019t you know who this is!?\u2019, I asked, surprised that she didn\u2019t recognise it \u2013 although \u2013 in her defence \u2013 he wasn\u2019t then quite the world figure and legend we all know now.<\/p>\n
Immediately, I thought, this one\u2019s for me, and after checking further and making a couple of phone calls to South Africa, told the 2 agents that we wouldn\u2019t argue about who the order belonged to, or how the duplication came about, we\u2019d simply combine both orders together and extend into 1 copy with a longer subscription period. I also took it upon myself \u2013 with great enthusiasm – to write back on TIME\u2019s behalf thanking him for bringing the problem to our attention, and letting him know we\u2019d sorted it out.<\/p>\n
At that time we had a completely separate South African edition of the magazine, which was also printed there (Sandton, if I recall). You may not be aware of this, but at that time all news media in RSA was subject to very heavy censorship. In the case of TIME, this was as crude as you could possibly imagine \u2013 large blocks of text blackened out on the printed copy \u2013in some cases making the story unreadable. It\u2019s also worth noting that it\u2019s quite possible that \u2013 even with the censorship \u2013 a personal magazine subscription in a high-security prison was probably a quite valuable commodity.<\/p>\n
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Knowing how shrewd Mandela was, it wouldn\u2019t surprise me one bit if the censored pieces were just as interesting to him as the untouched bits, as they held clues to what the Apartheid government were determined to keep from the public. This is pure speculation on my part, but I can certainly envisage discussions between prisoners on this subject \u2013 It\u2019s not as if they had lots do to pass the time. However, speculation aside, it struck me that it displayed great integrity for a man in that situation to take the trouble to write and point out that he was getting something he didn\u2019t think belonged to him.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
I then set out to draft a letter in reply and \u2013 even if I say so myself \u2013 I\u2019m very proud of my achievement. Conscious of the fact that letters both in and out of prison have to get past the prison censor, I took excruciating care to phrase it in such a way, that it could be read as a standard boring office text letter, whilst containing a different message under the radar. In short, commenting on the different delivery addresses, I basically said that we hoped that it wouldn\u2019t be too long before he had a completely different address outside of prison. I added a bit along the lines that the type of honesty he\u2019d shown in bringing the problem to our attention was something that was admired across the world. I also added a promise that we\u2019d do everything we could, both now and in the future, to offer him our fullest support in every way possible. Bearing in mind I was writing on behalf of the company, although I put my signature to it, I needed to get the letter approved first before sending, so ran it past our then Circulation Director, an American woman with a liberal heart beating beneath a hard-as-nails-business-woman outer shell. She read it through carefully, stopped to grin at up at me a couple of times, then said (her exact words);<\/p>\n
\u201cThat is fucking brilliant. Mail it!\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
But that wasn\u2019t the end of it. A couple of weeks a letter arrived addressed to me from Pollsmoor Prison. \u2013 I opened it to find the same plain, white paper, the same neat and simple handwriting, the same rather formal but polite & friendly English, the same stamp showing it had passed through the censor before being mailed, and the same name & signature of Nelson Mandela. Not only had the great man taken the trouble to write back thanking me personally for sorting out his subscription, but he\u2019d also taken the trouble to let me know that he\u2019d also \u201cgot\u201d the hidden message of support that I took great pains to try and get across. Not only that, but here he was replying in kind \u2013 using ambiguous language which the censor couldn\u2019t really fault – he let us know he appreciated the support of those in the outside world and that it was some comfort to him to know that with a little bit of common sense, a wrong could be righted. I was so choked with emotion reading it, that even now it still brings a tear to my eye, but, it also makes be smile from ear to ear to think that old Nelson got the message, and I can\u2019t tell you how proud I am of that.<\/p>\n
Now, isn’t that \u00a0one of the most heartwarming anecdotes you\u2019ve ever heard?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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