#MastersofSocialIsolation #11. In 1964 Nelson Mandela arrived at the prison in Robben Island to begin his life sentence. Altogether he would spend 18 of his 27 yrs in prison there, confined to a small 7 x 9 ft cell, with a straw mat, blanket, and a bucket for toilet.
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Allowed 1 visitor and 1 500-word letter every 6 mos. Each day he worked 4 hrs in silence breaking rocks in a limestone quarry. “Prison life is about routine: each day like the one before; each week like the one before it, so that the months and yrs blend into each other.”
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“Every day is for all practical purposes like the day before: the same surroundings, same faces, same dialogue, same odor, walls rising to the skies and the ever-present feeling that outside the prison gates there is an exciting world to which you have no access,” he wrote.
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He had no reason to believe he would ever be released. The state did everything to make him believe he was forgotten by the world. Yet he used his time to study, to discipline himself for the day when he would bend his jailers to his will. The day he would walk free.
His isolation worked 2 ways. For 27 years it was illegal to publish his name or print his photo. That silence only increased his mystique. Without those years it is doubtful he would ever have had the authority to negotiate the end of apartheid and wisdom to lead a free S Africa.
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