Letter to Mandela
Dear Mandela, I write to you not as a country writes to a statesman, nor as history writes to one of its most stubborn sons. I write to you as a mother writes to her child, with trembling hands and a heart too heavy for silence or for sobbing. I am Africa, the same old mother whose skin was divided by colonial rulers with hungry maps and careless pens. The same mother whose children were sold across oceans, whose gold built foreign crowns, whose blood watered strange soils, whose pain became the footnote of civilisation. I am that mother. Scarred, patient, enduring. And you, Mandela, were one of my brightest replies to suffering. When they buried you in prison walls and called it justice, I waited. When they gave you numbers instead of your name, I remembered your name for you. When they locked your youth behind iron bars and thought time would break your spirit, I stood outside those walls like a mother waiting at the gate of a school that refused to return her son. I watched Robben I...