Mandela letters returned after 30 years

A former apartheid policeman who helped jail Nelson Mandela more than 30 years ago today returned to him two notebooks of letters written in prison.

At the opening of the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory and Commemoration, retired policemen Donald Card told the former South African president he had waited more than three decades to return the notebooks in which Mandela wrote drafts of prison letters between February 1969 and April 1971.

“Thirty-three years have flown by since 1971 when I put these two notebooks on my wardrobe,” said Card in Johannesburg.

Card had testified against Mandela and his co-accused in their sabotage trial. All were sentenced to life in prison in June 1964. Mandela was released in February 1990 and was elected South Africa’s first black president in 1994. Now 86, Mandela said earlier this year he had retired from public life.

“What you have just witnessed could be described as one old man giving another old man two old notebooks,” quipped Mandela, dressed in a shirt emblazoned with his old prison number, 46664.

He thanked Card for returning the notebooks rather than keeping them or selling them to a collector.

The centre is an archive of Mandela’s papers and records.

“The history of our country is characterised by too much forgetting,” said Mandela, drawing laughter when he noted that at his age, he is “forced to make friends with forgetting.”

“One of our challenges as we build and extend democracy is the need to ensure that our youth know where we come from, what we have done to break the shackles of our oppression, and how we have pursued the journey to freedom and dignity for all,” he said.

In the early years of his imprisonment, Mandela was allowed to write and receive only one 500 word letter every six months. Since letters were heavily censored by prison officials, he painstakingly drafted most of his correspondence in notebooks before putting them on paper to be mailed.

“Letters were the lifeblood connecting prisoners and their families,” said Amhed Kathrada, who was jailed with Mandela.

Card said he once helped authorities read the letters, looking for “coded messages” in them.

“I decided against returning the letters to authorities,” the ex-policeman said. “I decided that these were very valuable documents that could be lost or destroyed.”

An exhibition called A Prisoner Working in the Garden was opened at the centre, which is at the offices of the Nelson Mandela Foundation in Johannesburg.