"At six o'clock we received sleeping mats and blankets. I do not think words can do justice to a description of the foulness and filthiness of this bedding. The blankets were encrusted with dried blood and vomit, ridden with lice, vermin, and cockroaches, and reeked with a stench that actually competed with the odiousness of the drain...
The prison, according to apartheid dictates, separated detainees by color... Our diet was fixed according to race. For breakfast, Africans, Indians, and Coloureds received the same quantities, except that Indians and Coloureds received a half-teaspoonful of sugar, which we did not...The diet for white detainees was far superior to that for Africans. So color-conscious were the authorities that even the type of sugar and bread supplied to whites and nonwhites differed: white prisoners received white sugar and white bread, while Coloured and Indian prisoners were given brown sugar and brown bread..."
This is a small excerpt from Nelson's Mandela's autobiography Long Walk to Freedom. It supplies the smallest example of what is enormously replete throughout, at least, the first half of the book, that which is the incredible, baffling, immoral denigration, maltreatment, discrimination, disenfranchisement, segregation, ridicule and humiliation meted out to Black Africans by White colonial-European-descended Afrikaaners. Simply, Africans were treated like animals.
From my perspective as a mixed-race-heritage 36 year old woman living in the United States in 2013, it is absolutely astonishing.
The passage excerpted speaks of the time before Nelson Mandela went to prison for over 20 years. Before the 1993 de Klerk / Mandela Nobel Peace prize. And yet well within the past 50 years, squarely within the lifetime of my father and myself.
The profound indignities so recently suffered by Black Africans in South Africa at the hands of Whites are incomprehensible.
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