![]() ![]() I learned to stick-fight-essential knowledge to any rural African boy-and became adept at its various techniques, parrying blows, feinting in one direction and striking in another, breaking away from an opponent with quick footwork.įrom these days I date my love of the veld, of open spaces, the simple beauties of nature, the clean line of the horizon. It was in the fields that I learned how to knock birds out of the sky with a slingshot, to gather wild honey and fruits and edible roots, to drink warm, sweet milk straight from the udder of a cow, to swim in the clear, cold streams and to catch fish with twine and sharpened bits of wire. He described the singular joys of his wide-open childhood in his autobiography Long Walk to Freedom. ![]() Mandela was raised in a traditional village of earthen huts in the Eastern Cape of South Africa. ![]() Here is Mandela in his own words: excerpts from letters, speeches and memoirs reflecting upon each stage of his life-from the innocence of a tribal village boy to the triumph and pressures of being the first black African president of South Africa. ![]() One of the 20th century’s most important civil-rights change-makers, Nelson Mandela devoted his life-including 27 years in prison-to bringing an end to the cruelly segregationist policies of South Africa’s apartheid system. ![]()
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