A Long Walk: Too Long

While I was applying for a long term visa to work and live in Zimbabwe, I had to leave the country. Thinking the time frame might be short, I just went out to South Africa to wait. I volunteered my services to colleagues in various places there and had the benefit of short stints in different places among different people. For a while, it was a nice interlude, a lingering loitering kind of existence. My supporters sprang for a rental car during part of the time as I was covering great distances between service opportunities.

During one memorable journey, I listened to a quite relevant book on cassette tape.

Nelson Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom began as scraps of paper, buried under the floor of his prison cell. He was incarcerated in South Africa for more than a quarter of a century, part of that time in the prison of Robben Island, about which he writes:

"Its isolation made it not simply another prison, but a world of its own, far removed from the one we had come from. The high spirits with which we had left Pretoria had been snuffed out by its stern atmosphere; we were face to face with the realization that our life would be unredeemably grim. In Pretoria, we felt connected to our supporters and our families; on the island, we felt cut off, and indeed we were. We had the consolation of being with each other, but that was the only consolation."

Mandela reflects:

It was during those long and lonely years that my hunger for the freedom of my own people became a hunger for the freedom of all people, white and black. I knew as well as I knew anything that the oppressor must be liberated just as surely as the oppressed. A man who takes away another man's freedom is a prisoner of hatred, he is locked behind the bars of prejudice and narrow-mindedness. I am not truly free if I am taking away someone else's freedom, just as surely as I am not free when my freedom is taken from me. The oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of their humanity.

When I walked out of prison, that was my mission, to liberate the oppressed and the oppressor both. Some say that has now been achieved. But I know that that is not the case. The truth is that we are not yet free; we have merely achieved the freedom to be free, the right not to be oppressed. We have not taken the final step of our journey, but the first step on a longer and even more difficult road. For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others. The true test of our devotion to freedom is just beginning.

I have walked that long road to freedom. I have tried not to falter; I have made missteps along the way. But I have discovered the secret that after climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb. I have taken a moment here to rest, to steal a view of the glorious vista that surrounds me, to look back on the distance I have come. But I can rest only for a moment, for with freedom comes responsibilities, and I dare not linger, for my long walk is not yet ended.

And while things in South Africa are not Utopian, some of her present challenges come from the very country I was seeking permission to enter, Zimbabwe, as people seek to escape oppression from her first and overstaying black leader.

If only the lessons learned were transferable, from country to country and person to person.