Of recent days, we’ve had a number of requests in the Seren Pop-Up Shop for ‘The Long Walk to Freedom’ by Nelson Mandela. I usually say, ‘Although of course he was secretly Welsh, we don’t stock his book.’

Plucking the title off my own shelves at home, I am reminded of how an early version of this memoir was smuggled out of Robben Island prison camp, where Mandela was incarcerated for over two decades. The first surreptitious draft was buried in the prison courtyard, where it’s discovery by the authorities resulted in suspension of study privileges for four years. Here he is, talking about his own reading habits at Robben Island:

"But the suspension of study privileges had an unintended benefit, and that was that I began to read many books that I would not otherwise have come across. Instead of poring over tomes about contract law, I was now absorbed by novels.

I did not have an unlimited library to choose from on Robben Island. We had access to many unmemorable mysteries and detective novels and all the works of Daphne du Maurier, but little more. Political books were off limits. Any book about socialism or communism was definitely out. A request for a book with the word red in the title, even if it was Little Red Riding Hood, would be rejected by the censors. The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells, though it is a work of science fiction, would be turned down because the word war appeared in its title.

From the first I tried to read books about South Africa or by South African writers. I read all the unbanned novels of Nadine Gordimer and learned a great deal about the white liberal sensibility. I read many American novels, and recall especially John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, in which I found many similarities between the plight of the migrant workers in that novel and our own labourers and farm workers. One book that I returned to many times was Tolstoy’s great work, War and Peace. (Although the word war was in the title, this book was permitted.) I was particularly taken with the portrait of General Kutuzov, whom everyone at the Russian court underestimated. Kutuzov defeated Napoleon precisely because he was not swayed by the ephemeral and superficial values of the court, and made his decisions on a visceral understanding of his men and his people. It reminded me once again that truly to lead one’s people one must also truly know them."