What It’s Like Reading Mandela’s Autobiography as a Hostage in Tehran


When I think of Nelson Mandela, I don’t really think of Mandela the president. I think of Mandiba the political prisoner, and the man whose writing gave me courage behind bars. I read Mandela’s autobiography, A Long Walk to Freedom, while incarcerated as a political hostage in Iran. His life put mine into perspective. I was finishing my second year, but he spent nearly as many years in prison as I’d been alive. He negotiated the end of apartheid from his cell. He was forced to bust rocks day after day, year after year, with a hammer for no good reason. He said the time he’d spent in solitary confinement were the most difficult thing he’d ever been through. I had made it through four months of solitary. If Mandela said that was the hardest thing, I could trust that the worst was behind me.

Long Walk To Freedom Nelson Mandela

In our limited, isolated world, Mandela’s experience became a reference point. When I read about the garden he eventually planted on Robben Island, my cellmate Josh Fattal and I made our concrete cell a little more alive by planting an onion in a milk carton, and setting it in our windowsill. When interrogators were unusually nice to us, we thought maybe it was a sign that freedom was coming: Mandela was treated better before he was released.

Mandela wrote much of his autobiography on pages that a fellow prisoner later transcribed into microscopic text. Those notes were then stuffed into the spines of a book, and smuggled out. After reading that, I taught myself how to write so small it could hardly be read, and Josh and I slipped our words into the spines of our books.

Six months after getting out of prison, we got our books back. There were hundreds of them. The Iranians handed them over to the Swiss embassy and the Swiss shipped them to DC. All of the book spines were sliced open and our notes were gone. But we got that autobiography. It sits prominently on our bookshelf at home. Mandela is a hero for ending apartheid. But he is also a hero for making it through those 27 years unbroken. 

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

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