LETTERS penned in jail by former president Nelson Mandela reveal his anguish at being separated from his family, according to a British newspaper serialisation yesterday.
The anti-apartheid icon wrote that he felt "soaked in gall" by being powerless to help his then wife Winnie and his children when he was in prison from 1962 to 1990, in the letters printed in The Sunday Times.
The writings gathered in the collection Conversations with Myself, which is being published in Britain tomorrow, also tell of Mandela's heartache at learning of the death of his son.
"I feel I have been soaked in gall, every part of me, my flesh, bloodstream, bone and soul, so bitter am I to be completely powerless to help you in the rough and fierce ordeals you are going through," he wrote to Winnie in August 1970.
In October 1976 he wrote: "My main problem since I left home is my sleeping without you next to me and my waking up without you close to me, the passing of the day without my having seen you."
When Winnie was also jailed for a time in 1969, he wrote to his daughters Zenani and Zindzi, then aged nine and 10: "It may be months or even years before you see her again. For long you may live like orphans without your own home and parents, without the natural love, affection and protection mummy used to give you."
Mandela, now 92, was jailed by the country's white minority government for resisting apartheid rule.
On his release in 1990, he led negotiations with apartheid rulers, a process that culminated in his election as the country's first black president in 1994.
Mandela's heartbreak in jail
LETTERS penned in jail by former president Nelson Mandela reveal his anguish at being separated from his family, according to a British newspaper serialisation yesterday.
The anti-apartheid icon wrote that he felt "soaked in gall" by being powerless to help his then wife Winnie and his children when he was in prison from 1962 to 1990, in the letters printed in The Sunday Times.
The writings gathered in the collection Conversations with Myself, which is being published in Britain tomorrow, also tell of Mandela's heartache at learning of the death of his son.
"I feel I have been soaked in gall, every part of me, my flesh, bloodstream, bone and soul, so bitter am I to be completely powerless to help you in the rough and fierce ordeals you are going through," he wrote to Winnie in August 1970.
In October 1976 he wrote: "My main problem since I left home is my sleeping without you next to me and my waking up without you close to me, the passing of the day without my having seen you."
When Winnie was also jailed for a time in 1969, he wrote to his daughters Zenani and Zindzi, then aged nine and 10: "It may be months or even years before you see her again. For long you may live like orphans without your own home and parents, without the natural love, affection and protection mummy used to give you."
Mandela, now 92, was jailed by the country's white minority government for resisting apartheid rule.
On his release in 1990, he led negotiations with apartheid rulers, a process that culminated in his election as the country's first black president in 1994.
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