Mandela's letters reveal agony at being separated from family

London: South Africa's first black president Nelson Mandela was anguished at being separated from his family and the ill treatment meted out to his wife by authorities during his 27 years long solitary confinement.

In letters penned in jail, 92-year-old Mandela reveals his anguish at being separated from his family and expresses his helplessness to defend them.

Asked what was his worst moment on Robben Island, Mandela wrote "Well, it's ...very difficult to pinpoint any particular moment... but the question of my wife being harassed and persecuted by the police and sometimes being assaulted and I was not there to defend her. That was a very difficult moment for me..."

Some of the most poignant writings are in two hard-cover exercise books in which Mandela carefully drafted copies of letter he sent through the prison censors on Robben Island from 1969 to 1971, the very worst period of his imprisonment.

Stolen from his cell by the authorities in 1971, they were returned to him in 2004 by a former security policeman.

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Mandela was never sure if his correspondence would reach its destination because of "those remorseless fates", the censors.

His wife, Winnie Mandela, was repeatedly jailed and harassed, which left him racked with guilt about abandoning Zindzi and Zeni, their two young daughters, as well as his other three children.

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In 1969, Thembi, the elder of two sons from his first marriage to Evelyn Mase, died in a car crash at the age of 24.

Mandela writes of his anguish at losing a second child, his daughter Maki having died as a baby. He was not allowed to attend Thembi's funeral.

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According to The Sunday Times magazine, here, too, are fragments of informal, intimate conversations with his jailmate Richard Stengel, recorded when the two men were working on Long Walk to Freedom, Mandela's autobiography.

He talks frankly to Stengel about coping without sex in jail and with the possibility that Winnie might be unfaithful while he is incarcerated.

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The writings gathered in the collection "Conversations with Myself", which goes for sale in Britain on Tuesday, also tell of the Nobel Peace laureate's heartache at learning of the death of his son.

"I feel I have been soaked in gall, every part of my, 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 Mandela in
August 1970.

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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 Zeni and Zindi, then aged nine and 10 that "now she and Daddy are away in jail."

"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."

But his relations with Winnie were sometimes stormy. 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.

He stepped down as president in 1999, after serving one term in office.