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Better Read Than Never: COURTENAY’s The Power of One

The Real Nelson Mandela, being sworn in. (Not Morgan Freeman.)

Sometime during the weeks following Nelson Mandela’s death, I started thinking of The Power of One, a novel that had meant a lot to me in the early ‘90s. (In a fit of bad poetry, I once wrote, “The loneliness birds are croaking…” and feared and heard them often that decade. I still do, sometimes, though I now remember that those birds were inspired, if not stolen, from the novel’s narrator.) Among the many articles and tributes that I read to Madiba, there were references to his enjoyment of boxing as a young man, and the things that he had learned from it. Right! And The Power of One is set in South Africa, centred on the boxing obsession and exploits of a white boy, and wait, wasn’t there a black man in prison who inspired his fists and his mind? I went looking, and found a free on-line torrent (okay, my wife did), but I didn’t really get into this second reading until I was holding a paperback copy. I could say it was an unconscious desire to respect author’s rights, but it was mainly a bibliophile’s bias. I like the feel of 500 pages between my fingers.

The Power of One was a first novel by Bryce Courtenay, an Australian advertising executive who wrote the book as a mid-life challenge¹, setting his adventurous and spiritual and polemical – and, I wasn’t surprised to discover, highly autobiographical – story in his native South Africa. This rambling tale, which he’d planned as a “practice novel”, sold millions. I liked it.

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Nelson Mandela (on genuine freedom)

“…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

“Madiba”, South Africa’s “gift from God”, an African prince in his tribal regalia–before the 27 years on Robben Island.

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…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…[taken only] 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.”

Out of prison, and into the Presidency. There was rejoicing world-wide, but it surely was not a thrilling ride for him. What a burden to carry at his age.

Nelson Mandela (1918-2013), from his 1995 book The Long Walk to Freedom. Among the many things that he was, Mr. Mandela was a practical philosopher on the true meaning of ‘freedom’, a troublesome word in whose name a thousand lies have been told and a thousand oppressions have been hatched.