Dear friends and fellow South Africans,
On the 18th of July 1978, Nelson Mandela spent his 60th birthday on Robben Island. In celebration of the man whom the London Times called "the colossus of African nationalism", Mr Walter Sisulu and Mr Ahmed Kathrada delivered speeches, while governments and individuals across the world sent messages of support. These messages were addressed to Mrs Winnie Madikizela Mandela, who also gave an interview to the New York Times.
Mandela himself received only eight messages from family and friends. One of those messages was from me, and Mandela responded warmly. We had maintained a friendship that began in the fifties, when I discovered that Mandela was close to my father-in-law, Zachariah Mzila. Whenever Mandela visited him at the Eloff Street compound where he worked, Mr Mzila's daughter, Irene Thandekile Mzila, would serve him tea and become the target of his gentle teasing.
I was in Durban at that time, completing my studies at the non-European section of the University of Natal, and I attended meetings of the ANC in Nichols Square, together with people like Tambo, Sisulu, Luthuli, Monty Naicker, Yengwa and Mandela. My political activism at the University of Fort Hare, where I had belonged to the ANC Youth League, had seen me rusticated from that institution. Mandela himself, who was a founding member of the Youth League, had been expelled from Fort Hare before I arrived.
When my father-in-law passed away, I asked Mandela to wind up his estate, as a lawyer and family friend.
Following the Rivonia Trial and Mandela's incarceration, we continued to correspond. Some of Mandela's letters had to be smuggled out by his visitors. At other times, he wrote to me through my wife, Princess Irene. There are two letters that I remember well. The first is his letter of condolence upon the passing King Cyprian Bhekuzulu ka Solomon. As the King's traditional Prime Minister, confidante and cousin, I was pained by his death in 1968.