Long Walk of Nelson Mandela, The 1x113
This two-hour FRONTLINE special brings Nelson Mandela’s biography up to date. The Long Walk of Nelson Mandela tells the story of the man behind the myth, probing Mandela’s character, leadership and life’s method through intimate recollections with friends, political allies, adversaries, and his fellow prisoners and jailers on Robben Island where Mandela spent 18 of his 27 prison years. It’s a two-hour biography filled with insights: from Mandela’s ‘royal’ upbringing in the rural Transkei where old chiefs still remember him as a young boy and where his values and attitudes were shaped by tradition and royal prerogative — to old colleagues’ anecdotes about his self-discipline, guarded privacy and quite early sense of his own historic destiny. This film probes how Mandela transformed himself in prison from an impetuous, risk-taking radical into a mature leader and statesman, and also examines Mandela’s electric relationship with Winnie Madikizela Mandela — a love story tragically tempered by the political ambitions of its two larger-than-life protagonists.
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