A monument to Mandela: the Robben Island years Freedom's champion

There is more to Nelson Mandela than the genial old man seen shaking hands with the great, the good and the famous. Paul Vallely recalls the persecuted activist and prisoner

Every Thursday at one point during Nelson Mandela's long incarceration on Robben Island he and a group of other black prisoners would be taken outside and told to dig a trench six feet deep. When it was complete, they were told to get down into it, whereupon their white warders would urinate on them. Then they were told to fill in the trench and go back to their solitary cells.

Years later, when Nelson Mandela was about to be inaugurated as the first president of South Africa elected by all its people, he was asked who he would like to invite to his first dinner as president. The warders from Robben Island, he said. "You don't have to do that," his advisers told him. "I don't have to be president either," he replied. The first time he sat down to break bread as head of state those same warders were his guests.

When Nelson Mandela arrived in London last week for the unveiling of his statue in Parliament Square, most of those who turned out to offer him adulatory applause were, like me, middle-aged and upwards. Mandela's epic life was the political soundtrack to our formative years.

In the politics of the 1960s, the apartheid system in South Africa stood as a totem of all that remained of the entrenched privilege and evil repression of the imperialism of the past. Apartheid was the last bastion of the arrogant notion of the superiority of the white man.

Stories like the one about the whites pissing on the blacks were the fuel for the outrage of the anti-apartheid movement all around the world. The curved black and white circle that was its badge became an icon for an entire generation. And Nelson Mandela became its hero.

Mandela was one of his nation's first black lawyers. He had set up the first African law firm in South Africa with his partner, Oliver Tambo, in 1952. The two men campaigned against the repressive system.

In 1960, tensions soared when 69 black people were shot dead by police in the Sharpeville massacre. The government banned the principal black political opposition, the African National Congress. "All lawful modes of expressing opposition," Mandela later said, "had been closed by legislation, and we were placed in a position in which we had either to accept a permanent state of inferiority, or to defy the government."

Peaceful resistance was over. Mandela became the leader of the ANC's armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation). He went into hiding, declaring "the struggle is my life". Even then his commitment to violence was a tempered one. Umkhonto limited itself to sabotaging military and government targets. Its members were told they were on no account to injure or kill anyone and were forbidden to carry weapons.

But he also toured the world to raise support for a guerrilla army should sabotage fail to end apartheid. He was received with great sympathy across Africa and also by Labour and Liberal political leaders in London. Thirty years of ANC moderation had only ever produced laws restricting the rights and progress of the majority black population.

Yet that was enough to secure a guilty verdict when Mandela returned to South Africa and was caught by the authorities.

At the Rivonia treason trial Mandela set out a cogent defence in a speech which it is still moving to read today - and which electrified the world when it was delivered in the closing moments of a trial in which the prosecution had asked for the death penalty. It ended: "During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to the struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die."

Mandela was jailed for life. He was to serve 27 years behind bars. But the anti-apartheid struggle continued, led by South Africa's churches and black children in the townships, supported by demonstrations by students and political activists across the globe.

Britain was a particular focus. The then Bishop of Liverpool, former England cricketer David Shepherd, was a vocal opponent. The world community imposed limited economic sanctions on South Africa.

News of the conditions on Robben Island only fuelled the international fury. Mandela performed hard labour in a lime quarry. Conditions were very basic. Prisoners were segregated by race, with blacks receiving fewest rations. Mandela was allowed one visitor every six months, and one letter, often rendered unreadable by the prison censors. When his mother and eldest son died, he was not allowed to attend their funerals.

Then in 1980 the exiled Oliver Tambo launched an international campaign whose "Free Nelson Mandela!" slogan resounded through universities, churches, schools and trade union gatherings across Europe and America. Local councils began to name streets, squares and buildings after Mandela. Musicians dedicated songs to him.