Deconstructing the Myth of the Civilized Nation and the Emergence of the Pragmatic Freedom Fighter: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Nelson Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom
Abstract
Long Walk to Freedom is an important text because it shows how a person retains the ability to build a future and reclaim the dignity lost through mass oppression. This research paper does not look at Nelson Mandela simply as a rising leader; instead, it focuses on moving away from the old myths of leadership toward understanding him as a practical man. Drawing on Critical Discourse Analysis, this study examines how a leader is born in the worst circumstances and whether a freedom fighter is a godly figure with perfect actions, or an ordinary person who makes mistakes yet still brings change to entrenched patterns. It also considers Mandela's understanding of racism, observed in his own writing, where he states that "no one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin" (Mandela, 1994, p. 542). Overall, this paper analyzes the discursive choices that trace an apartheid chain-bound man's transformation into a real freedom fighter.
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Introduction
For decades, the colonizing world sought to colonize the rest of the globe simply to extract the treasures of nations by any means necessary. This is the underlying idea confronted in Nelson Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom: that the history of civilization is, in fact, a history of mass oppression directed at already-civilized peoples, and that it is a myth that the colonizer arrived to bring "light" and shape "advancement" in self-sufficient lands. This literary work challenges the prevailing notion of the African land and, beyond telling a heroic story, Nelson Mandela took a very unusual road—one that everyone wishes to travel but few are willing to accept the bitterness of. This analysis traces Mandela's journey through his nonfictional account of that bitter road, beginning from an unspoken acceptance and moving toward active resistance against every form of systemic harm.
This study examines the discourse used in explaining the historical apartheid system and closely analyzes the discursive choices that construct not a mythical, powerful leader, but an ordinary man with extraordinary courage to challenge systemic oppression. It focuses on the tone and behavioral patterns used to voice injustice in a humanistic form rather than through the lens of a mythical hero.
This paper has three goals: (1) to show how Mandela's story challenges the colonial idea of the "civilizing mission"; (2) to explain how the book presents Mandela as a grounded, practical freedom fighter rather than a heroic figure; and (3) to explore how Mandela's account presents African communal beliefs—particularly about land and human relationships—as evidence of a civilization that existed long before, and in many ways surpassed, Western ideas of progress. This paper also applies Michel Foucault's concept of governmentality and its systemic mechanisms to examine how discursive choices help dismantle the system through the emergence of true consciousness.
Conclusion
Overall, this research has focused on the linguistic patterns and discursive choices Mandela uses to explain his journey of freedom fighting—not merely as a role to perform, but as something to be lived through. Close analysis of specific chapters from Long Walk to Freedom shows that Mandela frames freedom as a natural, universal entitlement rather than a privilege to be granted, and demonstrates how the colonial chains are broken by refusing to accept anything as given. His account further suggests that this journey did not need to begin at some fixed point for the South African people, because it had already begun long ago; what remains is simply to carry it forward.
Ultimately, this research has examined how the freedom fighter is portrayed in Long Walk to Freedom, and what a pragmatic freedom fighter looks like when he follows the will of ordinary people and works to reclaim the lost identity of the South African people—as revealed through close attention to the discourse and linguistic patterns used throughout the autobiography.
References
- Foucault, M. (1978). The history of sexuality Vol. 1: An introduction. Pantheon Books.
- Felekidou, D. (2014). The use of metaphors in Nelson Mandela's autobiography and their relation to his social roles [Master's thesis, University of Glasgow]. University of Glasgow Theses Repository. https://theses.gla.ac.uk/6373/
- Mandela, N. (1994). Long walk to freedom: The autobiography of Nelson Mandela. Little, Brown and Company.
- Zhou, J. P. (2020). An analysis of A Long Walk to Freedom from the perspective of transitivity system. Open Journal of Modern Linguistics, *10*, 195-202. https://doi.org/10.4236/ojml.2020.103012