9000 days

This is the title of a song part of the soundtrack of the movie "Invictus".  It relates to the 27 years of Nelson Mandela's political imprisonement.

Like François Pienaar and the 1995 Springboks team, I paid a visit to the Robben Island Prison complex and to the cell occupied by Nelson Mandela.

All that does not kill us makes us stronger, but what really makes us stronger is the power of our mind.
Invictus is this poem by William Ernest Henley, whose words have been helping Mandela during the 27 years in jail.

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
 
 
The song "9000 days" by South African band Overtone is very movinghttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3J1Xov0dB5Q
 
9000 days were set aside....9000 days of destiny.
 
And it leads me to talk about one of the greatest novelists of our time.
Although Nadine Gardimer won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991, she is not as well known as Andre Brink, Breyten Breytenbach and J.M.Coetzee.
 
It is very unfair, in my mind. Brink, Breytenbach and Coetzee are all three in their seventies and Nadine Gordimer is now well advanced in her eighties.
 
She was the first, starrting with her first novel in 1953 " The Lying Days" to use the power of her writing to depict the twisted evil of a system condemned to a dead end by design.
 
As it is today very difficult to find "The lying Days" - This absolute masterpiece by a young genius must be reprinted and should never have been out of print. It should also be translated - my intelligence tells me that it is one of the Gordimer's novels never translated in French....a shame! - I advise to read first "Burger's Daughter " to have a flavor of what has been apartheid.
 
I will always been happy about the decision I made during my time living in Abidjan, Ivory Coast in 1983 to flight and visit South Africa and see first hand the apartheid, Soweto, the Kruger National Park and also the city of Bulawayo in Matabeleland and part of Zimbabwe.
 
It has shaped the way I live my life and the way I build relations with my fellow human beings for the rest of my life.