There is a particular danger in the way that successful movements get remembered. The longer the arc of justice bends toward victory, the more the terror of the journey tends to fade — smoothed away by the comfort of the outcome. A new documentary series, *Free Nelson Mandela*, sets out to resist that amnesia, tracing thirty years of campaigning that preceded Nelson Mandela's release from prison in 1990 and his election as South Africa's first democratically chosen president four years later. Peter Hain — the South African-born activist who came to Britain in 1966 as a teenager and later served as a senior Labour minister — is among those who speaks with unflinching candour about what that struggle actually cost.

Thatcher denounced Mandela as a terrorist only a few years before he walked free; Hain himself received a letter bomb and was framed for a bank robbery. "It was a hard struggle, a bitter struggle," he says, and yet he is careful to insist that white British activists faced nothing remotely comparable to the daily violence endured by Black South Africans living under apartheid itself. Dali Tambo, son of ANC president-in-exile Oliver Tambo, offers testimony of a different kind of childhood — one shaped entirely by the expectation of catastrophe. Growing up in London, he watched his parents call on the Algerian embassy to sweep their house for surveillance devices; two out of three times, bugs were found.

At the age of roughly fourteen, he discovered an intruder hiding in the family cellar.