Nelson Mandela: 27 years and the line he didn't say

Nelson Mandela is one of the most quoted names when the subject is persistence. He's also one of the most quoted with lines he never said. This page separates one from the other.

The no

On June 12, 1964, at the end of the Rivonia Trial, Mandela was sentenced to life imprisonment for his struggle against apartheid, South Africa's regime of racial segregation. He spent most of the following years in the prison on Robben Island, breaking rocks in a lime quarry. The no, there, was that of an entire state.

He was imprisoned for 27 years. He was released on February 11, 1990.

What they did

Mandela came out of prison to negotiate the end of apartheid. In 1993, he received the Nobel Peace Prize, together with Frederik de Klerk. On May 10, 1994, he was sworn in as the first president elected by the vote of all South Africans, and he governed until 1999.

In his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom (1994), he wrote: "I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear."

The line he didn't say. "It always seems impossible until it's done" is attributed to Mandela on millions of pages. The Nelson Mandela Foundation, which keeps his speeches and letters, has no record of the line, and Quote Investigator didn't find it in his books or speeches either; the earliest attribution located is from an Australian newspaper in 2001. A similar idea appears in 1965, in a book of maxims by the American writer Paul Eldridge: that all things are impossible until they happen, and then they become inevitable.

What this has to do with Bairo

Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez has a line that recalls this one: "The impossible is just something that hasn't been done yet." It isn't a translation of Mandela, nor does it try to be. It's how Bairo sums up what he learned from each fall. And, precisely because the famous line circulates without a source, it's worth saying whose each one is: Bairo's is his, spoken in Manifesto 14:20; the one attributed to Mandela has no record.

What Bairo truly recognizes in Mandela is something else: the idea that courage isn't the absence of fear. He says he was afraid, still young, when he lost his footing in a country that wasn't his. He carried on anyway. It's in Capoeira was the bridge.

There's no possible comparison between one man's life and 27 years in prison for a people. There is tribute.

Read: Manifesto 14:20 · No is the foundation of yes

Sources

• Quote Investigator, "It Always Seems Impossible Until It's Done": https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/01/05/done/
• Africa Check, "No record of Mandela saying 'it always seems impossible until it's done'": https://africacheck.org/fact-checks/spotchecks/no-record-mandela-saying-it-always-seems-impossible-until-its-done
• Nelson Mandela Foundation, on false quotes: https://www.nelsonmandela.org/news/entry/deepest-fear-quote-not-mr-mandelas
• CNN, "Mandela in his own words": https://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/africa/06/24/mandela.quotes/
• Nobel Prize, Nelson Mandela (1993): https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1993/mandela/facts/