Page 144 - SpringBoard_ELD_Grade7_Flipbook

Interpret the Text Using Close Reading
Learning Target
• Apply an understanding of how text is structured. • Read closely and annotate the text.
Read and annotate
Read the excerpt from Nelson Mandela’s autobiography Long Walk to Freedom and annotate the text as you read.
■ Use the My Notes area to write questions or ideas you have about the speech. ■ Underline the images in the last two paragraphs that relate to the title.
■ Put a star next to Mandela’s statement about his “mission.”
■ Put an exclamation mark next to Mandela’s sentence about “chains.”
■ Circle unknown words and phrases.
Long Walk to Freedom:
With Connections
by Nelson Mandela
1 I was not born with a hunger to be free. I was born free—free in every way that I could know. Free to run in the fields near my mother’s hut, free to swim in the clear stream that ran through my village, free to roast mealies under the stars and ride the broad backs of slow-moving bulls. As long as I obeyed my father and abided by the customs of my tribe, I was not troubled by the laws of man or God.
2 It was only when I began to learn that my boyhood freedom was an illusion, when I discovered as a young man that my freedom had already been taken from me, that I began to hunger for it. At first, as a student, I wanted freedom only for myself, the transitory freedoms of being able to stay out at night, read what I pleased, and go where I chose. Later, as a young man in Johannesburg, I yearned for the basic and honorable freedoms of achieving my potential, of earning my keep, of marrying and having a family—the freedom not to be obstructed in a lawful life.
3 But then I slowly saw that not only was I not free, but my brothers and sisters were not free. I saw that it was not just my freedom that was curtailed, but the freedom of everyone who looked like I did. That is when I joined the African National Congress, and that is when the hunger for my own freedom became the greater hunger for the freedom of my people. It was this desire for the freedom of my people to live their lives with dignity and self-respect that animated my life,
that transformed a frightened young man into a bold one, that drove a law-abiding attorney to become a criminal, that turned a family-loving husband into a man without a home, that forced a life-loving man to live like a monk. I am no more virtuous or self-sacrificing than the next man, but I found that I could not even enjoy the poor and limited freedoms I was allowed when I knew my people were not free. Freedom is indivisible; the chains on any one of my people were the chains on all of them, the chains on all of my people were the chains on me.
ACTIVITY 3.3
My notes
Autobiography
Unit 3 • Choices and Consequences • Part 3: Long Walk to Freedom 121
transitory: temporary, not permanent
animated: giving energy and purpose to
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