August 5: When one arrest sparked a twenty-seven-year fight

On August 5, 1962, Nelson Mandela was arrested at a roadblock near Howick, South Africa, beginning his 27 years of imprisonment. Tonight's film: Logan's Run (1976).

On August 5, 1962, on a South African road near Howick, a police roadblock ended the seventeen months during which the press had called Nelson Mandela the “Black Pimpernel.” The secret police were looking for him, the world did not know where he was, and still he got into a car, this time as the chauffeur for Cecil Williams in an Austin Westminster, and set off back toward Johannesburg. Behind the wheel, on paper, sat David Motsamayi, the alias he had been moving under for almost a year. A Ford V-8 full of officers overtook them near Howick. Sergeant Wessels of the Pietermaritzburg police produced the warrant and brushed the alias aside: “Ag. You’re Nelson Mandela and this is Cecil Williams and you are under arrest.”

From that moment on, numbers ruled Mandela’s life. 19476/62, Pretoria Local Prison. Then Robben Island, 466/64. Pollsmoor, 220/82. Victor Verster, 1335/88. Twenty-seven years, because a state decided one man’s freedom was worth less than its own racial order.

And that is exactly why tonight’s film is Logan’s Run (1976). Michael Anderson sat in the director’s chair, David Zelag Goodman wrote the screenplay, and the source was the 1967 novel by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson. The story is set in a 23rd-century domed city where everyone lives freely until they turn thirty. Then comes a civic ceremony called “renewal,” which is actually death, and the Sandmen, police like Logan 5, who hunt down anyone who tries to run. Michael York plays Logan, alongside Jenny Agutter, Richard Jordan, Peter Ustinov, and Farrah Fawcett, with a score by Jerry Goldsmith.