I just returned from a trip to South Africa. As part of this trip I took a tour of Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela spent the majority of his 27 years in prison. The tours at Robben Island are conducted by former inmates. Our guide was Elias Mzamo.

Like many of his fellow inmates, Mr. Mzamo was poor and uneducated when he was sentenced to Robben Island in 1964 for his political work fighting apartheid. Life there consisted of long hours of manual labor punctuated by brutality and terror. Thanks to the efforts of progressive lawyers, however, prisoners were allowed--if they could afford it--to take correspondence courses to try to complete their educations. Not surprisingly, only a few inmates had the resources to take advantage of this opportunity. But many more were hungry to learn. So the prisoners designed a scheme. Inmates assigned to building crews smuggled empty cement bags back to their cell blocks. At night, the prisoners taking correspondence courses would use this "paper" to teach the rest of the prisoners what they themselves had just learned.

As a result, many prisoners, at great personal risk, completed the equivalent of a high-school education, while some of those enrolled in correspondence courses earned college and even post-graduate degrees. Indeed, the prisoners' commitment to education was so great that when a new warden was appointed to Robben Island, he required the guards, who had almost as little formal education as those they guarded, to enroll in correspondence courses and to ask the prisoners for help in completing their studies. Today, many of these same "prisoners," including Nelson Mandela, are the leading officials of the new South Africa, where they are teaching not only their former captors, but the rest of the world, lessons about truth and reconciliation and justice and democracy.

As you prepare to leave school, it is important to remember that each of you has been given the precious gift of education--a gift that many people risk everything to receive. It is now your obligation to repay this debt by teaching others. As lawyers, you will have the opportunity to be wise counselors to your clients and mentors to those who follow you into practice. For many of you, however, your greatest teaching role will be as parents, where you will have the privilege of guiding the next generation of women and men, to paraphrase Nelson Mandela, on humanity's long walk to freedom.

When we returned from Robben Island and told our friend from South Africa what we had learned, he told us that "in the dark days of apartheid, we had a motto: 'Each one, teach one.'" I promise you that if you hold that motto dear, you will not only do your small part to help humanity walk into the light, but you will also know, as I know today, that to have the privilege to teach in any capacity is to experience some of the greatest joy that the human heart can ever know.