Mandela: The family man and the failure
Source: Agencies |
October 12, 2010, Tuesday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
NELSON Mandela failing classes, fussing over his children, fighting with his wife.
This is not the anti-apartheid icon of "Long Walk to Freedom," his 1995 autobiography. "Conversations with Myself," which goes on sale today in 22 countries and 20 languages from Catalan to Turkish, presents a more human Mandela, faults, frailties and all.
"Conversations" was compiled with the 92-year-old former South African president's blessing by a team of archivists, editors and collaborators who worked from decades of notes, letters, recorded conversations and other material.
In a foreword, United States President Barack Obama writes that Mandela, who largely retired from public life in 2004, is inspiring even if he is no saint.
"Underneath the history that has been made, there is a human being who chose hope over fear - progress over the prisons of the past," Obama writes. "And I am reminded that even as he has become a legend, to know the man ... is to respect him even more."
"Conversations" is best read as a companion to "Long Walk," which was in part calculated by Mandela and other members of his African National Congress party to stir support for anti-apartheid activists as they stepped into new roles as leaders trying to heal and develop a divided, impoverished nation.
As he puts it in "Conversations," an autobiography of "a freedom fighter must inevitably be influenced by the question whether the revelation of certain facts, however true they may be, will help advance the struggle."
Certainly, the possibility of violence within Mandela's first marriage, to Evelyn Mase, who died in 2004, had no place in the official autobiography. But it has been raised elsewhere, including in "Young Mandela," an unauthorized biography by the British writer David James Smith.
In "Conversations," Mandela puts his version on record. In a conversation with Ahmed Kathrada, a friend and fellow veteran of the anti-apartheid struggle, Mandela denies he tried to choke his first wife. Instead, he said, she threatened to burn him with a red hot poker.
"So I caught hold of her and twisted her arm," Mandela says. He has said his first wife did not understand or support his political activism. A second marriage, to Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, also ended in divorce.
His anguish over sacrificing family life to politics is a recurrent theme.
"I love playing and chatting with children, giving them a bath, feeding and putting them to bed with a little story, and being away from the family has troubled me throughout my political life," he writes in a passage from an unpublished autobiography.
Other passages are taken from notes Mandela made in calendars in his careful, upright penmanship. On December 12, 1984, he jotted: "Results: failed all six subjects."
He writes elsewhere of having too little time to study for his advanced law degree, taken by correspondence in prison.
This is not the anti-apartheid icon of "Long Walk to Freedom," his 1995 autobiography. "Conversations with Myself," which goes on sale today in 22 countries and 20 languages from Catalan to Turkish, presents a more human Mandela, faults, frailties and all.
"Conversations" was compiled with the 92-year-old former South African president's blessing by a team of archivists, editors and collaborators who worked from decades of notes, letters, recorded conversations and other material.
In a foreword, United States President Barack Obama writes that Mandela, who largely retired from public life in 2004, is inspiring even if he is no saint.
"Underneath the history that has been made, there is a human being who chose hope over fear - progress over the prisons of the past," Obama writes. "And I am reminded that even as he has become a legend, to know the man ... is to respect him even more."
"Conversations" is best read as a companion to "Long Walk," which was in part calculated by Mandela and other members of his African National Congress party to stir support for anti-apartheid activists as they stepped into new roles as leaders trying to heal and develop a divided, impoverished nation.
As he puts it in "Conversations," an autobiography of "a freedom fighter must inevitably be influenced by the question whether the revelation of certain facts, however true they may be, will help advance the struggle."
Certainly, the possibility of violence within Mandela's first marriage, to Evelyn Mase, who died in 2004, had no place in the official autobiography. But it has been raised elsewhere, including in "Young Mandela," an unauthorized biography by the British writer David James Smith.
In "Conversations," Mandela puts his version on record. In a conversation with Ahmed Kathrada, a friend and fellow veteran of the anti-apartheid struggle, Mandela denies he tried to choke his first wife. Instead, he said, she threatened to burn him with a red hot poker.
"So I caught hold of her and twisted her arm," Mandela says. He has said his first wife did not understand or support his political activism. A second marriage, to Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, also ended in divorce.
His anguish over sacrificing family life to politics is a recurrent theme.
"I love playing and chatting with children, giving them a bath, feeding and putting them to bed with a little story, and being away from the family has troubled me throughout my political life," he writes in a passage from an unpublished autobiography.
Other passages are taken from notes Mandela made in calendars in his careful, upright penmanship. On December 12, 1984, he jotted: "Results: failed all six subjects."
He writes elsewhere of having too little time to study for his advanced law degree, taken by correspondence in prison.
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