Mandela

"I was very torn, and I feel very guilty and indeed treasonous towards Mandela for not choosing his autobiography. I guess that if I have to go to a desert island and take one Mandela book with me I think it would be Anthony Sampson’s one. It covers all of the same chronological and biographical ground as Mandela’s autobiography but what it does is add Anthony Sampson’s eye. He knew Mandela very well when he was a young man during the 1950s and they remained good friends until Anthony Sampson’s death four or five years ago. So he has the credibility of knowing Mandela as well as any biographer could be expected to get to know him. But, at the same time, he was able to reflect on Mandela. And the thing about Mandela is that he’s not a man to reflect upon himself. Mandela is an actor on stage. He’s a performer. He’s a man of action. He’s not someone who pauses and reflects – at least he’s not someone who’s going to reflect publicly in a book. And so in order to analyse and draw reference from Mandela, to stand back and think about him, I think you get more guidance, very authoritative guidance, from Anthony Sampson’s book. At least a third of the book, if not more, takes place during Mandela’s 27 years in prison. Mandela in his autobiography will tell you about encounters and clashes he had with the prison warders and with other prisoners, but what Sampson does is put it into the context of his life. He explains the very important degree to which prison was a laboratory or school for Mandela, in which he quite consciously prepared for what he knew would be the day when he would have to sit down and negotiate the transition to democracy and try to persuade the white government to cede power rather than to do so by force of arms. That was the realisation he reached in prison, and in his relations with his jailers and the heads of the prison he was continually learning and making notes about all the aspects of the Afrikaner personality. He learned about their history; he read their books; he learned their language. He prepared himself in prison for the great political game that lay ahead. Sampson explains that very well. On another level, what Sampson’s book does is demythologise Mandela. It talks about his private life and his first wife, whom he left for Winnie Mandela. It talks about his extraordinary passion for Winnie Mandela and his evolving, appalling disappointment, as he understood that Winnie had really been corrupted over the years by, no doubt, the very unpleasant experiences she herself had suffered at the hands of the security forces. He considers Mandela’s pain there. He also talks about his estrangement from his family, who resented in many cases the fact that he was dedicating so much of his life to the nation – to the children of the nation – and not so much taking care of his own biological children. He examines that in a way that Mandela is simply incapable of doing. There’s a great line about Mandela that Sampson quotes in the book: “He combines an extreme heartiness with an impenetrable reserve.” I think that captures Mandela very well and it tells you why he would have a problem in an autobiography of going beyond a certain surface telling of the story. He has been known to have flashes of anger, certainly in meetings of the ANC leadership. There were certainly times at press conferences when, if a journalist were to ask a question that betrayed a certain foolishness or lack of information, he would snap at them. He did not suffer fools gladly. The point about forgiveness is very important. Sampson addresses this in his book and I myself have written a lot about this. Essentially, what Sampson does is offer a corrective to the notion that Mandela just offers forgiveness for forgiveness’s sake, and is driven above all by a Gandhi-esque or Christ-like moral vision of life. The thing about Mandela that is absolutely critical to understand is this: He is over and above all else a political leader. He’s a political leader with a very clear sense of what his objective is. In prison he understood that force of arms, that revenge, that throwing the whites into the sea, was not going to be the way he was going to achieve his life’s goal of installing democracy, stability and peace in South Africa. Therefore, what I’m saying, and Sampson says this too, is that forgiveness became in Mandela’s hands a political tool. It became a key instrument to achieving a political objective. Happily, of course, forgiveness was something that meshed wonderfully with his own nature. He’s a person who’s generous by nature. But let’s not forget he was the man who founded the armed wing of the ANC in 1961, and had Mandela emerged from prison and judged that the most effective and swiftest way to achieve the liberation of his people was through force of arms and revenge, he would have gone for it. But he had it very clear in his mind that forgiveness was the tool to achieve his ends."