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Young Mandela Nelson Mandela, conversations with myself

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DOI: 10.1080/02589001.2011.581503

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Young Mandela Nelson Mandela,

conversations with myself
a
Roger Southall
a
Department of Sociology, University of the Witwatersrand, South
Africa

Available online: 08 Aug 2011

To cite this article: Roger Southall (2011): Young Mandela Nelson Mandela, conversations with
myself, Journal of Contemporary African Studies, 29:3, 352-358

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 352 Book reviews

Young Mandela, by David James Smith, London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2010,
iii340pp., ISBN 13-978-0-297-85524-8

Nelson Mandela, conversations with myself, edited by Nelson Mandela Foundation,

London, Basingstoke and Oxford, Macmillan, 2010, xxi454 pp., ISBN 978-0-230-
74901-6

Nelson Mandela has become not only a saint but a publisher’s dream and a heritage
industry. Feted as the iconic figure of liberation by the African National Congress
(ANC) when it was in exile, he published his autobiography, Long walk to freedom, in
1994, reinforcing the notion that Mandela was the struggle and the struggle was
Mandela. When he joined the ANC, he wrote, ‘the hunger for my own freedom
became the greater hunger for the freedom of my people . . . the chains on all of my
people were the chains on me’. As Anthony Sampson wrote, in his own biography,1
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Mandela had to create his own myth as part of his challenge to the racist regime, and
did so with a natural flair for showmanship. Yet when he retired from politics, at the
end of his presidency, he made a fetish of stressing his own fallibility and humility.
David Smith, in Young Mandela, sees him both as a superman and an ordinary old
man simultaneously, his ‘essential integrity’ giving his story its universal appeal:
Mandela is the man we love to love, and we will mourn his passing.
His admirers will find much to deepen their regard for Nelson Mandela in
Conversations with myself. This is a fascinating collection of Mandela’s personal
letters, jottings, taped conversations, memoirs and other sources which, in the
introductory words of Verne Harris, the archivist at the Nelson Mandela Founda-
tion, ‘aims to give readers access to the Nelson Mandela behind the public figure’
(xvi). Here, says Harris, ‘he is not the icon or saint elevated far beyond the reach of
ordinary mortals. Here he is like you and me’. Well, not quite. For a start, few of us
have ever had the obsession which this man has had in his life for accumulating
records, from the thoroughly mundane (his membership cards of the local Methodist
church when he was young) to the grandiose, his justly famous speech from the dock
at the conclusion of the Rivonia trial in 1964. So, inevitably, this collection is a
somewhat arbitrary selection from a mass of material, yet I think we can say without
much fear of contradiction that it has been well done. There is much there that might
be expected: the poignancy of letters to his family, notably Winnie Mandela, from
jail; the longings for the ordinary things of life denied to a prisoner; the
reminiscences of events long past with life-long friends; and not least, Mandela’s
impish sense of humour. More unexpected, however, is his at times poetical turn of
phrase, and the beauty of his language. ‘What a sweet euphemism for self-praise the
English language has evolved!’, he writes in a letter to Fatima Meer in 1971.
‘Autobiography, they choose to call it. . .’ (7). He goes on to state that nothing would
ever induce him to write an autobiography. Nor indeed, in the genuine sense of the
genre, did he, for Long walk was, as Verne Harris indicates, ‘fundamentally, and very
deliberately, the work of a collective’ (xv), designed to shore up his political image at
a key moment in the nation’s life.
This of course reflects a wider problem for political biography in South Africa, for it
has evolved as a continuation of ‘the struggle’, as life stories of individuals involved in
the liberation movement roll off the production line with monotonous regularity.
 Journal of Contemporary African Studies 353

Those who committed their lives, made personal sacrifices and often served long spells
in prison feel desperate to see their names inscribed in history. Yet, as one critic of the
genre has pointed out, ‘the whole historical enterprise in South Africa is threatened by
attempts to impose an official narrative of the liberation struggle, centred on the ANC
and its leadership, into which the entire history of modern South Africa is subsumed’.2
The Anti-Apartheid Museum, Freedom Park in Pretoria and Liliesleaf Farm in
Rivonia (where the ANC leadership was arrested in 1963), are all way stations on a
heritage trail that elevates the role of the ANC, at the expense of other movements, in
the struggle for political freedom. There are many outstanding biographies, yet they
add to the reductive view of South African history as a saga of organisational politics,
in which inconvenient facts are suppressed and the complexity of individual lives are
ironed out. Hence the elevation of Mandela to the status of saint.
David Smith has set out to ‘rescue the sainted Madiba from the dry pages of
history, to strip away the myth and create a fresh portrait of a rounded human being’
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(viii) by highlighting personal aspects of Mandela’s life story which, as he says, have
not been subject to scrutiny in the past. He takes Mandela’s own professions of
fallibility seriously, going far beyond the Great Man’s generic mea culpa to argue that
in addition to his political commitments, his wayward and damaging behaviour had
such a devastating effect on his immediate loved ones that even the British royals
look like a functional family by comparison. Not surprisingly, in South Africa, the
book has aroused scorn and antipathy from figures close to Mandela who have
accused the author of sensationalism: a wish, above all, to take Mandela’s reputation
down a peg or two. After all, Smith writes for the Sunday Times magazine and has a
tabloid reputation for the personal angle with racy books, among others, about the
James Bulger case (The sleep of reason, 1994) and the murder of Jill Dando (All about
Jill, 2002). He likes to get to the bottom of things, which amounts to what a person,
especially a celebrity like Nelson Mandela, does in private. Smith was rightly
regarded with reserve by the staff at the Nelson Mandela Foundation, yet
nonetheless they offered him assistance, all in the spirit of Mandela’s commitment
to reconciliation and forgiveness.
Young Mandela seeks to introduce personal material into the political story, from
Mandela’s early childhood through to his imprisonment after the Rivonia trial in
1964, in particular by filling in the gaps left by the established biographies, and by
addressing some difficult private issues that Mandela skips deftly over in the course
of his own Long walk. There is nothing new for the historian in the narrow sense: the
idea of the liberation struggle following a broad trajectory from the 1940s onwards is
left unchallenged; no new ‘facts’ disturb the ANC’s own sense of its absolute
centrality
its manifest destiny – even though there are interesting elaborations of
key moments. So what is new in Smith’s treatment is the focus on the messiness of
Mandela’s personal life, and its consequences for those closest to him. Thus Smith
tries hard, a little too hard at times, to challenge the Mandela myth with scurrilous
tales or memories of hurt on the part of family members.
Yet it would be wrong to suggest that Smith deals with the personal to the
exclusion of the political. The key elements are there, beginning with Mandela’s early
role in the formation of the ANC Youth League at the end of the 1940s and the
movement’s turn to mass action via the Defiance Campaign of 1952. Smith is careful
to explain the rupture in 1958 with the ‘Africanist’ tendency in the ANC
those who
held that black Africans alone should set the terms and objectives of the liberation
 354 Book reviews

struggle
and the formation of the break-away Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) the
following year. He is good on the political repercussions of the Sharpeville massacre
in 1960, when police killed 69 and injured 180 at a PAC rally against the pass laws,
discussing how the ANC reacted by claiming that the rally should never have taken
place, and that the PAC had acted irresponsibly in seeking to pre-empt the ANC’s
own plans for demonstrations against the pass laws. He is careful to trace Mandela’s
personal shift away from Africanism towards the view that the ANC should
collaborate with the Indian Congresses and the Communists (many of whom were
white), stressing that it was, as much as anything, a recognition of the commitments
made to the struggle by individuals of other races and of the friendships he struck up
with them. Mandela elaborates this in a number of places in Conversations, for
example when he discusses with Stengel, the chief ghost writer of Long walk, how
although in the late 1940s he was deeply suspicious of Marxism as a foreign ideology,
he was fascinated to meet whites who were ‘totally divested of colour consciousness’
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(44). Yet Mandela was shrewd and moved quickly to counter the international
publicity that the PAC won after Sharpeville by raising the ANC’s profile as the
leading movement within the Congress Alliance. Smith also emphasises Mandela’s
assertive leadership over the turn to armed struggle. Again this is highlighted in
Conversations, with Mandela observing to Stengel how, whereas Chief Albert
Luthuli, the President of the ANC in the 1950s, believed in non-violence as a
principle, Mandela and those young bloods around him conceived of its as a tactic
(76). He was insistent on this
despite the reservations of some his closest friends,
including the Sisulus
and on the harsh fact that support for an ANC military wing
would have to come from the Eastern bloc.
Smith is not offering a ‘revisionist’ version of Mandela in the political sense: his
reassessment is largely based on family and personal matters. Some, however, have
political reverberations. He takes issue, for example, with Mandela’s account in
Long walk (parroted in authorised biographies) of how his father was dismissed
from his position as Thembu headman for refusing to obey a summons to appear
before a white magistrate after a complaint was lodged against him by one of his
subjects. According to Mandela, his father acted on principle: the magistrate, he
felt, had no authority over him. Smith argues that this gesture of ‘proud
rebelliousness’, presented to the young Mandela in the family oral history, helped
shape his own character, as the inheritor of a ‘stubborn sense of fairness’ (14). Yet
for Smith, this merely exposes the ‘fundamental weakness’ of oral history. A trove
of bureaucratic records recently discovered in Umtata, the site of the chief
magistracy and later the capital of the Transkei homeland, contains a completely
different account of Mandela Sr’s dismissal, and gives ‘every indication’ that he was
guilty of corrupt practice and abuse of his local powers (15). After receiving the
summons, he had in fact appeared before the magistrate to hear his dismissal in
person. Oral history may have fuelled Mandela’s sense of injustice, but the written
record suggests that the charges against his father were well founded. Whether
Mandela has become aware of this is not clear, and sadly there is nothing in
Conversations which clarifies the issue one way or the other. Yet given Smith’s
delight in the written record over this issue, it is ironic that much of what he has to
tell us later about Mandela’s personal relationships, and those of other leading
members of the ANC, comes from what one reviewer has called ‘gratuitous’
gossip
the lowest form of oral history.
 Journal of Contemporary African Studies 355

Other ‘revelations’ call Nelson Mandela the man into question. The most
insistent voices are those of his first wife and his children by her. Mandela married
Evelyn Mase, a nurse and the daughter of a migrant mineworker from Engcobo, in
Transkei in October 1944 and divorced her in March 1958. In between, they had four
children, the first, a son, Thembekile, the second a girl who died after nine months,
the third, a son, Makgatho, and the fourth, another girl, Makaziwe, all of them born
in the first 10 years of marriage. The good times together were spent at House No
8115 Orlando West in Soweto, allocated by the West Rand Administration Board,
where they moved around 1946
1947. It was one of identical hundreds built on small
plots, with a tin roof and bucket toilet. Smith records Mandela’s immense pride in
the place, and his writing about it in a letter from prison to his daughters by his
subsequent marriage (who later lived at 8115) as ‘the one place in the whole world
that is so dear to our hearts’ (61). This is not how Evelyn would have come to think
of the house as time wore on.
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In 1950 she left for Durban to study as a midwife. Mandela had by now
started work as an attorney, the family was no longer purely dependent on
Evelyn’s income, and Mandela’s mother had moved in to help with the children.
In Durban, Evelyn stayed with Ismail and Fatima Meer, both activists in the
struggle. Mandela visited occasionally. When Evelyn returned home in 1953, she
was pregnant with Makaziwe, and believed that she was returning to a committed
marriage. By now, however, Mandela was playing the field. He insisted to Evelyn
that he was staying out at night on ANC business, but there was a series of extra
marital relationships going on that ‘even a 1950s wife’ could not ignore. Over the
years there have been numerous stories about Mandela’s infidelities and Smith
relays Evelyn’s anger at his liaisons with Lilian Ngoyi and Ruth Mompati, both
important figures in ANC history, and also with the singer, Dolly Rathebe. He
also suggests that Mompati may have given birth to a child by Mandela, stressing
that he finds her denial ‘ambiguous’ (105). It was against this background that
the marriage came apart.
The most dramatic revelation in the book concerns Evelyn’s decision to start
divorce proceedings in May 1956. In her statement, she alleged that Mandela had
assaulted her on a number of occasions over the previous 10 months, inflicting severe
injuries to her face and throat, attempting to strangle her, and on one occasion going
for her with an axe: she had fled the house, leaving the children behind. Her initial
plea to the court was for a formal separation, custody of the children and
maintenance. Mandela filed a response denying all allegations of violence and
lodged a counter-claim for custody and restoration of conjugal rights, failing which
he would petition for a divorce.
The case was never heard. On 5 November 1956, Evelyn withdrew her suit,
without giving a reason. By now Mandela had achieved national prominence as an
ANC leader and the case, Smith speculates, would have been hugely embarrassing to
him (elsewhere, he challenges the notion that Evelyn had no interest in politics, citing
her committed participation in ANC women’s structures). Yet he puts his money on
the greater likelihood that the couple were reconciled, after Mandela implored her to
return home. Nonetheless, as Evelyn confided to Fatima Meer, an ‘unbearable
distance’ remained between them. She moved out again, and later it was Mandela
who filed for divorce; Evelyn did not oppose the application, though she told Meer
 356 Book reviews

that Mandela was the only man she had ever loved, a ‘wonderful husband and a
wonderful father’ (102).
Long walk gives a judicious, highly condensed version of all this. While he admits
to an ‘immoral life’, Mandela mentions no other women, and names no names. He
makes much of Evelyn’s devotion to religion (she turned away from Anglicanism to
become a Jehovah’s Witness), how she continued to hope they would return to live in
the Transkei, and how he saw a fundamental divergence between her commitment to
religious faith and passivity and his to politics and struggle. The breach between
them could not be mended, in Mandela’s account, for all that he claimed to have kept
was his respect and admiration for her. What’s the ‘truth’? Is there ever a ‘truth’ in
marital breakdowns? Suffice it to say that in Conversations, Mandela denies all
charges of marital violence, and claims that it was Evelyn who on one occasion lost
her temper and assaulted him with a red hot poker, and he was forced to defend
himself (67). Clearly we will never really know. But Smith, a seasoned explorer of
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people’s shortcomings, believes that if Mandela did attack his wife, an explanation
may lie in the unrelieved pressure and instability of that period of his life: a young
family, an unhappy marriage, a hectic love life, huge pressure at work as a lawyer
dealing with endless queues of needy clients, and not least, his total immersion in the
leadership of the ANC. Not an excuse, Smith hastens to add, but a helpful context.
Good enough for today’s feminists? Probably not, but it needs to be recalled that
although Mandela was a political radical, he came from a world rooted in the
patriarchal, conservative values of rural African society, where men were regarded as
superior and had as many wives as they could afford.
By the time he decided on a divorce, Mandela had met Winnie Madikizela and
wanted to marry her. Winnie was a social worker at Baragwanath Hospital in
Soweto, and the daughter of Chief C.K. Madikizela from Bizana in Transkei: a
local girl, in Mandela’s eyes, and Smith makes it clear that she turned a lot of
heads. One of her admirers was Kaiser Matanzima, Mandela’s cousin. The two
men parted politically when Mantanzima finished at the University of Fort Hare
and returned home to Transkei, where he was soon playing a leading part in
apartheid policies: Transkei was the first of the Bantustans, or pseudo-independent
‘homelands’, created by Pretoria to substitute for majority rule, and Matanzima
became its leader. He had set his heart on Winnie, and after consulting her father,
came up to Johannesburg to ask her to marry him: he would be staying at a house
in Orlando West in Soweto, he said. Winnie, who knew he already had two or three
wives, resolved to visit the house in question
8115
and turn him down. To her
amazement, the door was opened by Mandela, the rival suitor, who had recently
seen her in the street, pulled his car over and offered her a lift. Three is a crowd,
and after an awkward meal together, she left, meeting Matanzima on his own the
next day to give him the bad news. Stories like these, in Smith, are quite unlike the
detail of the first meetings between Mandela and Winnie in Long walk. In his
autobiography, Mandela does not let on that Winnie’s father later became Minister
of Agriculture in Matanzima’s homeland government. This was scarcely the thing
to do in 1994, not long after the Matanzima’s puppet regime had imploded in
ignominy. It foreshadows what is still a delicate question for the ANC: how is it
that so many homeland politicians, previously reviled as collaborators, moved
seamlessly into office at one level or another after 1994? Yet reference to
Matanzima, for whom he always retained a personal affection, is valuable for it
 Journal of Contemporary African Studies 357

is an outstanding example of how Mandela constantly strove to ensure that his

political commitments never intruded upon his judgments of people as individuals
behaving in given situations. The Chief Magistrate of Johannesburg, who had
refused permission for Winnie to visit him, he notes in a letter to his daughter
Zindizi in 1970, ‘cannot do what he likes. His official duties may force him to do
what his personal nature violently hates’ (189).
Mandela’s second marriage took place in 1958 during a gap in the Treason Trial.
Clearly Winnie had married into the liberation struggle and committed to it in
earnest, abandoning any semblance of a normal family life. Smith carries this part of
the story well. In spite of her disastrous behaviour later and Mandela’s third marriage
to Graca Machel, it is plain from his account that Winnie was the love of his life (147),
and this is borne out by his various letters to her included in Conversations, for these
include some lyrical expressions of his longing for her: ‘One day’ he writes to Winnie
in 1969, ‘we will have the privacy which will enable us to share the tender thoughts
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which we have kept buried in our hearts during these past eight years’ (176).
Neither of their two daughters, Zenani and Zindizi, would know Mandela as a
father. He was either on trial or travelling in Africa, drumming up support for the
ANC, or on the run at home; ultimately he was incarcerated on Robben Island. His
personal story is the story of two broken families, the first one jealous and angry at
being neglected, the second caught up in the turbulence of South African politics. The
bitter experience of Mandela’s families is not unusual in South Africa: the children of
many politicised parents, including the four Bernstein children and the three Slovo
sisters, felt orphaned by the struggle and spent their adult lives trying to come to terms
with this. Some never did. Thembikile, Mandela’s first son by Evelyn, developed
psychological problems and died in a car crash in 1969; Makgatho, his second,
descended into alcoholism and died of HIV-AIDS in 2005. Mandela announced the
cause of death, to the great distress of his granddaughter, who regarded this an
invasion of her father’s privacy. The first and second families have never been
reconciled; there are huge tensions between them concerning the role of the Mandela
Foundation, and of the front man, Mandela himself. In his retirement
the first
opportunity for his children and grandchildren to get to know him
he has become a
harmless, ordinary old man, constantly repeating the ‘same harmless yarns’, as Smith
calls them, while the ‘triumphant narrative’ of his life is left to others to tell (160).
Smith has given us a more rounded and fuller picture of the struggle against
apartheid, even if he has gone in for some high-class tittle-tattle, much of it in the
form of innuendo about who slept with whom, mostly among the whites on the
South African left. Apparently he feels we are entitled to a slice of the action, such
as it was. As for Mandela, we have a better understanding of the demands he
imposed on those close to him, as well as the sacrifices he demanded of himself. We
are also left with a greater knowledge of his immense self-understanding, how the
personal was wrapped up in the political. What worried him when he was in
prison, he writes in a draft of an autobiography he never finished after he retired as
President, was that he had been projected to the outside world as a saint. Yet ‘I
never was one, even on the basis of an earthly definition of a saint as a sinner who
keeps on trying’ (410). It leaves us with the uncomfortable thought that it was
prison which constructed his sainthood, and that if he had avoided incarceration,
he might have ended up, not merely as an ordinary old man, but as just another
politician.
 358 Book reviews

References
1. Sampson, A. 1999. Mandela: The authorised biography. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball.
2. Hyslop, J. 2010. On biography: a response to Ciraj Rassool. South African Review of
Sociology, 41, no. 2: 104
15.

Roger Southall
Department of Sociology, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa
Email: Roger.Southall@wits.ac.za
# 2011, Roger Southall
DOI:10.1080/02589001.2011.581503

The African Peer Review Mechanism: lessons from the pioneers, by Ross Herbert and
Steven Gruzd, Johannesburg, South African Institute of International Affairs, 2008,
Downloaded by [Roger Southall] at 04:21 02 December 2011

xviii  406 pp., ISBN 1-919969-60-8

This book is a penetrating, well researched and thoroughly informed account of the
intricacies of the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) process. Interstate
relations in Africa have taken centre stage in recent years as the continent continues
to encounter political, economic and social challenges. The establishment of the
APRM has tried to promote conformity and accountability along with acceptable
standards of governance. Consequently, this book has come at an opportune
moment as there is a dire need to document the objectives, modus operandi and
challenges that have faced the African continent against a backdrop of economic
stagnation and political disintegration.
The authors provide a balanced account of the APRM experiment, as well as
focussing on points of contention. The book portrays peer review as ‘mark[ing] the
start of a new kind of African diplomacy’ (viii), which may determine whether
NEPAD remains a dream or reality.
The book is divided into five sections. Part one provides a broad overview of the
challenges facing the APRM and includes a concise summary of the APRM’s rules
and institutions. Part two explores the governance processes at national level, as well
as the public consultation and validation options that have been used in the countries
presented as case studies, namely Ghana, Rwanda, Kenya, Mauritius and South
Africa. Part three presents an analysis of the politics and discourse of peer review,
and the ways in which civil society can influence the process. In this same section the
authors outline the prospects of peer review in an increasingly volatile African
continent. Part four examines how the peer review has been applied in the five case
studies. The book also provides a critique of the crucial role that the South African
Institute of International Affairs has played in incorporating civil society into the
APRM process. Part five comprises useful appendices: a summary of official
guidance documents, the APRM Standards, findings from relevant desk research
on the concept of governance, a checklist of civil society and its role in the
mechanism process, and successes and lessons drawn from the deliberations and
activities of the APRM on the continent. For policy makers the book provides a
thought-provoking resource which comes at an opportune time of unprecedented

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