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Lessons in LifeWe long for heroes but have too few. Nelson Mandela is perhaps the last pure hero on the planet. He is the smiling symbol of sacrifice and rectitude, revered by millions as a living saint. But this image is one-dimensional. He would be the first to tell you that he is far from a saint – and that is not false modesty.
Nelson Mandela is a man of many contradictions. He is thick-skinned but easily wounded. He is sensitive to how others feel but often ignores those closest to him. He is generous with money but counts his pennies when giving a tip. He will not step on a cricket or spider but was the first commander of the African National Congress’s military wing. He is a man of the people but revels in the company of celebrities. He is eager to please but not afraid to say no. He doesn’t like to take credit, but will let you know when he should get it. He shakes the hands of everyone in the kitchen but doesn’t know all of his bodyguards’ names.
His persona is a mixture of African royalty and British aristocracy. He is a Victorian gentleman in a silk dashiki. His manners are courtly – after all, he learnt them in colonial British schools from headmasters who read Dickens when Dickens was still writing. He is formal: He will bow slightly and hold out his arm for you to go first. But he is not the least bit finicky or prim – he will talk in almost clinical detail about the toilet routine in prison on Robben Island or how it felt when his foreskin was sliced off in his tribal circumcision ritual at the age of sixteen. He will use fancy silverware when he is in London or Johannesburg, but when he is in his home area of the Transkei he enjoys eating with his hands, as is the local custom.
Nelson Mandela is meticulous. He takes tissues from a box and refolds them individually before placing them in his front pocket. I have seen him remove his shoe during an interview to reverse one sock when he notices it is inside out. In prison, he made a fair copy of every letter he wrote over two decades, and kept a detailed list of every letter he received, with the date he got it and when he replied. Until his marriage to Graça Machel, he slept on one side of his king-size bed, while the other side remained pristine and untouched. He rises before dawn and makes his bed precisely every morning, whether he is at home or in a hotel. I have seen the look of shock on hotel housekeepers when they find him making the bed. He hates to be late and regards lack of punctuality as a character flaw.
I’ve never known a human being who can be as still as Nelson Mandela. When he is sitting or listening, he does not tap his fingers or his foot, or move about. He has no nervous tics. When I have adjusted his tie or smoothed his jacket or fixed a microphone on his lapel, it was like fussing with a statue. When he listens to you, it is as though you are looking at a still photograph of him. You would barely know he was breathing.
He is a power charmer – confident that he will charm you, by whatever means possible. He is attentive, courtly, winning, and, to use a word he would hate, seductive. And he works at it. He will learn as much as he can about you before meeting you. When he was first released, he would read journalists’ pieces and praise them individually with specific details. And like most great charmers, he himself is easily charmed – you can accomplish that by letting him see that he has won you over.
The charm is political as well as personal. Politics is ultimately about persuasion, and he regards himself not so much as the Great Communicator but as the Great Persuader. He will either get you through logic and argument or through charm – and usually a combination of the two. He would always rather persuade you to do something than order you to do so. But he will order you to do so if he has to.
He wants to be liked. He likes to be admired. He hates to disappoint. He wants you to come away from meeting him thinking that he is everything you had ever hoped for. This requires tremendous energy, and he gives of himself to almost everyone he meets. Almost everyone gets the Full Mandela. Except when he is tired.
Then his eyes droop to half-mast and he seems asleep on his feet. But I’ve never known a man to be so revived by a night’s sleep. He can seem at death’s door at 10 p.m., but then eight hours later, at 6 a.m., he will seem sprightly and 20 years younger.
His charm is in inverse proportion to how well he knows you. He is warm with strangers and cool with intimates. That warm benign smile is bestowed on every new person who comes within his orbit. But the smile is reserved for outsiders. I saw him often with his son, his daughters, his sisters, and the Nelson Mandela they know often appears to be a stern and unsmiling fellow who is not terribly sympathetic to their problems. He is a Victorian/African father, not a modern one. When you ask him something he doesn’t want to talk about, he will fix his face into a frown of displeasure. His mouth becomes an inverted cartoon of his smile. Do not try to force the issue or he will simply become stony and turn his attention elsewhere. When that happens, it is like a sunny day that has suddenly become overcast.
Mandela is indifferent to almost all material possessions – he does not know or care about the names of cars, couches, or watches – but I’ve seen him dispatch a bodyguard to drive an hour to get his favourite pen. He is generous with his children when it comes to money, but don’t count on his generosity if you are his waiter. The two of us once had lunch at a fancy hotel restaurant in Johannesburg where he was waited on hand and foot. The bill came to well over one thousand rand, and I watched as Mandela examined some coins in his hand and left a few tiny pieces of change. After he had gone, I slipped a R100 note to the waiter. It was not the only time I ever did so.
He will always stand up for what he believes is right with a stubbornness that is virtually unbending. I very often heard him say, “This isn’t right.” Whether it concerned something mundane or of international importance, his tone was unvarying. I heard him say it when a security guard’s key would not open his office, and I heard him say it directly to South African President F.W de Klerk about the constitutional negotiations. He used the phrase for years on Robben Island when talking to a guard or the head of the prison. This isn’t right. In a very basic way, this intolerance of injustice was what goaded him. It was the engine of his discontent, his simple verdict on the basic immorality of apartheid. He saw something wrong and tried to right it. He saw injustice and tried to fix it.
How do I know all of this?
I collaborated with Nelson Mandela on his autobiography. We worked together for nearly three years, and during much of that time I saw him almost every day. I travelled with him, ate with him, tied his shoes, straightened his tie – and spent hours and hours in conversation with him about his life and work.
My path to Mandela was an accidental one. I first went to South Africa by chance: I took the place of another journalist who cancelled his trip at the last minute. Based on that trip, I wrote a book about small-town life in South Africa under apartheid. When the editor of Mandela’s memoir-to-be stumbled across my book, he offered me the chance to work with Mandela on his life story.
That’s how I found myself in Johannesburg in December of 1992, waiting to meet Nelson Mandela. It was a difficult, treacherous time in South African history; the country was in danger of descending into civil war. Mandela had been out of prison for less than three years and was struggling to consolidate his power, and move the country toward the first democratic elections in its history. Working on his autobiography was not exactly number one on his “to do” list – but he wanted to tell his story.
He kept me waiting for nearly a month before our first meeting. And when we finally met, I almost capsized the project. I was sitting in the anteroom outside his old office in ANC headquarters, waiting for him to emerge. Instead, I looked up and he was headed down the hallway toward me from the other direction. He walked slowly, in a controlled, almost slow-motion way. The first thing I noticed was his skin – it’s a beautiful caramel colour, a soft, yellowish brown. His features are beautifully molded, with high cheekbones and an almost Asian cast. He is six-foot-two, and everything about him – his head, his hands – seems a little larger than life. As he came closer, I stood up.
“Ah, you must be . . .” he said, and then waited for me to fill in the blank.
“Richard Stengel,” I said, and he put out his hand. It was fleshy, warm, and dry; his fingers as thick as sausages, the skin still rough from decades of hard labour.
He looked me over. “Ah,” he said with a smile, “you are a young man.” The last two words were pronounced as one: youngman. This was clearly not a compliment. He gestured for me to come into his office. It was large and formal and completely tidy. It looked like a show office but it was not. He paused to have a word with his assistant, a brisk, tiny woman who handed him a paper to sign. He took the paper slowly and deliberately; it was obvious that he did everything in a very deliberate way. Then he sat down at his desk and began to read it. He wasn’t scanning it, he was reading it – every word. He then wrote his name slowly at the bottom, as though he was still perfecting his signature.
He walked over and sat in the well-worn leather chair opposite the couch. He asked me when I had arrived. His voice was slightly foggy, like a trumpet with a mute on it.
“Did you come over just for this project or for something else as well?” he asked.
My heart sank. His question implied that the autobiography was not quite enough to justify a trip on its own. I said I had come solely for the book. He nodded. He does not waste words.
He told me that he was planning on going on holiday on December 15, and that his staff had set aside four or five days for us to talk. He added that he hoped we could finish the project before his vacation, which was 10 days away. I had spent a month of making unanswered calls trying to see him and several months of preparation and research, so it was perhaps the pent-up frustration that led me to say to him, in a slightly raised voice, “Four or five days? If you think you can produce this book in four or five sessions, you’re . . . you’re” – I could not think of the right word – “deluding yourself.”
I had been in Mandela’s presence for less than 10 minutes and I had suggested that he did not have a firm grip on reality. He regarded me with a slightly raised eyebrow and then stood up. He was ready for me to go. He then walked back to his desk, buzzed his assistant, and said, “Mr Stengel is here and we are trying to work out a schedule.” He said that he had an engagement that evening and that he didn’t mean to rush me, but that I should speak to his assistant on Monday morning. With that, I was out of his office – and perhaps, out of his life.
The following Monday evening, I received a call that Mandela would see me at seven the next morning. Promptly at seven, we sat in the same configuration as last time. “Let’s begin,” he said, as though he were a judge getting ready to launch a trial. I cleared my throat and said that I first wanted to apologise for my behaviour the other day. “I’m sorry I was so, so . . .” and I paused, again at a loss for the right word, “so brusque with you the other day.” The word sounded foreign and pretentious. He looked at me and smiled – a smile that was amused, understanding, and a little weary.
“You must be a very gentle young man indeed,” he said, “if you thought our conversation the other day was brusque.” And he said the word very deliberately, with a trilled r at the beginning and a hard q at the end.
I laughed.
He had been in prison for 27 years with guards who, for much of that time, treated him as less than human and with a casual brutality that he took for granted. Before that he had been hunted by policemen and soldiers who regarded him as a terrorist to be stopped at all costs. He lived in a country where the white ruling class did not consider him or treat him as a full human being. All of that was a little more than brusque.
And that was the beginning of our friendship. Over the next two years, I amassed more than 70 hours of interviews with him, but that paled in comparison to the hours, days, and months we spent in each other’s company. I decided early on I would be at his side as much as he could tolerate – at meetings, events, holidays, and state trips. I spent hours with him at his home in Houghton, I travelled with him to his country home in the Transkei, and went with him to America and Europe and elsewhere in Africa. I campaigned with him, I went to negotiation sessions with him, I became, as much as I could, his shadow. I kept a diary of my time with him that eventually grew to 120 000 words. Much of this book comes from those notes.
Anyone who has spent much time with Nelson Mandela knows that it is not only a great privilege but a great pleasure. His presence is golden, luminous. You feel a little taller, a little finer. Most of the time, he is upbeat, confident, generous, fun. Even when the weight of the world was on his shoulders, he would wear it lightly. When you are with him, you feel you are living history as it is being made. He let me inside much of his life, some of his thoughts, and a little bit of his heart. He became the man who urged me to marry the South African woman who became my wife, and he eventually became godfather to my first son. I loved him. He was the cause of so many of the best things that have happened in my own life. When I left his side when the book was finally completed, it was like the sun going out of my life. We have seen each other many times over the years, and he has spent time with my two boys, who regard him as a kindly old grandfather. But he is no longer a regular presence in our lives.
This book is both a thank-you for the time and affection he gave me and a gift to others who were unable to receive the benefit of his generosity and wisdom. ▲
Richard Stengel
