Madiba shares his innermost thoughts

Everything is in your words,” Ahmed Kathrada, Nelson Mandela’s fellow Robben Island prisoner, tells him upon the publication of Conversations with Myself.

The de-sanctification of Mandela – who, according to Kathrada, has announced in public that he has “human failings like everyone else” – is the major theme of the hitherto unseen collection of material that has been mined from Mandela’s personal archive. This contains unseen diary entries, notebooks, letters, speeches and private papers.

Together with interviews conducted by Kathrada and Richard Stengel, the editor-in-chief of TIME magazine who facilitated the writing of Mandela’s memoir Long Walk to Freedom, these reveal a man of greater wit; a man far more astute than the image projected by the icon of reconciliation who steered South Africa’s first years of democracy.

The material of his own words conjures an internal life with a resonance that is somewhat different from the charismatic and responsible – the kind word for “monotonous speech maker and smiling man”.

It comes as a surprise to learn that Mandela agreed to lead the country in its first five years of democracy against his will and only for one term. “My installation as the country’s first democratically elected president was imposed on me much against my advice.”

At 76, Mandela wanted to hold no position in the organisation or government, although he wanted to serve. The liberation of the country gave meaning to his life, but he felt an aching distance from family and was moved by his daughter Zindzi’s poem, “A Tree Was Chopped Down”, which tells of the separation of her family from her father.

He mourned his beloved mother in 1968 and grieved for his son, Thembekile, who died in a motor accident in 1969, at the age of 24. He was devastated that he was not allowed to bury them at their respective funerals.

“My heart bled when I realised I could not be present at the graveside,” he wrote to Nolusapho Irene Mkwayi on 19 November 1969, of Thembekile’s funeral.

Sahm Venter, a senior researcher at the Centre for Memory and Dialogue at the Nelson Mandela Foundation, says that Mandela’s request to attend Thembekile’s funeral “was ignored – not officially rejected, just received no answer.”

In 1970, Mandela wrote to Winnie: “I feel as if I have been soaked in gall, every part of my flesh, bloodstream, bone and soul – so bitter am I to be completely powerless to help you in the rough ordeals that you are going through.”

Such searing prose makes it difficult to resist sanctifying the man, who writes that in prison he “worried deeply” about the “false image” of sainthood that was cast on him as he became the world’s longest serving prisoner. “I was never one, [a saint] even as a sinner who keeps on trying.”

If sainthood has been a burden for Mandela, this book may not serve to relieve him of it.

A diary note on 20 August 1986 reveals that he tuned into Reverend Peter Storey’s broadcast sermon on forgiveness. He tells Stengel about the anger he felt in prison.

Mac Maharaj had said that this anger became less visible, and he agreed. “It is true in the sense that I am working with the people who threw me into jail, persecuted my wife, hounded my children from one school to the other… and I’m one of those who was saying, ‘Let us forget the past and think of the present’.”

There had to be some belief sustaining him, although this is never made explicit. The conversations reveal him to be determinedly, if discreetly, religious.

In a letter to his daughter, Maki Mandela, dated 27 March 1977, Mandela recalls his baptism in the Methodist church and his education in Wesleyan schools.

“I have my own beliefs... It is far better to keep religious beliefs to yourself. You may unconsciously offend a lot of people by trying to sell them ideas they regard as unscientific and pure fiction.”

Describing Knysna to Kathrada, Mandela says, “I sincerely thought that if God came back to earth he would settle there, you know?”

He says he never abandoned his Christian beliefs. “And I think it’s proper, you know, it could do a lot of harm.”

Chief Albert Luthuli was a passionate disciple of Mahatma Gandhi and he believed in non-violence as a principle, says Mandela. “Many of us did not. We took up the attitude that we would stick to non-violence only insofar as the conditions permitted that.”

Contrary to news reports, he “condemned unreservedly” Winnie’s April 1986 “necklace speech”, which endorsed the burning of alleged police informers and called for comrades to liberate the country “with our boxes of matches and our necklaces”.

The archivists at the Nelson Mandela Foundation’s Centre of Memory and Dialogue have succeeded in their mission to bring forth material that is “fresh and rich”, to allow us more than a glimpse, for the first time, into the other sides of the multifaceted statesman.

That Mandela loves the music of Tracy Chapman and the Manhattan Brothers brings him closer.

He learnt how to use a gun in Oujda, Morocco, and met the Emperor Haile Selassie in Ethiopia in the 1960s.

He told Ruth First to go to hell after a row about a case he had lost, then kissed and made up soon after.

Mandela mourned the loss of “a sister in arms” when she was assassinated by the apartheid regime in 1962. “Her death was a tragedy for South Africa because she was among the brightest stars in the country.”

He was prevented from correcting -- as he wished to -- “the distortions” propagated by his first wife, Evelyn Mase, because Walter Sisulu and others said, “You are not only telling your life, we want you to be a model around which we are going to build our organisation.”

Mandela had no desire to be such a model, just as he does not want this autobiography to become “a blueprint on which others may model their lives”. What he wanted to do, was to show “the dark spots” in his life – he sought the right to explore its reality.

Twenty years after his release from his 27-year incarceration, he has not yet achieved liberation from the burden of sainthood.

Verne Harris, project leader at the Centre of Memory and Dialogue, says that some time ago, Mandela instructed the team not to protect him.

More than half of the 70 hours of his conversation with Kathrada and with Stengel were transcribed by Venter – the conversations become increasingly spicy as Mandela enters the global stage.

Mandela tells Stengel that Queen Elizabeth is “a fine lady”; Graça Machel, on a first meeting, is “a very impressive woman and a striking personality”; Castro is “a striking chap”, he is very humble; so is the Pope: “Gee whiz, the Pope is also an outstanding person.”

Tim Couzens, the academic and writer who is responsible for the structuring of the “conversations” into a format similar to the Meditations of the 2 AD Roman ruler Marcus Aurelius, says that Venter suggested the book be called Gee whiz.

This would surely be an unsuitable title for a book laden with substantial truths we are hearing for the first time – from the horse’s mouth. It is a book with gravitas, even if its author has picked up some slang to which Barack Obama, the United States president, testifies in his introduction.

Obama, himself a bit of a religious nut, who has claimed Mandela as a role model anyway, is undoubtedly impressed by the quasi-religious undertones, the repudiation of the halo.

When Obama writes, “it is precisely those imperfections that should inspire every one of us”, he raises the status of imperfection.

For imperfection and the right to possess it, to live it, to falter, as Mandela did as a boy, hiding his own behind weakness behind arrogance and committing indiscretions as a country boy, he writes.

“Only armchair politicians are immune from committing mistakes. Errors are inherent in political action.”

The conversations, which present Mandela as a work in progress, reveal that Marxism was a foreign ideology for him at the beginning of his career. He was [initially] interested in the social aspect of the Communist Party.

“To see whites who were totally divested of colour consciousness was... a new experience to me.”

Memory is a saviour during those long years of incarceration, allowing a replay of Mandela’s epic life history – as “rabble-rouser”, as townsman, lawyer and man of great courage, which he downplays. Yet, he still made no apparent striking errors of moral judgment.

Conversations presents a fastidious man who made notes – of the prices of Nescafé and subscriptions for TIME, of Electric Boogie, “a baffling new dance” – he notes newspaper reports of Winnie’s gagging.

Mandela’s unconsummated desire for Winnie played out in his dreams. He had understood that she might have met other men when he chose to go underground. “Those issues are not material to me.”

For him, it was sufficient “that she is loyal to me, supports me and comes to visit me and writes to me”.

He said, “When I went to prison, I resigned myself to the fact that I had no opportunity for sexual expression, and I could deal with that.”

Surely, it takes an evolved man to reveal so openly the flaws in the glass – and a man of foresight to even attempt to pre-empt a possible posthumous backlash. His five-year administration is yet to be judged; his political legacy scrutinised.

During the long years that took their toll on the health of Mandela’s eyes, his heels, his legs, his heart, his lungs, he came to understand how certain experiences had “eaten too deeply” into his soul.

He has earned the right not to be called a saint, to show off his flaws, although none of these is made plain.

He tells Kathrada that he was not beyond the sin of temptation: While he was in prison, he was offered in the region of half a million rand for his story by one publication, and later R1m by another.

“You know, to be poor is a terrible thing.”

On 9 June 1980, Mandela’s financial ‘balance’ was R41.44.

On 19 August 1987, he weighed 67 kilogrammes. His diary entry reveals that he acquired a new razor blade.

Of course, we know that our hero did not succumb to temptation any more than he would have killed an impala at the Kruger Park. Such an act would have been ‘murder’. It would presuppose an absence of the awareness that has enabled Mandela’s moral example to make of him a universal beacon. ▲

Maureen Isaacson

“Nelson Mandela; Conversations with Myself”

Macmillan and PQ Blackwell Limited