Memoirs from living legend
Nelson Mandela agonized over the suffering caused to his family by
his struggle against white rule in South Africa, according to an
intimate portrait painted by personal letters and diaries.
The cover of Mandela’s book |
Correspondence, personal notes and hours of recordings will be
published Tuesday in 22 countries and 20 languages in "Conversations
with Myself", which was compiled by the Nelson Mandela Foundation and
includes a foreword from US President Barack Obama.
Much of the book is based on an unpublished autobiography that would
have been a sequel to his world-famous 1995 "Long Walk to Freedom",
including his musings on life as South Africa's first black President.
"I have often wondered whether a person is justified in neglecting
his own family to fight for opportunities for others," Mandela said in
the book.
Letters in the young Mandela's neat penmanship show a side of the
Nobel Peace Prize winner often obscured by the grandfatherly image of
the reconciler, now 92, who won South Africa's first all-race elections
in 1994.
As a young activist, he pushed the African National Congress to form
an armed wing after years of devotion to non-violence as a guiding
principle.
"The actual situation on the ground may justify the use of violence
which even good men and women may find it difficult to avoid," he said.
"But even in such cases the use of force would be an exceptional
measure whose primary aim is to create the necessary environment for
peaceful solutions."
Nelson Mandela with daughter and fellow political prisoner Ahmed Kathrada.
AFP |
In diaries of his 1962 journey across Africa to round up support for
the armed movement, he recounts learning to fire a gun in Ethiopia and
studying Algeria's military tactics against the French. He was arrested
shortly after his return to South Africa.
The book shies away from the most personal details of his life. It
barely talks about his first wife Evelyn, although it does recount one
violent argument where she tried to burn him with a hot poker.
"So I caught hold of her and twisted her arm, enough for me to take
this thing out," he said.
But his many letters to Winnie Madikizela-Mandela during his second
marriage which lasted through his imprisonment, and to his children
showed the strains on his family. "I feel I have been soaked in gall,
every part of me, my flesh, bloodstream, bone and soul, so bitter am I
to be completely powerless to help you in the rough and fierce ordeals
you are going through," he wrote to his wife in 1970.
He also remembers feeling gutted when prison authorities refused to
allow him to attend the funeral of Thembi, the elder of two sons from
his first marriage, who died in a car crash at the age of 24 in 1969.
"When I was first advised of my son's death I was shaken from top to
bottom," he said, adding that he had experienced similar heartache when
he lost a nine-month-old baby girl several years earlier.
Mandela himself has yet to speak about the book. He hasn't been seen
in public since a brief appearance at the World Cup final in
Johannesburg.
Some of the entries are more mundane, with calendars chronicling his
weight and blood pressure, and the arrival of milk and new razors -
luxuries in his prison life.
His notes become less detailed after his release in 1990, as he led
negotiations with the white apartheid government and then took office.
But he records his own failures, as when the ANC shot down his idea to
lower the voting age from 18 to 14.
He also scribbled notes, for meetings with world leaders, and in a
flair of of personality jotted down the address of his current wife
Graca Machel - on a notepad emblazoned with his name and a cartoon of
Garfield the cat.
Obama's introduction said the book offered an image of Mandela that
anyone can relate to, against the heroic icon depicted in "Long Walk to
Freedom".
"By offering us this full portrait, Nelson Mandela reminds us that he
had not been a perfect man," Obama said.
"Like all of us, he has his flaws. But it is precisely those
imperfections that should inspire each and every one of us."
The book ends with a passage from Mandela's draft for a new
autobiography, asking the world not to beatify him. "One issue that
deeply worried me in prison was the false image I unwittingly projected
to the outside world; of being regarded as a saint," he wrote. "I never
was one, even on the basis of the earthly definition of a saint as a
sinner who keeps trying." AFP
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