Short description
'A magisterial, detailed and invaluable account of one of this century's greatest figures ! it is hard to believe that a better biography will ever be written.' Justin Cartwright, Sunday Telegraph
Long description
'A magisterial, detailed and invaluable account of one of this century's greatest figures ! it is hard to believe that a better biography will ever be written.' Justin Cartwright, Sunday Telegraph The life of Nelson Mandela, from the personal and the global perspective, is one of the epic stories of the twentieth century. It is also one of the most inspiring. Twenty years ago, Mandela was an almost forgotten figure languishing in jail on Robben Island; today, as he leaves office as President of South Africa, he is one of the most widely admired leaders on earth. The book provides many new insights into Mandela's story and sheds new light at every turn on the moral dilemmas and personal choices of both Mandela's private and public life. Anthony Sampson has known Mandela from the early 1950s, and conducted hundreds of interviews with colleagues, family and friends as well as prison warders and Afrikaner ex-cabinet ministers, and he is the first person to have examined prison archives in South Africa and diplomatic papers in Great Britain, the United States and South Africa. He was given unprecedented access to 27 years' worth of unpublished correspondence from prison, as well as to other unpublished writings including Mandela's original, suppressed, autobiography.
Review
In his authorized biography of Nelson Mandela, Sampson set himself the task of penetrating the myth, of writing of the man and not the icon. He succeeds and produces a lucid, often moving and always readable book. Born in the Transkei in 1918, a minor member of the Tembu royal house, Mandela ran away to Johannesburg in 1941. There he encountered the humiliations of racism that helped him outgrow his purely Xhosa perspectives and met Walter Sisulu and Oliver Tambo, who together formed a unique association that would eventually overthrow white rule. Sampson charts Mandela's growing political sophistication against the background of his two marriages and the coming to power of the Afrikaner nation. The steps he took led him, in 1964, to life imprisonment. In the second section of the book, Sampson draws a convincing picture of Mandela's imprisonment and the process that led to his emerging from prison more myth than man. And yet, describing Mandela's masterly statesmanship during negotiations along with his personal sadness, Sampson never forgets that Mandela's great strength is his very humanity. This book does indeed transcend the icon. Review by GILLIAN SLOVO Editor's note: Gillian Slovo's anti-apartheid activist mother, Ruth First, was killed by a letter bomb in 1982. To piece together the reasons behind the murder, Slovo returned to her South African homeland and wrote the autobiographical Every Secret Thing. (Kirkus UK)