When I noticed a rave review of this new book in some magazine, I knew that I had to take a closer look. I had so thoroughly enjoyed reading his biography Long Walk To Freedom that I was sure this one would be educational and enjoyable. I then made the mistake of mentioning it to my wife, and a few days later the book showed up in our mailbox. Buying this book was a big mistake.
To begin with, the format of the book is far from reader-friendly. The letters are logically laid out chronologically for the whole time he was incarcerated, from 1962 until 1990. But a quick glance at any book that includes a Foreword, an Introduction, and a ‘Note on the Letters’ at the start, very extensive footnotes in impossibly small print on almost every page taking up to 1/2 of the page, with those footnotes in turn referring to an eighteen page Glossary at the back, and an eight-page small print index should alert potential readers that this is not going to be an easy read.
An easy read, it certainly is not, but is it educational or worth the effort?
It sheds a bit more light on the great man’s humility, (he vows in one letter to never write an autobiography -(“…through me the Creation intended to give the world an example of a mediocre man.”), idealism, family loyalty, stamina, determination and morality than does the earlier biography, but not by a lot. And it exposes the cruelty and deviousness of the apartheid regime in detail. Most of the letters were never delivered and remained out of the public’s reach until the diligent editor found them in various archives. And it is certainly not his fault that the letters are often addressed to or discuss numerous relatives, friends, acquaintances, tribal chiefs, administrative officials, and fellow freedom-fighters all referred to with peculiar multiple unpronounceable names in several different local languages. His use of names, words and phrases in isiZulu, isiXhosa, Afrikaans, and Bantu may justify some of the footnotes, but were still distracting to this anglophone. The average reader will find it impossible to keep track of the hundreds of names. I counted up thirty unfamiliar names in one two page letter, but I was impressed with the number of people Mandela must have known personally and the huge social network he maintained. There are many letters that relate exclusively to family matters that will be of limited interest even to historians. Other letters are duplicated in both (often illegible) handwritten and typed formats.
In spite of the careful editorial work and notes between some of the letters setting out the background, there are some peculiar inconsistencies. In a letter to the Minister of Justice dated February 12, 1975, Mandela discusses in the past tense a conversation they had had on December 27th, 1975. And in a letter to Winnie dated Sept 1, 1976, he refers to her letter of September 29th, and then one paragraph later notes that on September 26th she will be turning 42.
I struggled though this book, tolerating only small doses a few times a day, looking for nuggets. But the best nugget was on the dust cover of the hard copy, a quote that I had earmarked within the text before discovering that someone else had also dug out this gem: “A new world will be won not by those who stand at a distance with their arms folded, but by those in the arena, whose garments are torn by storms and whose bodies are maimed in the course of the contest.” The following prescient insight was in a 1971 letter to a friend. “The trouble, of course, is that most successful men are prone to vanity. There comes a time in their lives when they consider it permissible to be egotistic and to brag to the public at large about their unique accomplishments.”
For academics researching the history of apartheid, this book will be an invaluable resource. But I am disappointed that the editor and the publisher have crassly capitalized on the great man’s name to pitch this book to the general public. There is a deceptive Barrack Obama quote praising Nelson Mandela on the back cover as though he was praising the book, which he probably has not read. And at least some professional book reviewers, who may not have read it in its entirety either, seem obliged to play along. Don’t be, like me, deceived by this hype into buying this book; but be sure to read The Long Walk To Freedom
The Passionate Reader 