Tried and tested

In June 1964, when Nelson Mandela was sentenced to life imprisonment for acts of sabotage against the apartheid government of South Africa, he was, as photographs reveal, a burly, blackhaired man, with a handsome, pugnacious grin. By the time he was released in 1990, his hair was grey and his features gaunt. But his first speech as a free man described the same ideal of a democratic, multiracial South Africa that he had presented in his final address before being sentenced — ‘an ideal I hope to live for, but if needs be, an ideal for which I am prepared to die’. That imprisonment should neither have broken nor embittered him, and that he should then have realised his goal by guiding South Africa’s transition from apartheid to ‘rainbow nation’, stamped Mandela as an authentic hero.

Nevertheless, such a reputation demands to be tested, if only because standards of political and personal behaviour change over time. Mandela’s espousal of terrorism in 1961, for instance, is more difficult to justify today than it once was. David James Smith’s stated aim, ‘to write about him as a human being [with] flaws and weaknesses just like everyone else’, is no doubt intended to be part of the testing process.

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He is certainly single-minded. In Smith’s judgment, Mandela is an ungrateful son, ‘embarrassed’ by his illiterate, pipe-smoking mother, an unfaithful and violent husband, who attempted to throttle his first wife, Evelyn, and an unfeeling father who recoiled from his Aids-infected son. For good measure, he is also a crypto-communist, whose critical decision to steer the non-violent African National Congress (ANC)towards a bombing campaign in 1961 was influenced by Marxist ideology.

On the face of it, this is a damning bill of indictment, apparently based on Smith’s research and on interviews he conducted with ANC survivors from the 1950s, and members of Mandela’s extended family.