When President Jacob Zuma reassures a journalist, as he did last week, that Nelson Mandela’s condition is improving slightly, the entire world sighs with relief. Yet it has become hard to get trustworthy information about the man the world most admires.
Mandela’s wife Graça doesn’t seem to be so involved in the key decisions about him any more. Instead, the occasional morsels of information which the world eagerly seizes on come largely from politicians. More strangely still, the South African government hasn’t let anyone know which hospital is treating him. In December, when he was being treated in Pretoria, an elaborate official deception allowed the South African and international press to believe he was in one particular hospital, when in fact he was in an entirely different one.
At one point a leading ANC official even appeared in front of the cameras outside the wrong hospital and gave the impression that he had just seen him. Jacob Zuma himself announced that, when he went to see him, Mandela had called out joyfully to him in a strong voice, using Zuma’s tribal name. Well, maybe he did; but given Mandela’s frailty of body and mind, this would be a bit -surprising.
Those of us with memories long enough to go back to the news blackouts which surrounded figures like Mao Zedong and Leonid Brezhnev find all this a bit disturbing. South Africa isn’t a 1970s or ’80s Marxist-Leninist state; why can’t it at least tell us where Nelson Mandela is being treated? Neither the ANC nor President Zuma himself have any great cause to love the press, but not even they would suspect that reporters or photographers might try to sneak into Mandela’s room to see how he was getting on. When I was in South Africa covering the ANC congress last December, at the time Mandela was in hospital, the BBC was offered what purported to be a photograph of him asleep or unconscious in his hospital bed, presumably taken by one of the nurses.
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