Bookshot #7: Mandela

I remember South Africa's first post-apartheid elections in 1994. I went to hear Former President FW De Klerk speak when he was on the University of Iowa campus when I was a freshman. I remember hearing the stories about the life of Nelson Mandela and how he had lead the fight against apartheid and spent nearly two decades in prison. I remember my mother listening to Ladysmith Black Mambazo and watching Sarafina. So I knew about South Africa and I knew about apartheid, but it wasn't until the World Cup kicked off in early June that I realized that I actually knew very little about Nelson Mandela himself.

So, I ran to the local book store and snagged a biography of what the Boston Globe accurately called 'one of the century's most extraordinary lives.' And appropriately, Anthony Sampson's biography lives up to the billing. Sampson, who spent decades in South Africa as a journalist first met Nelson Mandela in 1952 and was given unprecedented access to Mandela's papers and accounts of his time in jail in what is billed as an 'authorized biography.' What emerges is an incredibly detailed portrait of an iconic man that told me so much that I didn't know about Mandela.

The first thing that stands out about this biography is that its essentially a meticulous history of contemporary South Africa stretching from before World War II right up until the present day. Things like the Defiance Campaign, the Sharpeville Massacre, the Soweto Riots in the late 70s/early 80s that reignited the fight against apartheid- events that had previously been merely words on a page swung into sharp focus and put together with the regional turmoil that came from the white South African government policy of holding and buttressing the so-called White Redoubt of Rhodesia, Angola and Mozambique- a policy that became more difficult with the collapse of Portuguese rule in the latter two countries after 1975. Cuban intervention in the Angolan Civil War became a Cold War flashpoint and Namibia's (then Southwest Africa) fight for independence put even more pressure on the white government and domestic pressures to end apartheid helped bring the situation to a boiling point by the 1980s that eventually saw Mandela released and apartheid end.

However, appropriately because after all it is a biography of the man, the meat of this volume concerns Nelson Mandela. Popular perception, at least in my head seems to think that Mandela has been presented to the world as a sort of Gandhi-like, Martin Luther King Jr-type of figure. Non-violent with gobs of moral authority that lead his country peacefully out of apartheid and into democracy- and while some of that is true, what surprised me was that throughout the struggle against apartheid, Mandela and the ANC never renounced the use of violence. As terrorist groups go, the ANC was far from what I would call successful, never really being able to mount a sustained campaign within South Africa's borders. This failure to renounce violence only perpetrated criticism of Mandela and the ANC as merely a terrorist organization and made it all too easy for the apartheid government to use them as a whipping boy to maintain their hold on power.

Were they communists, as many more conservative critics of the ANC and Mandela had charged? Well, yes and no. Early on Mandela seems to have been influenced by socialist thinkers and certainly the Communists within South Africa were important allies in the struggle against apartheid, but unlike many Communist Parties, they didn't really take their marching orders from Moscow. And to his credit, Sampson takes pains to illustrate Mandela's evolution in thinking throughout his time in jail- Mandela's imprisonment being covered in greater detail for the first time.

The real astonishing feat of Nelson Mandela came after his release from prison, where he managed to negotiate an end to apartheid and hold his country together, despite the threat of Civil War, which seemed very real in the early 90s. That and the continued stability of South Africa to this day is a testament to his leadership, moral authority and strength in leading first the fight against apartheid and then his country into a democratic future.

Overall: Everything you ever wanted to know about Mandela but were afraid to ask in a detailed, meticulous biography that illuminates Mandela's life and accomplishments to the reader.