The Times – Ian Finlayson

June 27, 2010

Mandela himself has played down claims that he is a saint and, indeed, he has not always been regarded as a paragon of virtue by opponents — Margaret Thatcher regarded him pretty much as a terrorist. (more…)

The Daily Telegraph – Gillian Slovo

June 27, 2010

On the back cover of Young Mandela, David James Smith has nailed the purpose behind his new addition to the burgeoning Mandela library: he wanted to explore not the icon but the human being. (more…)

The Observer – Justin Cartwright

June 25, 2010

Last week it was announced that Nelson Mandela’s 13-year-old great-granddaughter, Zenani,named after one of Mandela’s two children by Winnie, was killed in a car crash on the way home from the World Cup opening party. (more…)

The Mail On Sunday – Martin Meredith

June 25, 2010

The narrative of Nelson Mandela s early life as a political activist confronting apartheid in South Africa is about failure as much as success. As a young man, he was prone to bouts of rash and stubborn behaviour. Among his circle of friends and colleagues in Johannesburg, he soon gained a reputation as a hothead . His close friend Oliver Tambo described him at the time as passionate, emotional, sensitive, quickly stung to bitterness and retaliation by insult and patronage .

No one doubted his energy and enthusiasm. His physical presence was striking: he was 6ft2in tall, broad-shouldered, with dark, piercing eyes, a radiant smile and an engaging laugh. But, by his own admission, he was regarded as a gadfly, a lightweight thinker too impatient for action. Indeed, Mandela’s liking for action was to have perilous consequences.

His background was unusually privileged. A descendant of the Thembu royal family, he was adopted, after his father s death, as a ward of the acting regent who paid for his education at mission schools and at Fort Hare university. His aim, above all, was to obtain a degree, which would have assured him of a future of prosperity and prestige. But just when it was within reach, Mandela fell foul of the university authorities in a trivial dispute over student food and then abandoned Fort Hare altogether to escape an arranged marriage, laying a trail of lies and deceit in an escapade that left him penniless.

Mandela’s luck was to find employment with a white Johannesburg lawyer and to fall in love with a nurse whose earnings helped him to further his law studies and start a family.

But he was soon drawn into the ardous world of black politics, hazjoin-ing a group of young militants who sought to turn the moribund African National Congress into an effective protest movement. For a period ing the Fifties, the ANC succeeded in gaining mass support but it was eventually crippled by government repression and internal feuds.

Mandela s career as a lawyer, too, briefly flourished. He was able to indulge his taste for fine clothes and to purchase a large Oldsmobile; and he cut a dashing figure across Johannesburg society, equally at ease at multi-racial parties as in the back streets of black townships.

His troubles, however, began to multiply. His marriage failed and he embarked on various affairs before meeting his second wife, Winnie. Along with other political activists, he faced charges of treason that dogged him for years. His law tice collapsed, pracleaving him without an income. Meanwhile, the juggernaut of apartheid rolled on. Frustrated by government repression, Mandela took the fateful decision to turn to armed struggle. He was influenced by members of the underground Communist Party who believed that armed action would precipitate a mass uprising.

It was a forlorn enterprise from the start, conducted in an ameturish fashion, and it enabled the apartheid government to crush the African nationalist movement in the name of law and order. Mandela himself, careless of his own rity, secusurvived for no more than five weeks before his arrest.

In Young Mandela, David James Smith follows Mandela s career up to the point where he was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1964. It is a well-trodden path. Smith has managed to find some additional details from archive material and from recent interviews. But he often loses sight of the larger picture of the apartheid menace Mandela was fighting and the ways in which his political views changed over time.

The clues to Mandela s deep conviction about the need for a multi-racial society lie in this period: he had friendships with Afrikaners at a time when they were generally regarded as the enemy.

The book s main drawback, however, is that it ends halfway through Mandela s life. There is no glimpse of how Mandela turned the failures and misfortunes of his early life into the triumph of democracy in 1994.

The Guardian – Mark Gevisser

June 25, 2010

There could not be a more poignant moment for the release of a book about Nelson Mandela’s personal life, and the complex interplay of political imperatives and family commitments that have bedevilled it. On the eve of the World Cup that he was to preside over as his final glorious public act, Mandela’s great-granddaughter was killed in a car accident; the driver, a member of the extended Mandela family (although not related by blood), has been accused of being drunk. Young Mandela is the backstory.

Mandela’s older son, Thembi, died in a car-crash while his father was in jail, in 1969; so alienated was the young man from his father that he had not visited him in prison on Robben Island. Mandela’s younger son, Makgatho, was an alcoholic who died of an Aids-related illness in 2005. According to David James Smith’s informants, he was a gentle sort deformed by his authoritarian father’s incapacity for affection and “unrelenting scrutiny”.

Mandela’s granddaughter Ndileka tells Smith Makgatho descended into alcoholism because of these deep wounds, and recounts a troubling story about how she failed to affect a death-bed reconciliation: Mandela “was frozen. He just could not accept his own feelings. Granddad can be affectionate with strangers but he is completely cut off from his own family.”

Thembi and Makgatho’s mother was Mandela’s first wife, Evelyn, who died in 2004. She left him, she claimed in the divorce papers, because of his womanising, neglect and violence; immediately the divorce came through, he married Winnie, and there has been tension between the “first family” and the “second family” ever since. The womanising allegations have been aired before; now, Smith names names: the singer Dolly Rathebe, the ANC women’s leader Lilian Ngoyi, his legal secretary Ruth Mompati, who allegedly bore his son.

The violence allegations are the most serious: Evelyn claimed Mandela beat and throttled her, and threatened to kill her with an axe. Smith spends some time trying to understand how Mandela could have done this: he was “very patriarchal”, and perhaps, given all the political pressure he was under, he simply “blew a gasket” in what was obviously a bad match. He comes to the conclusion that there must be “at least some credence” to the allegations, despite the fact that Mandela has categorically denied them, that they were not tested in court, and that they might have been fabricated or exaggerated by the aggrieved complainant. This is strong stuff, and is part of Smith’s stated intention, from the outset, “to rescue the sainted Madiba from the dry pages of history, to strip away the myth and create a fresh portrait of a rounded human being”.

At the very least, this is a long-overdue exploration of the making of the Mandela myth; one that refreshes a somewhat stale and overcrowded field. Smith sets the territory by looking at the stark difference between Mandela’s account of his father, a Thembu noble and a colonially appointed headman, and the documentary evidence provided by the colonial archive. He then effectively demonstrates how Mandela’s memoir was designed to “boost” the cult around him: although Mandela instructed his comrades to insert the line, “I led a thoroughly immoral life”, into Long Walk to Freedom, an “admission of immorality might have detracted, or at the very least distracted, from his heroic reputation”. And so “history had been revised”.

Of course, this last comment is the very definition of memoir, all the more so for someone who has exercised such tight control over his pubic image. Mandela has made a political fetish of his biography: as he was in chains, so too were all South Africans; as he liberated himself and forgave his oppressors, so too can we all expunge the hate from our hearts. For this reason, the most striking and valuable parts of Young Mandela are the rare occasions where we hear Mandela’s unmediated voice, in a series of exquisite letters to Winnie and his daughters from jail. Here, away from the public eye, he articulates acute emotional intelligence and deep regret as he recounts the way his calling has denied his children a normal family life.

The book also includes some well-researched recapitulations of key political moments in Mandela’s early life: the retelling of his time underground stands out, as does the description of the “double-life” of his white comrades. But I put the book down not so much with a clearer understanding of the making of Mandela as with the kind of headful of gossip you carry away after spending too much time in a small town.

Perhaps this is a comment on the small town of the Mandela industry itself: Cranford-on-the-Highveld. Like all gossip, some of it is illuminating, but much is gratuitous, unsubstantiated and even malicious: Smith is obsessed with the sexual goings-on of the white left, which tell us nothing about Mandela’s own infidelities; he uses unnamed sources to have a go at Maki, Mandela’s oldest daughter, for declining to be interviewed; he also twice reports on “suspicions” about the bona fides of Mandela’s co-accused Govan Mbeki, with no evidence to back it up. More seriously, he has no firm corroboration of the allegation that Mompati bore Mandela’s son, something she firmly denies.

Smith also does not give enough weight to the way revisionism and self-mythologisation is often a balm to the wounds made by history rather than an act of wilful intent. Often, too, he does not look closely enough at the reasons for the disjuncture between Mandela’s public memory and the conflicting evidence he has found; this is most evident in the case of the colonial record about Mandela’s father.

Ultimately, despite his strong research and laudable intentions, Smith falls into the mythbuster’s trap. Some people “won’t hear a word against” Mandela, he writes, and so sets himself the task of finding all the “words against” he can. In so doing, he sometimes loses sight of the primary reason for biography, which is to make sense of a life within its times, and to bring us closer to understanding its subject.

Daily Mail – Peter Lewis

June 25, 2010

This book may come as a shock to those who are used to regarding the world’s most revered elder statesman as a saint. Al though he has wri tten hi s own autobiography, Mandela has never given away much about his private life. David James Smith had no help from him either, but he had the support of the Nelson Mandela Foundation in presenting the hero as a human being with human faults.

This is in no sense a hatchet job. But the consequences of Mandela’s life of struggle and rebellion costs not just him, but everyone close to him dear.

The first problem the author had is what to call him. When he was born in 1918, his father called him Rolihlahla — equivalent roughly to ‘troublemaker’.

His father was related to the chiefs of the Thembu Tribe, which occupies the Transkei district of Eastern Cape province. He had four wives and he died when Mandela was nine. He was put in the care of the acting chief and brought up in the tribal Great House.

His English teacher at the local Methodist mission school couldn’t cope with African names, so it was she who called him Nelson. When he underwent the circumcision ritual that symbolised manhood, he was given the tribal name of Dalibunga. But family and close friends refer to him as Madiba.

His education was chequered. He went to Fort Beaufort, a little slice of England run by a Dr Wellington, descended from the Duke. Next came Fort Hare, the black Oxbridge, whose alumni include Robert Mugabe and Kenneth Kaunda. But he was suspended for refusing to serve on the student council, which he and his friends were boycotting.

Hoping to be the first black barrister in Johannesburg, he read part-time for a law degree at Witwatersrand University, but failed the finals three times. He believed he was failed because he was black. So he got a diploma and set up as an attorney with his friend Oliver Tambo. Despite his lack of means, he contrived to dress superbly in hand-tailored suits (for which the tailor may not have charged him).

HIS endless queue of clients were often too poor to pay fees — so he waived them. He was tall, handsome and thin — thanks to the running and boxing which he took up at university. He was a born charmer with natural charisma. Inevitably women fell at his feet.

The one he married when he was 26, Evelyn, was almost written out of his story in later years. They had two sons and two daughters and he acquired his first home in Orlando East, a district of Soweto. He was ‘mightily proud’ of it although, like every other home in the area, it had a tin roof, a bucket toilet at the back and no electric light. Evelyn began to complain of his f ri endshi ps wi th other pretty women including Ruth, his secretary, whom he sometimes brought home after work and who would follow him into the bedroom, possibly not to take dictation. There were other lady friends from the African National Congress, to whom he devoted nearl y al l his leisure.

The marriage had worn out well before the dazzling beauty Winnie Madikizela came on the scene and divorce had been started on both sides. Eventually Evelyn walked out. She alleged that he had assaulted her, but later withdrew her petition.

In 1958 the divorce became final and he married Winnie, who came to live at the Orlando East house which is now a museum.

Each was the love of each other’s life — or so they said. They had two daughters, but very little time to spend together. Within a few months of his second daughter’s birth, he went underground in hiding and disguise as a wanted man.

Winnie managed to have occasional clandestine meetings with him but, as marriages go, it was extremely short and fraught. She had years of financial struggle to bring up their children. It has to be remembered that their lives were lived in the harshest years of Apartheid, under the porcine racial prejudice of the government.

NATIVE Africans — Kaffirs — were regarded only as labourers or servants without rights, who had to call white men Baas. Whites would push them off the pavement if they hadn’t stepped off it already.

Macmillan’s Wind of Change speech was a stern rebuke to the South African Parliament given that the country was after all a member of the Commonwealth. Their reaction was to declare a republic and leave the Commonwealth.

The Sharpeville Massacre followed hard upon Macmillan’s visit. The excuse for it was self-defence, but the 69 unarmed demonstrators killed, including women and children, were shot in the back.

It is little wonder that men like Mandela decided there was no alternative to armed struggle.

He instigated the military wing of the ANC and became its commander in chief, although he had never fired a shot. He organised military training and went to Ethiopia to be taught it himself. He became, in short, a terrorist. Although many ANC leaders had by then gone into exile for safety, he came back to lead the struggle and inevitably to be arrested and put on trial for his life.

He turned the trial into a propaganda triumph, looking magnificent in the tribal robes of a Thembu chief made of jackal skins. He defended himself with a great ‘I am prepared to die’ speech. In place of execution, he faced living death, 27 years of it, on Robben Island.

His release and ultimate triumph are perhaps all that many people know about him nowadays. This probing but sympathetic examination shows how hard it was for his wives, children and even grandchildren to bear. Both his sons met premature deaths. And there is still a legacy of suspicion between the descendants of his two families, although it has been partly defused by the efforts of his third wife, Graca Machel.

Mandela emerges from these recollections rather surprisingly as a traditional African patriarch, an autocrat in the home, a one-time lady-killer who did not show affection because to show feeling would be to show weakness.

He has since expressed his regret at the neglect his families had to suffer. He had to be a man of iron to achieve what he achieved and, at that time, he certainly was.

The Sunday Times – Stephen Robinson

June 25, 2010

Before he went underground in 1961 to mastermind the ANC’s guerrilla campaign, Nelson Mandela released a lengthy statement, of which only five words are now remembered: “The struggle is my life.”Ever since, he has been lauded for his selflessness, but as this biography unblinkingly reveals, his family had already learnt that politics squeezed everything else out, leaving them embittered in the shadow of his global celebrity.

Nobody will be surprised to learn that, in his youth, Mandela chased women who didn’t run very fast. He was an exceptionally charismatic young lawyer in Johannesburg, who had his suits cut at the best tailor in town just opposite the Rand Club, where rich white men gathered to discuss high finance and the native question.

The anti-apartheid movement of the 1950s and 1960s might have been built upon fighting injustice, but it was fuelled by alcohol and libido, and many of the white communists were just as keen as the black nationalists to use politics — as David James Smith relates — to get their hands into girls’ pants. Mandela’s behaviour was unusual only in his emotional neglect of his wives and children. He shunned even his own mother, whom he rarely saw before he went to prison, apparently because he was embarrassed by her lack of education. He drove his first wife, Evelyn, close to madness by his casual adultery, allowing one lover to walk into the marital bedroom while she was present in their cramped Soweto house. Evelyn threatened to throw boiling water over the woman if he brought her home again.

There were numerous other women apart from Evelyn and his second wife, Winnie; almost certainly an unacknowledged illegitimate child; and allegations by poor, bitter Evelyn in her divorce petition that he had beaten her. The mystery of Mandela lies in the jarring contrast between his behaviour towards his family, and his princely courtesy to everyone else.

When he was arrested in 1962 for his ANC activities, he came up before a grim pro-apartheid magistrate who would take lunch with special-branch officers. This offered the defence an opportunity to demand the magistrate recuse himself, but Mandela was oddly reluctant to humiliate the man, and insisted that good manners required he be given warning of the application. Again and again, reading this book, one wonders what prevented Mandela extending the same sort of kindness to his own family.

Admittedly, for much of his life he was not in a position to take control, yet some of his children clearly resented him before he was sent to Robben Island in 1964. His son Thembi, who died in a car crash five years later, had not once visited his father in jail. In 2004, when another son, Makgatho, succumbed to complications from Aids, Mandela was unable to hold his hand around his hospital bed as he died. Subsequently Mandela was lauded for announcing that Makgatho had died because of a virus that remains taboo in South Africa, yet Makgatho’s children regarded it as a betrayal of their father’s privacy.

Smith has certainly not taken a hatchet to Mandela in this book; rather, he succeeds in bringing him to life, wading in where other biographers have feared to tread to provide much new information and genuine insight. Young Mandela is not just an account of his early years, but also a superbly framed snapshot of the ANC’s transformation in the early 1960s into a guerrilla organisation, when rich white communists with swimming pools joined forces with angry black nationalists. The activists’ hapless attempts to strike terror into the heart of apartheid are sympathetically told, but their amateurism is starkly — and sometimes hilariously — portrayed. Few of them knew how to hold a gun or handle explosives. Mandela once attempted to prove his guerrilla credentials by shooting a sparrow out of a tree with an air gun, and then felt awful about it. When the security police belatedly realised that the sabotage campaign was based at Liliesleaf farm in the Johannesburg outer suburb of Rivonia, the guerrillas failed even to burn incriminating documents that became the basis of the prosecution case.

Mandela, Joe Slovo, Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki et al were all fine men in their own ways, but it is difficult to disagree with Smith’s judgment that by prematurely launching an inept campaign of violence in 1961, “they incited a fierce clampdown by the state and set back their cause for a generation”.

Ultimately, Mandela and his comrades were fortunate that Pretoria buckled under intense secret diplomatic pressure and ensured that the conspirators were given life sentences rather than death, and of course we are all lucky for that, too.Smith has pitched this biography so well that by the end of it you are no less willing to join in the global celebration of Mandela’s stoicism and political acumen, even as you give thanks that you are not his wife or child.

Time Out – Chris Waywell

June 24, 2010

David James Smith’s ‘Young Mandela’ is burdened with the kind of anterior baggage that can make a book stall before it’s even got going. The sheer fact of Mandela and what he has meant to South Africa in the last 60 years makes him a kind of no-go area (to add to the country’s many others), so this portrait of the years up to his imprisonment in 1962 is tackling a lot.

We have Mandela the snappy dresser, Mandela the ladies’ man; later Mandela the guerrilla leader, holed up in a hotel room with a gun and 200 rounds of live ammunition that he’s been given and doesn’t know what to do with. What’s lacking perhaps, is Mandela the man. Under the circumstances, this may be inevitable; Mandela existed in negative space for so long that to turn this outline into flesh and blood was always going to be a tall order, especially given the importance to both sides of the struggle to recreate him as an ambiguous caricature: terrorist or martyr.

What does emerge is a man appropriately struggling with an internalised conflict of rival identities: he prides himself on his ‘royal blood’, yet yearns for American cars and handmade suits; for a long time he is one half of the only black law practise in the country, yet when he goes into hiding, the bailiff repossesses the family’s furniture because he’s stopped making payments on it. Smith is a sympathetic guide through these ambiguities, gently chiding when accounts differ, seeking neither to bury Mandela nor to praise him; certain unsavoury episodes – the treatment of his first wife, Evelyn, the sad story of his son Makgatho – are dealt with even-handedly . The book is also excellent on the sheer bizarreness of SA society under apartheid: Mandela attends an all black stage musical version of ‘King Kong’ at which, by special dispensation, a mixed audience is allowed to sit in alternating rows of white and black. Afterwards, he congratulates the writer on a number he interprets to be a comment on his then ongoing ‘Treason Trial’. It isn’t.

Ultimately, it probably doesn’t really matter what pre-incarceration Mandela was like, but reading ‘Young Mandela’ in conjunction with Bloom’s book, it’s hard now not to see him as a man not only out of step with his own time, but also with the future for his country he helped create.