Time Out – Chris Waywell

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.