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Mandela: The Authorised Biography. Anthony Sampson
Читать онлайн.Название Mandela: The Authorised Biography
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780007374298
Автор произведения Anthony Sampson
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство HarperCollins
The next morning there is another Mandela: the champion of the underdog, the people’s president who can bring all the races together. With Prince Charles he makes a tour of the multi-racial south London suburb of Brixton, where he is greeted by a huge crowd of black and white Londoners. From there he goes on to Trafalgar Square, dominated on one side by South Africa House, the old fortress of apartheid which is now the symbol of liberation. The square is closed to traffic, and is packed solid with people wearing Mandela T-shirts and waving flags. As he walks slowly through the crowd children gaze in wonder, and reach out to touch him. When he appears on the balcony of South Africa House he seems more like a pope blessing the crowd than a politician: ‘I would like to put each and every one of you in my pocket.’ He talks about love, without embarrassment: ‘I am not very nervous of love, for love is very inspiring.’
Why should an elderly African politician attract such unique affection – not just in Britain, but throughout Europe, America and Asia – at a time when politicians everywhere are more distrusted than ever before? What has happened, I cannot help wondering, to the stiff, proud young lawyer and revolutionary whom I first knew in Johannesburg in the fifties, who looked so suspiciously at the hostile white world and made fierce speeches denouncing the British imperialists? What has changed that young man’s flashing smile into the welcoming grin which seems so genuinely warm?
From Trafalgar Square he goes on to the Dorchester, where I have the chance to talk to him briefly in private. He is in a euphoric mood, delighted by his welcome from the Queen and from the crowd in Brixton. He recalls how he first visited London in 1962 when he was on the run as a ‘raw revolutionary’, two months before he went to jail for twenty-seven years. I ask him why he seems so transformed. He laughs: ‘Perhaps I was defensive then.’ Now he seems totally at ease with everyone, including himself; but he makes it clear, as always, that he does not wish to talk about his own feelings.
It is not easy for a biographer to portray the Nelson Mandela behind the icon: it is rather like trying to make out someone’s shape from the wrong side of the arc-lights. The myth is so powerful that it blurs the realities, turning everything into show business and attracting Hello! magazine as much as the New York Times. It is a myth which fascinates children as much as adults, the world’s favourite fairy-tale: the prisoner released from the dark dungeon, the pauper who turns out to be a prince, the bogeyman who proves to be the wizard. Cynical politicians also wipe away tears in Mandela’s presence, perhaps seeing him as a secular saint who makes their own profession seem noble, who rises above their failings. Some have warned me: ‘I don’t want to hear anything bad about him.’
But it is not realistic to portray Mandela as a saint, and he himself has never pretended to be one: ‘I’m no angel.’ No saint could have survived in the political jungle for fifty years, and achieved such a worldly transformation. Mandela has his share of human weaknesses, of stubbornness, pride, naïveté, impetuousness. And behind his moral authority and leadership, he has always been a consummate politician. ‘I never know whether I’m dealing with a saint or with Machiavelli,’ one of his closest colleagues has said. His achievement has been dependent on mastering politics in its broadest and longest sense, on understanding how to move and persuade people, to change their attitudes. He has always been determined, like Gandhi or Churchill, to lead from the front, through his example and presence; and he learnt early how to build up and understand his own image.
For all his international acclaim, Mandela remains very African: and in Africa he emerges even more clearly than elsewhere as the master of politics. A week after his visit to Britain he is giving a birthday party in the grounds of his official mansion in Pretoria for ‘veterans of the struggle’. Coachloads of guests, including ancient grandmothers and grandfathers, converge on the huge marquee. Mandela appears at one end, towering above them, luminous in a brightly coloured loose shirt, while his bodyguards dart to and fro to cover his highly visible back. He works the room like any presidential candidate, revelling in the love from the crowd, spotting distant faces, remembering names, radiating goodwill and reaching out with his big boxer’s hands. He fixes each guest with an intimate look, a personal smile, listening apparently intently – ‘I see, I see’ – leaving them glowing with pride and pleasure. He moves to the middle of the marquee to welcome his special guests, enfolding them in his bony embrace, including his cabinet and a few white friends like Helen Suzman and Nadine Gordimer. He sits between two friends of fifty years’ standing, Walter Sisulu and Ahmed Kathrada. But he remains the arch-politician, showing little difference between his political and private self, relating to everyone in the same hearty style.
And he has his own agenda of nation-building, which he explains in an impromptu speech, without spectacles, with no journalists to report it. He has invited his guests, he says, because each of them has made some contribution to South Africa’s peaceful transformation; but also to remind them where they came from: ‘The history of liberation heroes shows that when they come into office they interact with powerful groups: they can easily forget that they’ve been put in power by the poorest of the poor. They often lose their common touch, and turn against their own people.’ Here Mandela is playing his last political game, for the highest stakes: to hold together the disparate South African nation. ‘I’m prepared to do anything,’ he says later ‘to bring the people of this country closer together.’
As the band strikes up and the real party begins, the old man at the top table surveys the scene. The musicians and singers include stars of the fifties like Dolly Rathebe and Thandi Klaasens, who conjure up memories of Mandela’s youth in Johannesburg. The guests come from every stage of his long political career: country tribespeople who still see him as a traditional ruler; white and Indian communists who shared his struggle in the fifties and sixties; ex-prisoners from Robben Island who hacked limestone with him in the quarry; white businessmen who condemned him as a terrorist until the nineties, then welcomed him to their dinner parties. With each group he extended his political horizons, and he moves casually between them all, slipping easily from township slang to financial jargon. But in repose, he suddenly gives a glimpse of another Mandela, with a turned-down mouth and a weary gaze of infinite loneliness, as if the scene around him is only a show. And behind all his gregariousness he still maintains an impenetrable reserve, defending his private hinterland, which seems much deeper than that of other politicians.
A few days after the party, in his sombre presidential office in the Union Buildings in Pretoria, he reflects quietly about the hectic past two weeks. He happily remembers the warmth and enthusiasm of his welcome in Britain, but he becomes much more intimate when he goes on to talk about his twenty-seven years in jail. He recalls again how he came to realise in prison that the warders could be good or bad, like any other people. ‘It was a tragedy to lose the best days of your life, but you learnt a lot. You had time to think – to stand away from yourself, to look at yourself from a distance, to see the contradictions in yourself.’
He still seems to keep his prison cell inside him, protecting him from the outside world, controlling his emotions, providing a philosopher’s detachment. It was in jail that he developed the subtler art of politics: how to relate to all kinds of people, how to persuade and cajole, how to turn his warders into his dependants, and how eventually to become master in his own prison. He still likes to quote from W.E. Henley’s Victorian poem ‘Invictus’: ‘I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.’
In this book I try to penetrate the Mandela icon, to show the sometimes harsh realities of his long and adventurous journey, stripped of the gloss of mythology; and to discover how this most private man relates to this most public myth. I try to penetrate into the prison years, when for almost three decades he was hidden from the glare of public politics, and gained the detachment which steeled him for the ordeals ahead. And I try to trace the unchanging man behind all the Mandelas in his bewildering