Mandela : The Authorised Biography (Hardcover)

Mandela improves as the prisoner's release approaches. Sampson sharply exposes the machinations of those undermining the ANC's struggle. The CIA knew of the Third Force years before the ANC, yet said nothing. Right-wing governments attacked "Mandela the Communist", preferring to promote Inkhata's Buthelezi, at that time secretly and violently colluding with de Klerk's apartheid regime. Against the small-minded figures of Reagan, Thatcher and Kohl it is Mandela who emerges here a giant. South Africa won her freedom through Mandela: his strength of character and willingness to forgive helped push a country into an alternative future, avoiding the racial civil war almost all predicted. Yet he and his kin paid an awful price. Sampson draws a painful, clear picture of a disintegrating family: dislocation from children; the terrible effects of the war on Winnie, and her increasingly erratic, later murderous behaviour; Mandela's own aching loneliness. It is in capturing Madiba, the ultimate public figure, at his most intense and private, that Sampson's Mandela succeeds best. --Chris Woods

Review
In his authorized biography of Nelson Mandela, Sampson set himself the task of penetrating the myth, of writing of the man and not the icon. He succeeds and produces a lucid, often moving and always readable book. Born in the Transkei in 1918, a minor member of the Tembu royal house, Mandela ran away to Johannesburg in 1941. There he encountered the humiliations of racism that helped him outgrow his purely Xhosa perspectives and met Walter Sisulu and Oliver Tambo, who together formed a unique association that would eventually overthrow white rule. Sampson charts Mandela's growing political sophistication against the background of his two marriages and the coming to power of the Afrikaner nation. The steps he took led him, in 1964, to life imprisonment. In the second section of the book, Sampson draws a convincing picture of Mandela's imprisonment and the process that led to his emerging from prison more myth than man. And yet, describing Mandela's masterly statesmanship during negotiations along with his personal sadness, Sampson never forgets that Mandela's great strength is his very humanity. This book does indeed transcend the icon. Review by GILLIAN SLOVO Editor's note: Gillian Slovo's anti-apartheid activist mother, Ruth First, was killed by a letter bomb in 1982. To piece together the reasons behind the murder, Slovo returned to her South African homeland and wrote the autobiographical Every Secret Thing. (Kirkus UK)

A comprehensive treatment of the life of the South African political prisoner, martyr, and president by journalist Sampson (Company Man: The Rise and Fall of Corporate Life, 1995, etc.), a long-time acquaintance and admirer. Adhering to a strict chronology, this biography follows Mandela from his boyhood in remote villages (where his father was a hereditary chief with four wives) to his miraculous transformation into an "overwhelming global icon." Mandela benefits from Sampson's thorough research and from his intimate knowledge of South Africa and of the myriad personalities who formed the cast for one of history's most compelling dramas of personal sacrifice and redemption. Sampson reveals that Mandela at 16 endured a painful circumcision in a tribal rite of passage; he portrayed John Wilkes Booth in a college play; he was a skilled boxer; for 18 of his 27 years in prison, he lived in an eight-food-by-seven-foot cell and slept on a straw mat; and he once acknowledged that his second wife, Winnie (there have been two other spouses), kindled "a thousand fires in me." Sampson enjoyed the full cooperation of Mandela, who not only granted access to his personal letters and other papers but also read and corrected drafts of Mandela. Although Sampson assures readers that he was "free to make . . . [his] own judgments and criticisms," there are in this lengthy work very few places where Mandela emerges as anything other than a secular saint. Sampson concedes only that Mandela's oratory is "far from thrilling" and that his devotion to the destruction of apartheid forced him to neglect his family. Winnie Mandela, by contrast, comes off poorly. She earns high marks for her pulchritude and panache, low marks for candor, probity, and, ultimately, sanity. A richly detailed political history, a generous portrayal of a consummate politician, and a true profile in courage - a courage both unimaginably immense and stunningly rare. (Kirkus Reviews)

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• Books > Biography > Historical > Countries & Regions > Africa
• Books > Biography > Political > Countries & Regions > Africa
• Books > History > Countries & Regions > Africa > 20th Century

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