Strange Bedfellows: Mandela, de Klerk, and the New South Africa

When President Clinton welcomed Nelson Mandela to Washington in 1998, he spoke of the universal nature of suffering and hatred, the "apartheid of the heart." The world adulates Mandela, he continued, because it seeks "wisdom from the power of his example É to do whatever we can, however we can, wherever we can, to take the apartheid out of our own and others' hearts." Mandela, along with the heinous system he negotiated out of existence and the country he led into freedom, have lost all specificity and become universal metaphors.

In his definitive biography of Mandela, Anthony Sampson notes that "cynical politicians" are wont to "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." Despite all the regal pomp that surrounds Mandela on his world travels, "he still manages to appear as the plain man with whom anyone could identify, like a Gary Cooper or a James Stewart, embodying simple values in a cynical world of technicians and manipulators" that bypassed him as he spent 27 years in jail. The Mandela story is "the world's favorite fairy tale." South Africa's transition to democracy is mythologized as a miracle and Mandela as the saint who made it happen. But Sampson -- a British journalist who helped Mandela craft his famously ringing statement in the 1964 Rivonia sabotage trial -- enlists the aid of Albie Sachs, one of the architects of South Africa's democratic constitution and now one of its Constitutional Court judges, to pull his subject -- and South Africa -- back to reality. The "South African miracle," Sachs has written, was in fact "the most predicted and consciously and rationally worked-for happening one could ever have imagined, and certainly the most unmiraculous."

Sampson's biography is authorized and thus sets out to explain, rather than deconstruct, its subject. His book soars, like any good biography should, on the wings of detail. It is written with an affectless lucidity and is both acute and cool-headed in its assessments. But perhaps because of its own emotional reserve and eschewal of the tools of psychoanalytic biography, it does not quite succeed in what it sets out to do: "penetrating the Mandela icon."

Nonetheless, especially when read together with The Last Trek, F. W. de Klerk's recently published autobiography, Mandela offers a powerful and compelling account of the grit that went into the forging of the South African democracy. The story is more exhausting than exhilarating; stripped of its mythos, it loses the cathartic qualities Clinton sought in it and becomes, rather, the inelegant, incomplete, and inconclusive tale of a difficult and not particularly significant country and its great but flawed leaders.

THE STRUGGLE IS MY LIFE

One of the pleasures of reading Mandela together with The Last Trek is getting two sides of the story -- the parallel and barely intersecting realities of the two men who would one day free South Africa together. There is some unexpected common ground: each grew up imbued with a nationalistic ideology and a prophetic need to redeem his people, each sees his life as having been a sublimation of personal desires and needs to the service of his respective nation, and each acknowledges the personal costs thereof.

Indeed, one of the Mandela biography's greatest achievements is its subtle illumination of its protagonist's dismal failure as father and husband -- and his own final redemption in the great love affair with Graa Machel, whom he married in 1998. The most revealing assessment comes from the estranged Winnie Madikizela-Mandela herself (by no means an objective assessor but certainly an informed one), who told Sampson in 1996, "My children still wait for the return of their father. He has never returned, even emotionally. He can no longer relate to the family as a family. He relates to the struggle which has been his lifetime."

Sampson notes that Mandela blamed himself for "being an absent head of the family," Winnie's difficulties, and her resultant excesses. In prison, "Mandela was often racked by remorse as he looked back over earlier years." Accounts of Mandela before his captivity emphasize his arrogance and combativeness; in the 1950s, his partner and comrade Oliver Tambo reportedly said, "When I want a confrontation, I ask for Nelson."

But Sampson believes that Mandela's years in prison "transformed him into a much more reflective and influential kind of leader" who came to see that "law, not war, was the basis of his hopes for his country's future." Because Mandela "was cut off from mass audiences, public images, and television cameras, stripped down to man-to-man leadership and to the essentials of human relationships...he learned about human sensitivities and how to handle the fears and insecurities of others, including his Afrikaner warders. He was sensitized by his own sense of guilt about [the] family and friends he had used during his political career."

Reading Sampson, one comes to understand how Mandela learnt his almost inhuman lack of bitterness and desire for reconciliation in the intensely controlled environment of prison, where he came to see that this approach not only got him what he wanted from the warders but actually lifted the scrim of prejudice from their eyes and transformed them into human beings. "The Department of Prisons has failed to apply its mind to the matter," he once wrote imperiously to the minister of prisons when he was refused more time out of his cell. Almost ignoring his captivity, he never behaved like a prisoner and thus convinced his warders that they need not behave like his captors. In the process, he discovered a reservoir of personal power he did not know existed.