Nelson Mandela: A Very Short Introduction

Firstly welcome Elleke to Blackwell, thank you very much for coming to talk to us today about your life and your latest book Nelson Mandela: A Very Short Introduction.

Having heard you speak at the Oxford University Alumni weekend, first of all what are your connections with Oxford and the University?

Where to begin? My first connection with Oxford came from reading Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass as a child, and seeing Oxford as a fantasy land. I won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford which began in 1985, I completed two degrees here in English and I retained a connection to Oxford until I began the job that I currently have, which is within the English Faculty.

I think it is worth saying that Nelson Mandela has several interesting connections with Oxford. He opened the centre for Islamic studies here and gave a really good pithy little talk as a way of marking the occasion, and I used that actually in the book. He has also now tied his name in with the Bachelors of Rhodes through the Mandela Rhodes Scholarship.

I have read that you grew up in South Africa. Has that influenced your choice to write the VSI?

Yes in a roundabout way, I grew up there but I was the child of Dutch parents and my mum certainly always kept trucking back to Holland with me in tow. I also completed my secondary education in Canada. These I suppose were two important elements because from quite early on I had a sense of how wrong the apartheid was. People outside Africa often say to me, when did you wake up to the fact that it was wrong for whites to oppress blacks? and I think I can honestly say I always thought it was wrong because of my mum's liberal influence and because of my time in Canada.

I worked in anti-apartheid both there and here I was very happy to leave when I came to Oxford. The country was in a state of emergency and there didn't seem to be any chance ever of Mandela walking free. So at the time I was happy to shake the dust of South Africa off my feet, and although I was interested in working on postcolonial literature which had to do with liberation literature or the resistance to oppressive situations, I self-consciously worked on English-speaking countries, all of them but not South Africa. My first novel which is very obviously set in South Africa is a mother/daughter novel, and I consciously don't mention those two words, South Africa, throughout the whole thing.

So there were years and years of, if you like, beating around the bush and that is why this was so great to write because I could take it head on. Because of my South African background I'm often called upon to speak on behalf of South Africa, or to offer an opinion and I often don't feel in a position to, I simply don't know enough. I actually know more about Nigerian lit than I do about South African literature. A very brief encounter with Mr Mandela in 2003 was a kind of trigger. It was great to take this on as a topic; the first thing I've written where there's been absolutely no holds barred. This is about South Africa, this is about Mandela.

So you have met Mandela in person?

Yes in passing, it was in 2003 on the occasion of the centenary of the death of Cecil John Rhodes and it was when the Mandela Rhodes scholarships were being launched. I can vouch for what people call this charisma that radiates from him, it's like nothing else really. As I've touched on in the book I think it has something to do with his height. He also has, well until recently, he's now very elderly of course, this amazing ability to put people at ease. He just radiates a charm, he knows it to an extent but he doesn't know it in a malignant way he knows it in a benign way. Actually we would have brought out the book sooner but noted the coincidence that this year was his ninetieth birthday so we actually held the book back a few months to coincide with the celebrations.

If there were one question you could ask him, what would it be?

There are so many questions I would liked to have asked him, but maybe, which is a question I often came back to in my mind in thinking through this book, how did he keep the faith that there would ever be a democratic non-racial South Africa in the future? I suppose now, and I mean right now, I would love to get his opinion (I'm sure it's a grim and dark one) of what's going on in the country. Because I don't think what's happening now was ever in his script.

Do you think the state of South Africa today embodies the values and traits that Mandela stood for, and what is his relationship with the ANC today?

It's a very difficult question, I happen to know, partly through my research and partly through talking to people in connection with the book that he is deeply downcast by the situation now. Things began in 1994 with such hope, Mandela became increasingly convinced, and he had some very strong evidence, that there was what he called a third force at work who wanted to play the democratic ball game. A force undermining the system of this non-racial state that he and the others were trying to set up. I think he too now sees that those forces are as present in his beloved ANC as they are outside it. I think he and many others in the ANC are waking up to the fact that it's going to have to change. It's too big and therefore too riven by ideological and ethical division, you know, positions on AIDS for example. So I think his mood is one of deep regret at what is happening.

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Mandela was praised for portraying the traits of a new type of African-ness, based on both modernity and tradition and most of all rationality. What were the influences of this and where were they from?

I think Mandela gets his strong belief in himself as an African from his pride from his family background. He came from a powerful and privileged family background, but that has given him that confidence with which he as a young man went to the great big city of Johannesburg. I think that was very crucial. Then he rapidly, through having contacts, (often from his family), developed friendships with a range of remarkable minds, intellectuals, black intellectuals, communists, Ghanaians, Indians, white people, and from all these different groups he picked up salient ideas, of resistance, ideas of social justice. If I had to name two things that were important in giving him that proud sense of African-ness is the family background and the cosmopolitan context of Johannesburg in the 40s and 50s. Some people say his mission education again gave him this grounding in self discipline, the values of self help, you know to succeed in the world you've got to rely on yourself.

Is it difficult to write a biography of a living icon? Someone who will probably read it?

He reads everything about himself apparently, and I went over to the Nelson Mandela Foundation, which is round the corner from where he lives in Johannesburg to give him the book in June. The first thing I would say is that I've always tried to see it not as a biography. What it's trying to grapple with is the fact that he's a living icon, it's the cultural history in a way. He was described not so long ago in the Guardian as "the world's president". I tried to find out what does that mean to have so many people adore you almost as a present day Messiah? It was hard to grapple with the meaning of Mandela, what Mandela signifies not only as a man, not only as a life or a political leader, but as a symbol.

Obviously there is a lot of information on Mandela, was it difficult to write a short introduction to such a massive topic and were there parts of the book that you wished you could have expanded on?

It's a kind of a yes and no answer. It was very difficult working out what to cut out because as you say there was an extraordinary amount of information. However a lot of it is very repetitive and a lot of it is completely uncritical. Having said that, OUP were so kind as to extend the word limit for me and to allow me a few more images for which I was very grateful. So I did have to cut some of it unfortunately and what I did cut down was chapter eight about his legacies. Maybe if this goes into a revised edition which would be nice in years to come, I'll ask for and hopefully be granted a bit more to reflect back and think about Mandela in the twenty-first century. What's interesting is a number of South African newspapers and websites have asked me to do articles on this aspect, so I have been able to recycle some of what I have had to cut. When I first proposed it I had thought that I could get away with really cutting down the biography bits down to just a skeleton and do a lot more theorising and broad historical discussion and lateral stuff. Whereas they said this may well be some people's first and only introduction to Mandela so you've got to give the other information.

Do you think Mandela's message can live on without Mandela himself? Or do you think it will die out after he has gone?

Time will tell, his legacy foundations (the Nelson Mandela Foundation, the Nelson Mandela Children's fund and the Mandela Rhodes Scholarships Foundation) are very preoccupied with that question and I think, that reading between the lines, they feel his message won't live on. I would say to them relax about it because it's inevitably the case that the interpretation of certain key figures changes over time. He'll be differently interpreted, it maybe that some of the work that he's done concerning HIV/AIDS will come more to the foreground, because that has actually been quite interesting. But I don't think what he signifies as a figure of social justice and incredible moral courage and that incredible faith in himself and self belief, I don't think that combination of features will fade too quickly from people's mind.

I noticed that you've written a paper on postcolonial terrorism and Nelson Mandela. Firstly can you explain the concept and why you choose Nelson Mandela as an example?

It was slightly tongue-in-cheek playing devil's advocate. I don't know if you are familiar with this concept but I remember very vividly arriving in Britain in the 1980s and Margret Thatcher lambasting Nelson Mandela for being a terrorist. So what I tried to do in the article, as I said a little bit tongue-in-cheek, is to ask whether there were grounds and what they were for her calling him that. It is true he was an out-and-out supporter of arms struggles, in that sense Thatcher may have had a point, but he was always very temperate and guarded in the way in which he condoned force. So I looked very carefully at what does terrorism mean in the context of Nelson Mandela. How you can be branded a terrorist without being a 7/7 bomber? The meanings of terror change depending on the context and one person's terror may well be another person's liberation struggle.

Do you have plans to do any further work on Mandela or South Africa?

At the moment no. Although the article and television programmes that came out of the book throw up this interesting question, has the promise of Mandela been fulfilled? And the answer that you kept hearing everywhere was not yet. There is still a lot that can be done with the Mandela legacy taking it forward and ensuring greater equality between men and women, gay and straight people. It's a sense of a still-unravelling story. I've been accentuating that in these articles and I'm also wondering if this doesn't lead on to something bigger but I'm not quite sure what that might be. I'm very preoccupied with India at the moment, there's quite a lot about Ghandi and Nehru in the book and I'm interested in that link. But I expect that there's something going on inside me and that this track will lead me back round to South Africa.

Is there anything further you would like to add?

I would just like to talk a bit about the images within the book. I think they are important as they capture moments that were crucial in his story. They also reflect this symbolism that is so important in the book.

Were the images difficult to get, for example from his time in prison?

Actually I seem to have included more images from his time in prison than after. I just feel that images such as Mandela wearing the Captain of the Springboks' Rugby shirt at the 1995 Rugby World Cup are crucial in history and really important in understanding Mandela the icon. I particularly like the one of him with his wife Winnie after his acquittal at the end of the treason trial. It really shows humanness and a playful intimacy.

Thank you once again for taking time to come and speak to us today. I think I can vouch for many in saying that we are glad you have been able to finally write about South Africa In doing so you have produced a brilliant insight into not only Nelson Mandela the man but what he stood for and what he has become.