[ad_1]
A long way to freedom is widely regarded as one of the greatest autobiographies of all time, but the credit for it has too rarely gone where it perhaps belongs: to Nelson Mandela’s ghostwriter, Richard Stengel.
Publishers Little, Brown and Company signed Mandela for a book almost as soon as he was released from prison, but there was never any suggestion that Mandela himself would have time to write his own life story.
“He was adapting to the modern world, he was worried if there was going to be a civil war in South Africa; he had 10,000 more important things to do,” Stengel said Daily Maverick this week.
There is another aspect: “If Mandela had done it, it would have been an 800-page history of the ANC,” quipped Stengel, referring to the statesman’s passionate love for the movement he led.
Stengel was a 37-year-old American journalist in 1993 when he sat down with Mandela, then 72, to conduct the series of interviews that would become Mandela’s international bestseller.
The then little-known Stengel was not Mandela’s choice.
“He had decided he wanted to [renowned South African author] Es’kia Mphahlele so Zeke [Mphahlele] was hired to write on it,” says Stengel.
But what Mphahlele, who died in 2008, ended up producing was more of a “Mandela quote novelization,” in Stengel’s words, and the publishers weren’t happy.
At one point, Stengel believes, Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer worked on a plan for the book with Mandela. By December 1992, however, a ghostwriter had yet to be officially signed on for the project, and time was ticking.
William Phillips, the editor-in-chief of Little, Brown and Company, got to read Stengel’s non-fiction work on South Africa and decided that Stengel might be the man for the job. After some tense but cordial initial meetings with Mandela, who looked dimly at Stengel’s relatively young age, it was agreed that the work could go ahead.
Mandela: The Lost Tapes
Now, for the first time, the public has been given access to the collaboration that followed between Mandela and Stengel – via the 10-episode Audible podcast Mandela: The Lost Tapes.
Referring to the tapes as “lost” is poetic license, Stengel freely admitted Daily Maverick: the records actually always belonged to the Nelson Mandela Foundation, under the ghostwriting contract, and were officially returned in 2010.
Over the course of the 10 episodes, Stengel covers the most significant aspects and chronology of Mandela’s life. The facts will be familiar to most South African listeners; what makes the series a wonderful listen regardless is the way it brings Mandela back to life and the value of Stengel’s observations.
“It’s hard to explain how little Mandela knew about modern life,” Stengel recalls in the first episode.
Having been in prison since 1963, so many cultural and political currents had passed Mandela by: gay rights, women’s rights, the Beatles, computers…
The Mandela we hear on the recordings is a man of truly “Victorian” sensibilities, as Stengel suggests Daily Maverick. He’s unflappable, polite, and extremely prim and proper: in the second episode, he can be heard revising an anecdote about apartheid toilets for Stengel because he doesn’t want the word “urinate” in his book.
Visit Daily Maverick’s home page for more news, analysis and investigations
One might think that Mandela would be a ghostwriter’s dream because of his extraordinary personal history. But what emerges most clearly from the recordings is how hard Stengel had to work on his material.
Because the ANC had not yet taken power, for example, Mandela refused to talk about certain tactics used in the Struggle because they might still need to be deployed. (He can be heard bringing this up on the recordings regarding the arrangements surrounding Liliesleaf Farm.)
Mandela also “wanted a book that didn’t deviate from the ANC line,” Stengel explains in the podcast. This was especially true as South Africa’s first democratic elections were still to come and the ANC president felt he could not risk publishing anything that might alienate his electorate.
He refused to discuss his divorce from his first wife, Evelyn, for example, on the grounds that conservative older Africans might disapprove.
In general, Mandela was extremely reluctant to talk about anything related to his personal life, which was something of a nightmare for any budding biographer.
Stengel says: “Mandela believed that black South Africans would not want to hear him talk about the heart as an American.”
For example, this is the sum Stengel was able to extract from Mandela on the subject of Evelyn’s personality: “She was a well-mannered, quiet lady.”
“Mandela was a democratic revolutionary”
Stengel said Daily Maverick that he hadn’t listened to the tapes since he conducted the interviews in the early 1990s, so going through them now was a trip back in time for him as well.
At 67, Stengel is now much closer to Madiba’s age on the recordings than to his younger self when the recordings were made.
“I hear things in his voice now that I don’t think I heard then. Longing, loneliness,” he reflects.
“I feel for him more. In his personal life, it was an incredibly difficult time. I went to see him at his house in Houghton and there was no one around.
The podcast series ends on a note of poignant intimacy between Mandela and Stengel, but the writer is under no illusions that he ever truly overcame the distance Mandela maintained between himself and even some of his closest comrades.
“Many people love me from afar, but very few up close,” Mandela was fond of saying; the reality, from Stengel’s perspective, is that he rarely allowed other people into his most personal inner sanctum.
Watch: Richard Stengel’s Address to The Gathering November 24, 2022
Mandela’s legacy in South Africa has become more complicated in recent years, as the concessions he made during the transition to democracy are seen as partly responsible for perpetuating grotesque social and economic inequality.
Stengel finds some of this discourse frustrating because of its apparent lack of consideration of historical context.
“Did he give up too much to get to this [democratic] dispensation? Maybe, but he was trying to avoid a holocaust!” he says animatedly.
If South African listeners take anything away from the podcast, Stengel says, he wants it to be the realization that Mandela was a “democratic revolutionary.”
The ANC leader has never needed fancy political consultants to remind him to stay “on message”, says Stengel, because he has always been on message.
“He was not a Santa figure. He was the founder of Umkhonto weSizwe. He was stubborn and pragmatic. He was not an ideologue. He was an African nationalist. Let people continue to criticize, but never doubt the integrity of what he stands for. DM
[ad_2]
Source link