Struggle History and Self-Help: The Parallel Lives of Nelson Mandela in Conventional and Figurative Biography

Abstract

My general impression, after reading several autobiographies, is that an autobiography is not merely a catalogue of events and experiences in which a person has been involved, but that it also serves as some blueprint on which others may well model their own lives … This book has no such pretentions as it has nothing to leave behind (Nelson Mandela, ‘Unpublished Sequel to Long Walk to Freedom’.)¹

Key words:

• Nelson Mandela
• biography
• self-help literature
• African nationalism

Note on Contributor

Steve Davis is Assistant Professor in the Department of History, University of Kentucky.

Notes

1. Available from: http://archives.nelsonmandela.org/asset-viewer/sequel-to-long-walk-to-freedom-revision-1-chapter-1-page-4 [Accessed 7 June 2013].

2. No Easy Walk to Freedom is a collection of speeches and writings by Mandela, first released after his imprisonment on Robben Island. Although not a narrative biography, the span covered by the collection constitutes a set of sources that trace the major episodes of his public life. Earlier editions were prefaced with biographical tributes written by Oliver Tambo and Ahmed Ben Bella.

3. Nelson Mandela, ‘Prison Manuscript’ <www.nelsonmandela.org/images/uploads/LWOM.pdf> (accessed 29 November 2012).

4. Although prognostic literature about South Africa certainly predates Mandela's many biographies, its more recent genealogy can be traced from publications in the late 1940s onward (see Kepple-Jones 1947; Carter 1958; Johnson 1977; Hirson 1979; Crapazano 1986; Davis 1987; de St. Jorre 1991). The question of intended audience is a complex one, but an examination of the publication history of Long Walk, as well as the chronology of translation, reveals much about who that book was destined to serve. First and foremost, the first quarter of the book is an ethnographic thick description of Xhosa customs and beliefs worthy of Jomo Kenyatta's Facing Mount Kenya. Would a South African audience need an explanation of a circumcision ceremony, or need the presence of a circumcision ceremony to authenticate the text as African? Further, would a South African audience need pastoralist pastorals to establish the Eastern Cape as a recognisably African setting? The publication history is more suggestive about the issue of intended audience. Long Walk to Freedom was published simultaneously in New York, London and Randburg in 1994, by three different subsidiaries of parent company Time Warner. In other words, this was not a book that was written or marketed to a solely local audience which was later picked up and distributed by an international publisher. The simultaneous launches meant it was always intended for global distribution, and I argue, written with that intended audience in mind. The chronology of translation is most telling. Long Walk to Freedom was not published in Afrikaans, Xhosa, Sotho or Zulu translations until 2001. By comparison, the German translation was simultaneously published along with the English-language editions in 1994. As noted by Marisa Honey, the translation of Long Walk to Freedom into South African languages was conceived as a cultural project that upheld the status of local languages, rather than an effort reach a wider South African readership. The Rembrandt Group, South Africa's premiere tobacco company, subsidised these translations, not as a profit-making venture but as part of their community service portfolio. Only the Afrikaans translation has gone into a second edition as a much abbreviated children's book. The Afrikaans children's book edition was published in 2009. Based on this, it seems reasonable to assume the intended audience was at least a foreign English-speaking readership. See Mtuze 2003:141–52; Honey 2006; Krog 2003:267–75).

5. Ahmed Kathrada also had a hand in editing the final draft.

6. These interviews will be available for the first time in mid-2013. Sahm Venter, Archivist, Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory, correspondence with author on 18 July 2012.

7. Sampson claims that the prison manuscript provided the basis for the first two-thirds of Long Walk to Freedom; Allen repeats the oft-made claim that the prison manuscript formed the ‘framework’ for Long Walk to Freedom; Holden suggests that the title of the Robben Island manuscript is not given in Long Walk to Freedom, presumably in an effort to encourage the reader to identify the manuscript as Long Walk to Freedom itself; and The Nelson Mandela Foundation suggests that Long Walk to Freedom was a product of both the prison manuscript and interviews conducted by Stengel. Nelson Mandela Foundation, ‘Role revealed of Madiba's comrades in Long Walk to Freedom’ <http://www.nelsonmandela.org/news/entry/role-revealed-of-madibas-comrades-in-long-walk-to-freedom> (accessed 10 March 2014).

8. Sisulu describes the process as an ‘assembly line’. In a quote from the manuscript itself, Mandela laments that he could not circulate the manuscript as widely as he would have liked, but sought ‘the widest possible measure of consultation’ and circulated it to a handful of friends. The clearest evidence we have of collective authorship, or at least collaboration, are the edits that Kathrada and Maharaj had penned on the draft circulated in prison. When the authorities discovered this draft, they called in handwriting experts to identify Kathrada and Maharaj as the source of the edits. Authorities then revoked study privileges for Mandela, Sisulu and Kathrada for four years. Ahmed Kathrada, interview with John Carlin <www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/mandela/interviews/kathrada.html> (accessed 29 November 2012). Kathrada maintains both that ‘nobody had anything to do with it, except Madiba’, but also that he and Sisulu wrote comments and left the final editorial control to Mandela.

9. The prison manuscript is comparable to two biographies written in the 1980s: Nelson Mandela; The Man and the Movement (1980) by Mary Benson and Higher Than Hope; The Authorized Biography of Nelson Mandela (1988) by Fatima Meer. Like the prison manuscript these biographies are part activist tract, part struggle history and clearly aimed at activists or sympathetic allies in Europe and North America.

10. Nelson, Mandela, Prison Manuscript, Nelson Mandela Centre for Memory <www.nelsonmandela.org/images/uploads/LWOM.pdf> (accessed 29 November 2012).

11. Ibid:103.

12. Ibid:182.

13. Ibid. One of the features that distinguish early self-help from contemporary self-help is the issue of conditioning a new middle class. Samuel Smiles and other Victorian self-help writers were teaching people how to behave as respectable members of the middle-class. In contemporary self-help that middle-class status and requisite comportment is assumed. In this later formulation the focus shifts to late 20^th century ideas about self-actualisation, which are commonly portrayed as a vehicle for financial and physical well-being.

14. Examples of Mandela-branded biographical self-help abound (see Fairhead 2010; Kalungu-Banda 2008; Chibaya Mbuya 2012; Shuetz 2013; Kasaval 2013; Charles 2013; Nelson 2010; Friedlander 2010).

15. See <http://www.rogerdarlington.co.uk/biographies.html#LWTF>. Consumer demands for a more portable Mandela became the market's command. In 2004 a new publisher parsed Long Walk to Freedom into two volumes (Mandela 2002, 2003).

16. The cover of Richard Stengel's Mandela's Way promises readers a ‘distilled’ and ‘compact book’ summarised into ‘fifteen life lessons’ (Stengel 2009:dust jacket).

17. The version of the circumcision ritual offered in the prison manuscript makes no mention of Mandela buckling under the pain.

18. A world far removed from whites, except of course, when Mandela's father had an argument with a white magistrate and lost his position as chief, consigning his family to a life of poverty.

19. This is not to say that Mandela's Way lacks a certain limited intertextuality with popular self-help texts. Deepak Chopra wrote a blurb for the back cover, but Stengel steered clear of any reference to self-help authors in the body of the book.

20. ‘Present’ being a play on words, between a gift and the moment we live in (Kalungu-Banda 2008:93).

21. Rowland Croucher, et al. ‘Nelson Mandela's speech’, John Mark Ministries <http://www.jmm.org.au/articles/4564.htm> (accessed 19 June 2013).

22. To Croucher's credit, he posted the entire set of exchanges between his readers. When a second reader pointed out that the ANC had no record of Mandela uttering those words, a third reader jumped in to support Croucher's revised attribution by claiming she watched Mandela deliver those words during a televised speech. Borrowing from the characteristic tropes of urban legends, this eyewitness claimed her friend watched the same broadcast, pointed out that she was from Cape Town, and maintained ‘everyone was talking about it afterwards’. Despite testimony from these ‘first person witnesses’ the phantom speech remained undated and unnamed. Croucher kept the original title of his essay, ‘Nelson Mandela's speech’.