There is no shortage of biographies of Nelson Mandela. Only this year David James Smith has published Young Mandela, and the man’s own Conversations with Myself have just appeared as a complement to Mandela’s Way and Long Walk to Freedom, while Anthony Sampson’s authorised biography remains indispensible. And there are many others.
Peter Hain offers something that is missing: ‘a short, popular and accessible book that tells Mandela’s entire and remarkable story’, as he puts it. But Hain has something else to offer, which is shared, to some extent, with Sampson, who was a pioneering editor of the South African magazine Drum during the early apartheid years. But Hain was more closely associated with activism against apartheid, making him at one time the subject of an attempt at framing in London by the South African security services.
He was born in Kenya, and moved with his parents to South Africa until they were forced into exile in the UK due to their political activities. This is, of course, not a book about Hain but part of its considerable value is both knowing its author history that so pervades it and the occasional insights and anecdotes gleaned from that experience. For example, Mrs Hain monitored the Rivonia trial for the South African Liberal party.
Mandela is a man of great humility, charm, humour and courtesy. He is a tribal aristocrat evident in his person and, as Hain shows, that did much to ensure his authority within the ANC (where he began as a rebellious youth member), in prison, in negotiations and later in government.
His gift for reconciliation, compromise and his patience have had an indelible effect on the new South Africa and his biographer shows how this grew from the long years of reflection and reading in prison. Those 27 years of incarceration also allowed him to understand more fully Afrikaners, so much so that he taught himself their language.
This is an honest book, too, about Mandela’s defects, not least his self-admitted paternal and husbandly failings. Winnie Mandela herself (with whom Hain also deals with even-handedly), once said that she knew that in marrying the man she had married ‘the struggle’. From this nothing – family included – would deflect Mandela.
Hain shows how the apartheid state came to dominate the south of the continent, but how its internal contradictions brought about its sure, if slow, collapse. As this happened there was the confusion of its beneficiaries who were not necessarily its supporters; as well as the divisions which beset both the black and white opposition.
Peter Hain writes well and easily in a text well served by the book’s attractive layout and excellent photographs. But, importantly, in Hain, Nelson Mandela is blessed with a biographer whose gifts as a writer and insight as a supporter offer the reader an engrossing narrative – no small achievement for a life already so well chronicled.
Mandela by Peter Hain is published by Spruce. 343pp, £12.99. Join Progress before 21 November 2010 and you will go in the draw to win a signed copy of the book.