Updates on Continuing Research

Verne Harris

Nelson Mandela University

 

 

Two books were published late in 2024 which add to the burgeoning literature on Nelson Mandela. The two couldn’t be more different.

 

In Dying for Freedom, scholar Jacob Dlamini brings a complex and fascinating lens to bear on aspects of struggles for liberation in twentieth century South Africa. What he finds is “a veneration of mortality as proof of the will to freedom.” (p.4) And, he argues, “this investment in death encouraged a masculinist style of politics in which activists understood fighting for emancipation as a struggle for manhood.” For Dlamini, Nelson Mandela and Bantu Steve Biko are the emblematic figures of this style. The first chapter of the book focuses on Mandela, with a close reading of Mandela’s speeches forming the fulcrum of the argument. Dlamini also references an archival document containing Mandela’s handwritten notes for what he would have said from the dock if he had been sentenced to death in 1964. There are five notes, the last being “If I must die, let me declare for all to know that I will meet my fate like a man.” Mandela, Dlamini concludes, “saw fighting against apartheid as being synonymous with his assertion of manhood and his struggle against the infantilisation of African men.” (p.30)

 

It is worth noting, perhaps, that in 2005 Mac Maharaj sat with Mandela in a formal meeting to discuss those handwritten notes. In the course of their conversation, Mandela responded to Maharaj’s suggestion that he (Mandela) was a male chauvinist at the time he went to prison. “Well, you know,” Mandela responded, “sitting down in jail and reading you discover things … (you) read literature that opens your mind and makes you realise that some of your ideas in the past were completely wrong.” (Important to note, as will become clear below, this meeting was recorded with Mandela’s authorisation during the course of an archival project.)

 

Whatever one makes of Dlamini’s lens, argument and line of enquiry, his book is one of serious scholarship. Peter Friedland’s Quiet Time with the President, on the other hand, is in a space I would call anecdotal. The book is a memoir by the ear, nose and throat specialist who treated Mandela for diminishing hearing ability through the decade before he turned 90 years old. It joins a plethora of books by Mandela’s friends, family, comrades, associates, employees, warders, security and medical personnel, and so on, in which they recount their life stories in a mode which ensures that Mandela becomes their story. A form of appropriation, in other words. What makes Friedland’s book particularly uncomfortable to read are the long passages in which he recounts conversations with Mandela in the context of a doctor-patient relationship, with the patient in his eighties, having good days and bad days, and not being aware that what he is saying to the doctor might be quoted verbatim in a book nearly two decades later. Was Friedland recording their conversations? Or keeping detailed notes (as a doctor, or as a prospective author?) of every conversation? Or does Friedland just have eidetic memory? Other questions press for attention as well, obviously. Medical ethics. The ethics of human connection, if not friendship. The right to privacy. The sanctity of safe spaces.

 

If for a younger Mandela death had been the ultimate validation of commitment, for Mandela the old man it became the gateway to sanctuary.