Mandela, the man didn’t die. He simply journeyed on to the ancestral world. At the least this is the message one gets on finishing reading Good Morning Mr Mandela (2014) by Zelda la Grange. Zelda was Mandela’s minder pretty much from 1994 when he became the president of a free South Africa till his death in December last year. Good Morning Mr Mandela is a kind of a memoir of Zelda’s rise from a conservative, apartheid supporting, and young Afrikaner woman to the public figure that remained at the side of Mandela into his last days.
This is a gripping book that actually reveals a lot of things that remain unknown about Mandela’s life during his presidency, after retiring and his family. Zelda offers a caveat, that this is not Mandela’s story. “This is not his story, this is my story, and I am content with it. But the reader may be disappointed if they expect me to wash too much dirty laundry in public. I would not disrespect the trust Nelson Mandela had invested in me. That is the biggest honour he could have bestowed on me – to trust me – and I intend to cherish that for the rest of my life. What I decided to write about and what I decided to omit as far as he is concerned is based on that trust. It is therefore not a tell-all book.”
Indeed this book is anecdotal, as Zelda explains later but it contains gems about Mandela the man, the president, the husband, the father, grandfather, friend, advisor, elder, statesman and many other details that the public giant that the man was in his later years camouflaged.
There are so many reasons to recommend this book to you my reader. But I will highlight three. First, this is the first close-up narrative shot of Mandela that I have ever read. The various books on Mandela including his autobiography Long Walk to Freedom only present Mandela really from a distance – most of the time as a political figure. But here we meet and see Mandela the human being, in flesh, as opposed to the saint that the media had made him to be. Mandela does ordinary things; what all humans do every day. We get to know what he ate; what he read – when in South Africa he would read the day’s newspapers and insisted on having cuttings of South African newspapers sent to him wherever he was in the world and loved going to the bookshop to buy books; his love for Graca Machel; his relationship with his children and grandchildren; his commitment to the ANC; his love for travelling etc. Zelda paints this narrative picture so closely and personal that one can see Mandela’s life in minute details, as it progresses till his last days. The power of Zelda’s story is carried by the manner in which she inserts Mandela into places, moments and among other people. In the end although this book is supposed to be Zelda’s life, it turns out to be really about Mandela – his life and spirit, in some sense, haunt to the whole story.
Secondly, if you have been looking for an extra, personal tale of Mandela’s attempt to create the rainbow nation that was his big dream after apartheid, then Good Morning Mr Mandela is the book to read. For here is a practical lesson in living one’s philosophy. Despite being imprisoned by the Afrikaners for over two decades, Mandela chose and worked with Zelda for all almost twenty years. Although initially employed as a typist in the administrative department of the Presidency in Pretoria, Zelda became probably the one person Mandela depended on most from 1994 till he died. Undoubtedly many other books are yet to be written by those who were close to Mandela – Graca, his daughters, his political friends and general observers – but Zelda’s book leaves no doubt that hers was a very close work relationship with Mandela. And that means it was fraught with problems, private and public.
By being the president and later ex-president’s assistant and minder, Zelda couldn’t do some things that ordinary people do. First, she just didn’t have the time. She was at the beck and call of Mandela almost 24 hours a day, 7 days a week; the whole year. How does a young woman without a social life get a man who can love her? Find out by reading the book. Second, she had to deal with the Mandela ‘family issues.’ It simply meant that whenever there was trouble in the house, she was part of it. Compounding this situation was the fact that she was white Afrikaner – how was she to deal with black South Africans or her own Afrikaners. Either way she had to live with the nagging reality that neither race trusted her. So, Zelda’s story is also the story of the coming of age, symbolically and literally, for her and South Africa.
Publicly she had to deal with thousands of requests by people wanting to meet Mandela. What did it mean to turn down some of these people or to allow others to see Mandela? What did it mean for her when protocol was breached, say such as in cases where Mandela’s children or relatives or the ANC party wigs did something that hadn’t been agreed on by the staff of the Mandela Foundation or Mandela himself, especially after he had ‘retired from public life?’
Zelda’s story is therefore one of Mandela embracing his former enemies, the Afrikaners, women, young people and the non-politicians. Zelda represented all these categories. And she emotionally acknowledges that Mandela gave her the opportunity of a lifetime; a chance that she would never have dreamt of but which Mandela’s magnanimity and wisdom delivered at her feet. Indeed, there are passages in Good Morning Mr Mandela in which Zelda profusely praises Mandela, although always with the refrain that Mandela was the first person to always remind people that he wasn’t a saint.
Thirdly, I think that this is the one book that presents Mandela as the African elder and statesman that he was, again, to repeat, from close quarters. Mandela spent a lot of his time travelling the world, seeking to bring together enemy factions in many places. From Burundi to Congo to Palestine, Mandela was one of the biggest peacemakers of the last years of the 20th Century and the early years of the 21st Century. Many of his initiatives might not have succeeded in the manner that he expected them but in the least we can say that Burundi and the DRC have had some stability in the recent past, thanks to Mandela.
But the most significant act of Mandela was to literally hand over the presidency to Thabo Mbeki before his term ended and retiring thereafter. As Zelda reminds us, Mandela believed that by retiring and staying away from the day-to-day politics of South Africa, he would be setting a good example for other African leaders. Mandela simply let go of his position, in the party and the minds of South Africans, a position that would have made him president-for-life, if he had wished. Yet, Zelda, reveals, both the Mbeki and Zuma governments always seemed to fear that Mandela’s stature outshone them. She notes that there were moments when the Mbeki government treated Mandela shoddily and so did the Zuma one but Mandela remained the wise old man, choosing not to be bothered.
You can buy Good Morning Mr Mandela to read about an honest retelling of the South African political ‘miracle’ post-1994. Or if you seek to know a little more about the Mandela family, the shenanigans around controlling his image and wealth when alive and after dying, how the family treated Graca when Mandela was alive and after he died, the shambles of the Mandela memorial in Johannesburg etc, then this book will whet your appetite – there should be more revelatory books on Mandela in the near future.
But you could also just do some public service by buying a copy for your MP, Senator, MCA or a person you like, for reference lesson on humility, wisdom, servant leadership, and sacrifice for the good and benefit of mankind. Good Morning Mr Mandela is available in bookshops in Nairobi.
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