Former South African president Nelson Mandela’s anguish at the suffering his political activism caused his wife and children is revealed in a book published yesterday.
The collection of his letters, diaries and conversations shows a husband and father sacrificing personal happiness for political ideals as the leader of South Africa’s liberation struggle. The book also expresses anxiety that the world should not regard him as a saint.
Conversations With Myself includes a letter sent in 1969 to daughters Zenani and Zindzi, then aged nine and 10, after his then-wife Winnie Madikizela-Mandela was detained by police, a harassment she would often endure during his 27 years of imprisonment.
“For long you may live like orphans without your own home and parents, without the natural love, affection and protection Mummy used to give you,” Mandela wrote. “Now you will get no birthday or Christmas parties, no presents or new dresses, no shoes or toys.”
In the same year he was not allowed to attend the funeral of Thembi Mandela, the elder of two sons from his previous marriage, who died in a car crash aged 24.
“When I was first advised of my son’s death I was shaken from top to bottom,” he wrote.
In a 1970 letter to Madikizela-Mandela, when she was detained in a Pretoria prison, he wrote: “I feel I have been soaked in gall, every part of me, my flesh, bloodstream, bone and soul, so bitter am I to be completely powerless to help you in the rough and fierce ordeals you are going through.”
Some of the exchanges with Madikizela-Mandela are romantic, tender and full of yearning.
In 1976 he wrote that his main problem was “my sleeping without you next to me and my waking up without you close to me, the passing of the day without my having seen you.”
However, in 1987 he wrote to a friend about his wife’s anger when he told her how well their two daughters had grown up: “She reminded me: ‘I, not you, brought up these children whom you now prefer to me.’ I was simply stunned.”
Much of Conversations With Myself, which has a foreword by US President Barack Obama, is based on a never completed autobiography Mandela intended as a sequel to his international bestseller, Long Walk to Freedom.
The first extracts appeared in the Sunday Times newspaper in the UK and its namesake in South Africa. Revenue from the book will go to the Nelson Mandela Foundation.
Far from the violence ravaging Haiti, a market on the border with the Dominican Republic has maintained a welcome degree of normal everyday life. At the Dajabon border gate, a wave of Haitians press forward, eager to shop at the twice-weekly market about 200km from Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince. They are drawn by the market’s offerings — food, clothing, toys and even used appliances — items not always readily available in Haiti. However, with gang violence bad and growing ever worse in Haiti, the Dominican government has reinforced the usual military presence at the border and placed soldiers on alert. While the market continues to
An image of a dancer balancing on the words “China Before Communism” looms over Parisian commuters catching the morning metro, signaling the annual return of Shen Yun, a controversial spectacle of traditional Chinese dance mixed with vehement criticism of Beijing and conservative rhetoric. The Shen Yun Performing Arts company has slipped the beliefs of a spiritual movement called Falun Gong in between its technicolored visuals and leaping dancers since 2006, with advertising for the show so ubiquitous that it has become an Internet meme. Founded in 1992, Falun Gong claims nearly 100 million followers and has been subject to “persistent persecution” in
ONLINE VITRIOL: While Mo Yan faces a lawsuit, bottled water company Nongfu Spring and Tsinghua University are being attacked amid a rise in nationalist fervor At first glance, a Nobel prize winning author, a bottle of green tea and Beijing’s Tsinghua University have little in common, but in recent weeks they have been dubbed by China’s nationalist netizens as the “three new evils” in the fight to defend the country’s valor in cyberspace. Last month, a patriotic blogger called Wu Wanzheng filed a lawsuit against China’s only Nobel prize-winning author, Mo Yan (莫言), accusing him of discrediting the Communist army and glorifying Japanese soldiers in his fictional works set during the Japanese invasion of China. Wu, who posts online under the pseudonym “Truth-Telling Mao Xinghuo,” is seeking
‘SURPRISES’: The militants claim to have successfully tested a missile capable of reaching Mach 8 and vowed to strike ships heading toward the Cape of Good Hope Yemen’s Houthi rebels claim to have a new, hypersonic missile in their arsenal, Russia’s state media reported on Thursday, potentially raising the stakes in their attacks on shipping in the Red Sea and surrounding waterways against the backdrop of Israel’s war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The report by the state-run RIA Novosti news agency cited an unidentified official, but provided no evidence for the claim. It comes as Moscow maintains an aggressively counter-Western foreign policy amid its grinding war on Ukraine. However, the Houthis have for weeks hinted about “surprises” they plan for the battles at sea to counter the