Dinner with Bill Clinton, vodka with Boris Yeltsin, loyalty to Muammar Qaddafi, a compliment to the Queen and a public humiliation for Robert Mugabe — not to mention an awkward exchange with UK TV presenter Jeremy Clarkson over lap dancing.
These were some of the stories revealed on Thursday in a memoir by Nelson Mandela’s former personal assistant. Zelda la Grange’s book also stirred controversy by accusing Mandela’s family of freezing out his wife, Graca Machel, in an ugly feud over his legacy.
La Grange, 43, spent more time than anyone in Mandela’s company after he became South Africa’s first black president in 1994. It was an improbable career for a conservative Afrikaner who confesses she was a racist until she began working for him, first as a typist.
Photo: AFP
Yet she went on to become known as “Mandela’s rock,” his secretary and closest aide and confidante during his presidency and retirement: a section of her book is entitled “Gatekeeper to the most famous man in the world.” Over 16 years she witnessed his encounters with royals and politicians, astronauts and celebrities. She recalls, for example, a regional summit at which the Zimbabwean president, Mugabe, turned up an hour late.
“President Mandela waited for President Mugabe to be seated and then launched into an off-the-cuff speech of about 20 minutes about being disrespectful and wasting other people’s time, and that ‘some heads of state’ considered themselves more important and therefore thought it was acceptable to arrive late. He didn’t mention President Mugabe’s name once, but we all knew.”
Relations between Mandela and Mugabe, the two political giants of southern Africa, were always frosty. La Grange adds: “That was the last time I ever saw any kind of interaction between them and there was no contact again that I am aware of, except exchanging courtesies whenever they shared a stage at an all-Africa event.”
With Libyan leader Qaddafi, however, there was mutual trust. “Madiba [Mandela’s clan name] was loyal to those in whom he invested friendship and the Brother Leader was one of them,” La Grange writes in Good Morning, Mr. Mandela, published by Penguin. “He never omitted to point out the mistakes he thought Qaddafi made, but they maintained mutual respect even while expressing their differences at times.”
Another friend was the Queen: He was one of very few people to call her by her name. La Grange recalls: “When he was questioned one day by Mrs. Machel and told that it was not proper to call the Queen by her first name, he responded: ‘But she calls me Nelson.’ On one occasion when he saw her, he said, ‘Oh Elizabeth, you’ve lost weight!’ Not something everybody gets to tell the Queen of England.”
After his retirement Mandela was often pictured with celebrities such as Naomi Campbell and the Spice Girls. La Grange recalls a poignant meeting with the first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong. “Madiba found it most intriguing. Neil Armstrong was a gentle soul and one could sense in his character that he had a different experience of life having gone through such an experience. He was also elderly, and it was easy for Madiba to relate to him.”
FROM THE SUBLIME TO THE RIDICULOUS
“I knew that Jeremy Clarkson was humorous but I thought he had tact. As I walked into Madiba’s office the next day he asked Madiba if he had ever had a lap dance. I thought it was completely inappropriate for him to ask something like that to an elderly statesman and Madiba looked at me as if he expected me to answer. I turned to Madiba and said: ‘You don’t have to answer that, Khulu [grandfather].’”
She goes on to describe a halting conversation between Mandela and Clarkson and fellow presenter James May. She accuses the visitors of underestimating Mandela’s intelligence because of his age. “In my view, there was no respect.”
The book also describes how Mandela “nearly died” when his plane hit turbulence in 1999 and tells how Mandela was lonely after his divorce from Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, but found true happiness with his third wife, Machel. Yet when his health began to deteriorate, La Grange claims, the rest of the Mandela family allegedly moved to sideline her.
“Mrs. Machel felt hopeless and undermined,” she writes of an incident in 2011. “Because I’d raised concerns and because the specialists were all white, I felt that it also became a racial issue.”
In a damning statement, La Grange added: “I don’t know of any person alive who has been treated with the amount of disrespect that people have shown towards Mrs. Machel. Politics within the family about his funeral took place for years before his death.”
This culminated in an unseemly court battle between family members last year in which the bones of Mandela’s three late children were dug up and reburied so they could be near his final resting place in Qunu, Eastern Cape province.
As he grew older, Mandela’s bank called La Grange to verify transactions on his account. She continues: “The fight over who controlled Madiba’s money continued and got messier as time progressed. The poison in the family was now leaking out everywhere. Many of his family had never wanted me around, and they were now getting their chance. But I still refused to abandon him.”
Mandela died on Dec. 5 last year at the age of 95. La Grange recounts that Machel required official accreditation to attend her own husband’s memorial service. “It is so ridiculous that you actually couldn’t help but laugh out loud at this ... I had traveled with Madiba across the world, attending functions where there were sometimes hundreds of heads of state present. Arrangements at such big events were always a little haphazard yet I had never experienced such chaos.”
Celebrity friends of Mandela such as Oprah Winfrey, Forest Whitaker and Gayle King had to pose for “countless photos” with protocol staff before they were granted accreditation, she continues. “It was revolting. I could not imagine that Madiba would have agreed to this type of treatment of his friends.”
Then Bono and Charlize Theron were blocked from the VIP suites at the stadium until La Grange’s “fighting, more crying, yelling and losing my temper” got official attention. And after all that, the service was a flop. “It was hardly the celebration of his life we had hoped for.”
The 370-page book has already caused a backlash in South Africa. Makaziwe Mandela, his eldest daughter from his first marriage, told the Sunday Times that La Grange would have to substantiate whatever references she made about her family, “otherwise she will be sued.”
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