The tale of a visionary

Nelson Mandela
Pan Macmillan
Edition: Paperback
ISBN: 9780230755949
Pages: 454
Price: 499


It has always been tempting for historians and biographers alike to compare the two greatest freedom fighters of the 20th century - Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela. The similarity between the two is intellectually stimulating. Both were coloured, both faced personal humiliation at the hands of their colonial rulers, both were barristers, normal family persons having deep attachment to their roots. As Gandhi faced the humiliation of being thrown out of a railway coach, so did Mandela. “I was arrested not because I had defied but because I had gone and urinated in a, what-you-call, whites’ toilet room for whites only,’ writes Mandela.

But the similarity between the two seems to end here. Both held and adopted divergent tactics in their fight against oppression. Mandela was not averse to armed and guerilla-type resistance, Gandhi, on the other hand, never approved it. For Mandela, non-violence was a means to an end. For Gandhi, it was an end itself. It was a way of life for Gandhi, for Mandela it was a conditional conduit for a dignified life.

In a conversation about Albert Luthuli, one of his close associates, Mandela brings forth his reservation about non-violence poignantly, “The Chief (Albert Luthuli) was a passionate disciple of Mahatma Gandhi and he believed in non-violence. Many of us did not. We took up the attitude that we would stick to non-violence only insofar as the conditions permitted. Once the conditions were against we would automatically abandon non-violence and use the methods dictated by the condition.”

So while Mandela praised and idolised Gandhi he was never convinced of the efficacies of non-violence in his fight against the Whites. For Mandela, it was Nehru and not Gandhi who was the real hero. In fact, after the war against Apartheid was won and freedom achieved, Mandela’s life portrayed much of what Nehru had to face post-independent India.

Unlike his autobiography Long Walk to Freedom, ‘Conversations with Myself is more personal, conversational and intimate. It doesn’t have the traditional structure of its genre and is more like a dispersed meditation - moving back and forth in time and space.

The book, as it outlines, comprises four parts, each with its own introduction and each carrying a title drawn from classical forms - pastoral, dramatic, epic and tragicomic. In fact, the book’s conversational structure is inspired by Marcus Aureliu’s Meditation - A volume of thoughts, musings and aphorisms penned in the second century AD. Marcus was a Roman Emperor, a politician and a man of action, much like Mandela himself. Parts of the book are marked by passages that employ Aristotelian rhetoric as a narrative device.

Mandela narrates his journey from childhood to adulthood to his fight against Apartheid and his days in prison through letters, conversations, dialogues, interviews and from the pages of his personal diary.

The beauty of the book lies is Mandela’s honesty and sincerity with which he has portrayed human emotion and has not once found to be wallowing in self-pity or self-flagellation. To the point of being discreet about his image, he says, “One issue that deeply worried me in prison was the false image that I unwittingly projected to the outside world; of being regarded as a saint. I never was one, even on the basis of an earthly definition of a saint as a sinner who keeps on trying.”

On his election as the President of South Africa, Mandela quotes from an unpublished sequel to his autobiography, “My installation as the first democratically elected President of the Republic of South Africa was imposed on me much against my advice. I advised against the decision on the grounds that I would turn seventy-six that year that it would be wise to get a far younger person, male or female, who had been out of prison, met heads of state and government...who could, as far as was possible, foresee the future course of such developments.”

Understandably, ‘Conversations with Myself’ is Mandela’s self-suggestion manuscript – an instrument to bring himself in terms with reality - both psychological as well as his Christian beliefs. The painstaking effort that has gone in collecting the data for the book is praiseworthy. For a leader who has been actively involved at its national politics, documenting such details with so much precision is breathtaking.

The book doesn’t offer titillation, thrill or captivating story telling ability of its author but the matter-of-fact trials and tribulations of daily existence after the author had waged a war against the Empire.

It’s an ordinary man’s fight against extraordinary forces, both inside and outside, and finally emerging triumphant. The book brings you closer to an exceptional man who has now assumed a persona larger than life.