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Africa Subsaharan

What a lost prison manuscript reveals about the real Nelson Mandela

2020-01-16

From 2014, but no less interesting. Though the speculation of what President Obama would have thought if he’d know the truth about Mr. Mandela’s Soviet connections strikes an odd note half a decade later.

[Spectator] This is a story about Nelson Mandela, and it begins on Robben Island in 1974. Prisoner number 466/64 is writing up his life story, working all night and sleeping all day. Finished pages go to trusted comrades who write comments and queries in the margins. The text is then passed to one Laloo Chiba, who transcribes it in ’microscopic’ letters on to sheets of paper which are later inserted into the binding of notebooks and carried off the island by Mac Maharaj when he is released in 1976.

So, a 'Secret'. If you wonder why, read on.

Outside, the intrepid Mac turns the microscopic text into a typescript and sends it to London, where it becomes the Higgs boson of literary properties, known to exist but not seen since it passed into the hands of the South African Communist Party, or SACP, in 1977. Years pass; the mystery deepens. Mandela goes from being an obscure South African prisoner to possibly the most famous living human, subject of global adulation and a ghostwritten autobiography that sells 15 million. His cult is such that prints of his hands are sold for thousands, and yet the prison manuscript stays missing. Until last week, when Professor Stephen Ellis of the University of Leiden sent out an email saying: ’You’ll never guess what I’ve just found in the online archive of the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory.’

So yes, the lost manuscript has come back to us and, with it, a range of fascinating questions. Why was it not published earlier? Why did it surface now? And above all, what light does it shed on Mandela’s Awkward Secret, first reported by Professor Ellis in 2011?

There's More!
...and it kind of goes along with what we already knew about him (or most of us anyway)

Posted by:Mullah Richard

#6 ...he was or pretended to be a democrat, But by night he became a leader of a fanatical sect known for its attachment to the totalitarian Soviet ideal.

And the difference is?

Posted by: JohnQC 2020-01-16 17:46

#5 Don't care about his writings so much. First thing he did after getting freed was visit Qaddafi. That about says it all.

Posted by: rjschwarz 2020-01-16 11:37

#4 /\ Yes, not unlike Soetoro mentor and avowed communist Frank Marshall Davis, Mandela was a Soetoro icon.

Posted by: Besoeker 2020-01-16 08:58

#3 What did Soetoro know and when did he know it?

Posted by: Lex 2020-01-16 08:44

#2 @ #1 - Sickening, indeed...to the nth degre.

Posted by: Clem 2020-01-16 08:33

Yes, an article from 2014, which might indicate we've known "Madiba" (his clan name) was a communist, a terrorist bomber and convicted murderer for a considerable amount of time. Foto of the statue atop Naval Hill in Bloemfontein, SA. An even larger statue sits in front of the Union Building in Pretoria. The adulation and legacy of this man is sickening.

Posted by: Besoeker 2020-01-16 02:23

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