Conversations with Myself Read Free

information from his clients. Perhaps, at over seventy years of age, he felt he could not entirely trust his memory.
    And fourthly: the draft of an unfinished sequel to Long Walk to Freedom. On 16 October 1998, he took a piece of blue notepaper and with a favoured pen he put down, in a strong and decisive hand, the date in Roman numerals. He followed this with what was his working title: ‘The Presidential Years’. Underneath it he wrote ‘Chapter One’. At some point, at the head of the page, he wrote the word ‘Draft’. The final year of his presidency, his involvement in the Burundi negotiations, political distractions of the moment, the demands of his charitable work, and an endless stream of visitors thwarted the book’s progress. His advisors suggested he get a professional writer to work with him, but he refused. He was very protective of the writing, wanting to do it himself. He did have a research assistant for a while, but he grew impatient with the arrangement. Ultimately, he simply ran out of steam.
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    Not surprisingly, the Mandela private archive has no inherent organising principle or system of arrangement. For Conversations with Myself we have grouped our selections according to an underlying rationale based partly on the chronology of Mandela’s life, and partly on the major themes of his meditations and reflections. The book comprises four parts, each with its own introduction and each carrying a title drawn from classical modes, forms and genres – pastoral, dramatic, epic and tragicomic. Mandela is steeped in the classics. He studied Latin at school and at university. He read widely in Greek literature, and acted in classics of the theatre while at university and in prison.
    The book’s form is inspired most directly by Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, a volume of thoughts, musings and aphorisms penned in the second century AD. Marcus Aurelius was a leader, a Roman emperor, a politician and man of action, a soldier. While not, perhaps, a great philosopher or writer, he knew the benefits of meditation, record-making and daily discipline. He wrote in the midst of action. His book is full of wisdom. Its original title translates literally as ‘To Himself’. Its attributes, and those of its author, are not entirely unrelated to those of a man and a book appearing eighteen centuries later.
     
    Verne Harris
    Project Leader
    Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory and Dialogue
    August 2010



A series of police raids on Nelson Mandela’s home in Orlando, Soweto, and a fire in the same house in 1985 meant that many of the records of his early life in rural Thembuland have disappeared, probably forever. This includes a family memoir he took down from his mother. There are photographs of his mother, but none of his father.
    Many of Mandela’s distinctive habits were acquired early. One of the most important, from his traditional background in Thembuland, was listening carefully to his elders and to all who spoke at tribal gatherings, and watching a consensus gradually emerge under the guidance of the king, the chief or the ‘headman’. Habits of discipline, order, self-control and respect for others were demanded by both traditional authority and the educational institutions at which Mandela studied.
    From the age of seven, he attended a one-roomed school in Qunu near his birthplace of Mvezo. Later he schooled at Qokolweni, the Clarkebury Boarding Institute, and the Wesleyan College of Healdtown. He completed his first degree at the University College of Fort Hare, near the small town of Alice. Fort Hare attracted the children of prominent black families throughout southern Africa, and nourished the cohort who inhabited Mandela’s world for many years to come.
     
    Most notable were Kaiser (K D) Matanzima (his nephew, though actually his senior in age) and Oliver Tambo, who became his political comrade, his law partner and his lifelong friend.
    In 1941, Mandela left Thembuland and the Eastern Cape