Mandela ‘Long Walk’ sequel release

THE sequel to Nelson Mandela’s celebrated autobiography Long Walk to Freedom will be published today after his unfinished, hand-written draft was completed by a South African novelist.

Titled Dare Not Linger, the book tells of Mandela’s five years as president after the end of apartheid and the first multi-race elections in South Africa in 1994.

Long Walk to Freedom, released shortly after the election, was a global phenomenon, selling more than 14 million copies, and was turned into a film starring Idris Elba.

Mandela wrote 10 chapters of his followup memoir on loose paper and in files between 1998 and 2002, when he stopped working on it due to his age and hectic schedule.

Mandla Langa completed the book using fresh interviews and research, as well as Mandela’s own notes from when he was president.

The Nelson Mandela Foundation, which hosted the book’s launch on Tuesday in Johannesburg, described the project as a 50-50 collaboration between Mandela and Langa.

The book’s title is taken from the final sentence of Mandela’s first autobiography, when he wrote that “with freedom comes responsibilities, and I dare not linger, for my long walk is not ended”.

Mandela’s widow Graca Machel wrote in a prologue to the new book that he had struggled to complete it because of the “demands the world placed on him, distractions of many kinds and his advancing years”.

“Through the last years of his life he talked about it often – worried about work started but not finished,” she said. Mandela served one term as South Africa’s president before stepping down in 1999. He retired from public life in 2004 and died in 2013 aged 95.

Best known as a novelist and poet, Langa, 67, said at the launch he had taken on the task with a sense of gratitude and humility and, at the same time, trepidation.

He hoped the book would “help us to remember ourselves as South Africans when we held the moral high ground”.

The years covered by the volume include the Truth and Reconciliation Commission into apartheid crimes, Mandela’s globe-trotting diplomacy, his divorce from Winnie Mandela in 1996 and marriage to Machel in 1998.

Publisher Pan Macmillan described it as “a vivid and inspirational account of Mandela’s presidency, a country in flux and the creation of a new democracy”. –