Author on writing Madiba’s life story
Writing the sequel to Long Walk To Freedom was no easy task, author Mandla Langa admits. He tells more about chronicling the life and times of Madiba
IT’S one of the most daunting tasks he’s ever undertaken – getting into the head of one of the world’s most revered men to complete the work he never got around to finishing. But there was no way Mandla Langa was going to turn it down.
Humbled and exhilarated at being chosen he jumped right in, delving into the life of Nelson Mandela and writing a memoir of the great statesman.
Dare Not Linger: The Presidential Years is the first work of non-fiction the acclaimed author has penned and it took him a while to find his groove, he admits.
“With fiction it all comes out of your head. But with the life of another person, you have to be incredibly careful.”
And when your subject is Madiba, who lived a life of meaning and purpose in the public domain, you have to tread with even more caution and make sure you get the tone and the facts just right.
So much has been written about Mandela that Mandla (67) wasn’t sure he could find out any more about SA’s first democratic president. But he was pleasantly surprised at what he was able to uncover. The result is a book peppered with anecdotes and insights that Mandla hopes will do justice to South Africa’s best-loved son.
He’s thrilled the book is being released far and wide. “It’s every writer’s dream to transcend the borders of one’s country.
“The world needs to remember people like Nelson Mandela,” he adds. “If you look now, every day we’re receiving signs of an absence of leadership.
“We have very few examples of the kind of authoritative leadership Mandela represented.”
DARE NOT LINGER is the sequel to Mandela’s global bestseller, Long Walk to Freedom, and the title is taken directly from the final paragraph of the first book. By the time Madiba died in 2013 at the age of 95, he’d handwritten 10 chapters of his follow-up memoir on loose sheets of paper, leaving Mandla to fill in the gaps.
He was approached by the Nelson Mandela Foundation and publisher Pan Macmillan to complete the book, which tackles Madiba’s five years as president and gives his view of the 1994 elections.
Writing the book took more than a year and Mandla relied on the material that had been started by Mandela and those who worked around him, including ANC national executive committee (NEC) member Joel Netshitenzhe and former political prisoner Tony Trew.
“I had to breathe life into the material that had been put together by Tony and Joel but I also looked into the archives, including the minutes of NEC meetings, examined Mandela’s own scribblings and transcribed broadcast material,” he says. “I also spoke to various people.”
These included Mandela’s widow, Graça Machel, as well as a number of people who know a lot about the history of the country and the ANC.
Graça was very insightful, he says. “She was generous with her time. She explained why Mandela insisted on being civil to people like FW de Klerk, why he continued making overtures to people like Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, why he would embrace or bring into the fold personalities such as [apartheid-era military commanders] Constand Viljoen and Georg Meiring.”
They represented a sector of the public “and if you’re rude to them, you’re by extension being rude to others”, he would tell her.
Graça also gave Mandla a better understanding of Madiba’s sense of discipline and duty. “He wanted to make his own bed and cook for himself. He woke up early in the morning and led a very disciplined, selfless life,” Mandla says.
The writer also managed to find anecdotal material for his book by spending time with Madiba’s bodyguards.
“They told me he was a nightmare to secure because you’d be going with him on the motorway and he’d see something and say, ‘Stop!’ because he wanted to greet someone.
“Even when he was coming out of Victor Verster Prison (now the Drakenstein Correctional Centre), he stopped the car because a woman had her kids by the hand and Mandela said, ‘Can you pass this child to me?’ And he took the kid and bounced them on his lap!”
Trying to put together the book came with its fair share of challenges, he says, including making sure he didn’t duplicate information people already knew.
“I also tried to lay to rest some of the misconceptions – for instance, that Mandela was fanatical about reconciliation, that he was a reconciler for reconciliation’s sake.
“But some people didn’t understand that the stakes were very high at that time [pre-1994]. We were practically in the middle of a civil war so it was his duty as much as possible to make sure that we veered away from that.”
MANDLA, who was involved in the struggle and went into exile in 1976, was fortunate enough to have interacted with Mandela on several occasions, starting in 1990 when the writer worked at the ANC’s offices in London.
“We were involved in the setting up of the [Nelson Mandela: An International Tribute for a Free South Africa] concert at Wembley Stadium so when Madiba came to London, we went to fetch him.
“He came to the concert and charmed the whole world.”
They met again a short while later. Mandela was friendly with Mandla’s brother, Pius Langa, who would go on to become chief justice, as both he and Madiba were lawyers.
He had unforgettable meetings with a special man, says Mandla, who lives in Joburg with his wife, June Josephs, and their two daughters.
He hoped to be an artist, Mandla says, and tells us how he used to draw cartoons and tell stories through a storyboard. This evolved into writing poetry.
“I think I was 19 when my first poem was published,” Mandla recalls. “There was something really liberating about seeing my name in print.”
His short story, The Dead Men Who Lost Their Bones, was published in Drum in 1980 and won the Africa Wide short story competition.
“I was in Lesotho then, in exile, and I remember receiving a princely sum of R250 – and in those years, you were a rich man with R250,” he says, laughing.
He gained more confidence the more he wrote. His most recent novel, The Texture of Shadows, is one of the few by a black writer to have been translated into a Chinese language.
With the ink barely dry on Dare to Linger, Mandla is already thinking about his next project, which will look into the lives of military veterans.
“People who were full of hope and enthusiasm – some of them are now destitute and begging,” he says.
As for another book on Mandela, he isn’t ruling it out – the former president’s story is so rich is can’t be contained. “There’s no telling – you could still have a book about his retirement years. That could be very interesting.”
‘The world needs to remember people like Nelson Mandela’