KATHRYN HUGHES SOUTHAFRICA
Fighting for Mandela Priscilla Jana Metro€32.50 ★★★★ ★
Priscilla Jana is no shrinking violet. A leading lawyer during South Africa’s most bitter years, at one point Jana had every political prisoner on Robben Island on her books, including Nelson Mandela.
When democracy arrived in 1992, she was made ambassador first to the Netherlands and then to Ireland. Now she has written a fascinating memoir of those times and the result is revealing and evasive by turns.
Jana was born into what is known throughout South Africa as The Struggle in 1943, she was the daughter of radical parents whose families had immigrated from India.
Little Priscilla was clearly a chip off the old block. As a tenyear-old she is sent home from school for pointing out how insultingly Indians are portrayed in her history textbook. Later, she is arrested for staging Shakespeare with a white Romeo and black Juliet. And yet, of course, this anger doesn’t come from nowhere. Under the rules of apartheid, as an Indian she is not allowed to use white beaches, toilets or shops. She has to watch helplessly when her family home is seized by the government and bulldozed because it happens to be in an area reserved for people of European descent.
So becoming a lawyer seemed less like a vocation and more like a destiny. The next few years are a blur of court cases, trips to Robben Island, and working around the clock to try to stop innocent people getting locked up and worse. At one point she is even subject to a five-year banning order, virtual house arrest during which she is not allowed to consort with more than one person at a time. It is the authorities’ way of making it impossible for her to work effectively for her clients.
By far the most interesting part of this memoir, though, is the insider’s view it offers of Nelson Mandela. Jana clearly has a huge crush on him. She admires his kindness, his dignity and, above all, his loyalty to his wife Winnie, whose erratic behaviour and acts of borderline terrorism become increasingly hard to ignore.
And yet you get the sense that Jana may actually feel betrayed by her star client. For once he becomes President of the new South Africa in 1992, Mandela appears to go soft. Jana explains that, naively, he really thought that some of the nastiest people of the old regime would step forward voluntarily to testify to the Truth and Reconciliation Committee. When they didn’t, he simply allowed them to walk away scot-free. Jana is too loyal to her old boss to criticise him overtly but, reading between the lines of this fascinating book, I sensed that she feels that Mandela prioritised reconciliation over truth, and that the bitter consequences are still being played out in South Africa today.