Mandela: The Lost Tapes

Audible

Following his 27-year imprisonment, Nelson Mandela was, in 1994, poised to become the leader of a postApartheid South Africa.

Before he did so, he wanted to write his autobiography outlining his early life, coming of age, education and the years spent in prison on Robben Island.

The resulting book, The Long Walk To Freedom, was an international hit. It wasn’t well known that the work was written with the ghostwriting help of US journalist Richard Stengel.

Stengel travelled to South Africa and recorded Mandela’s thoughts on a series of tapes which, since then, have lain in storage.

Now a new podcast series is exploring the recordings.

Mandela: The Lost Tapes, from Audible, features neverbefore heard audio of his conversations with Nelson Mandela from 1993. Stengel was asked about the tapes being lost for so long – and why we haven’t heard them until now.

“Well, they were never lost. When I made them with him in ’93, technically he owned them,” said Stengel. “I mean, the book is his book. And so all of that material became archival stuff that nobody really paid attention to anymore.

“So I thought, you know what? I’m going to see if the Mandela Foundation, which owns them, will license them to me to make a podcast.”

One focus of the book was how Mandela emerged from prison a radical freedom fighter to become a global statesman.

“I do think those prison years were a kind of crucible that melted away all the impurities in his personality and made him this very mature, calm, self-disciplined 72-year-old who came out when he came out of prison.”