There are four principal areas that biographers of Nelson Mandela have tended to neglect, all crucial for an assessment of this major, though flawed, political leader.
Relationship with the SACP
The first is the exact nature of his relationship with the South African Communist Party. Understandably, a wide range of organisations - the SACP itself, the African National Congress, the Anti-Apartheid Movement and a very broad spectrum of left-liberal opinion in Britain, extending to the Labour Party, the Liberal Party and the more conciliatory wing of the Conservative Party, with nearly the whole of the media thrown in to boot - fought shy of the issue.
Mandela's most celebrated biographer, Anthony Sampson, who had known him in the Fifties while editor of Drum magazine in Johannesburg, gives some of the materials essential for forming a judgement but does not investigate the matter with the care with which a top-rate British biographer would explore, say, a protagonist's closet homosexuality. Important potential first-hand witnesses on the subject of Mandela's relation with the SACP appear not to have been interviewed, even on conditions of anonymity.
The 62-page text in Mandela's handwriting on ‘How to be a good Communist', discovered by the police in July 1963 in their raid on the secret headquarters of the ANC/SACP military wing, Umkhonto weSizwe, at Lilliesleaf Farm in the Johannesburg suburb of Rivonia, deserves a far more thorough textual analysis than provided by Sampson. My own judgement, as a then member of the SACP and editor of the underground journal of Umkhonto during the Rivonia trial - that in all likelihood Mandela had been a very senior member of the Party, though not for long - was shared by at least one of his fellow-accused.
I think he was a member of the SACP in a period between the massacre at Sharpeville in March 1960 and his return from a secret trip to Britain and several African countries in 1962, in which he discovered the extent of hostility among leaders of newly-independent African states to too close a relationship of the ANC with the Soviet Union, the great power always standing behind the SACP; and to its close relationship with certain whites and ‘Indians.' Umkhonto had been formed in 1961 by senior leaders of the SACP (many of them white, or of ‘Indian' background) and by leaders of the then banned ANC, including Mandela, then in hiding in South Africa. It would be surprising if documents were not eventually to prove his Party membership at this time.