In the newly published sequel to his internationally acclaimed autobiography Long March to Freedom, Nelson Mandela apologises for the false image of being a saint that he "unwittingly projected" while in prison. Entitled Conversations with Myself, Mandela writes in the sequel: "I never was one, even on the basis of an earthly definition of a sinner who keeps on trying."
His apology is unnecessary since, as a prisoner, he had no control over the projection of him as the political equivalent of a saint by the African National Congress leaders in exile. Ditto the world wide Anti-Apartheid Movement that did everything in its power to project him as a man of unblemished integrity and a prisoner of conscience. It is common knowledge that Mandela's reputation grew with the passage of every year that he spent in prisoner and eventually became overlaid with myth.
Welcome as Mandela's admission that he is not a saint may be, it has come a bit late in the day. His beatification has been challenged over the years by both of his ex-wives and by David James Smith, author of a biography of Mandela as a young man entitled Young Mandela.
In an interview published in early 1990 shortly after Mandela was released from prison, Evelyn Mase, his first wife, describes Mandela as a dandy and adulterer and expresses astonishment at the excitement or "fuss' engendered by his release from prison.
More recently, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, his second wife and herself a stalwart of the struggle against apartheid, describes the name Mandela as an albatross around the necks of her grandchildren in the published reflection on Africa by V S Naipaul, a Nobel laureate for literature. In his account of an interview with Madikizela Mandela in her Soweto home, he quotes her as accusing Mandela of betraying the revolution by emerging from prison as a man of peace who sacrificed his poor black constituents in order to conclude a deal with their oppressors.
She forgets, of course, that when Mandela was sentenced to life imprisonment in the Rivonia trial of 1963-64, the previous white controlled regime was determined to crush the ANC and to press ahead with its plans to offer black people quasi-self-governing states in their own areas.