Mandela: His Essential Life [Paperback]

Passionate and engaging. From a man whose tireless anti-apartheid activism supported the long struggle to free his friend and leader, Nelson Mandela.Highly readable and inspirational.His life and times told succinctly and compellingly.Peter Hains excellent Mandela: His Essential Life, does not pretend to be anything more than, as he writes, a short, popular and accessible book that tells Mandela's entire and remarkable story in a nutshell. Actually, he does himself a disservice: it is much more than that, and is a serious analysis of Mandelas place in history, his failings as well as his virtues.It also contains a powerful final chapter on the betrayal of the Mandela legacy. In recent years, Hain, a second-generation anti-apartheid activist, has exposed the corruption of the Zuma presidency, and played no small part in bringing down the PR firm Bell Pottinger. It is a sad sequel to Mandel's life but a story of modern-day South Africa that needs to be told.Borrowing extensively from works such as Anthony Sampsons Mandela (1999) and Nelson Mandelas own autobiography Long Walk to Freedom (CH, Apr'95, 32-4642), Hain, a former anti-apartheid activist, offers a more condensed biography of the freedom fighter turned statesman, and combines it with personal observations of his encounters with the legendary South African. Hain tracks Mandelas rural roots, political awakening, trial and imprisonment, progressive estrangement from his wife, Winnie, and triumph in South Africas first democratic election in 1994. Despite several chronological issues (i.e., the Congress of the People took place in June 1955), Hains narrative of Mandelas long struggle for justice and reconciliation falls in line with other scholarly biographies, even if it does not break new ground. The most original material in Hains book comes in the later chapters, where he relates several encounters with the man known as Madiba. It was not just his towering moral stature, his courage and his capacil³@