Post date: Oct 04, 2010 8:59:4 PM
A new book collecting decade's worth of private papers by anti-apartheid hero and Nobel Prize Laureate Nelson Mandela goes on sale worldwide in 22 editions and 20 languages.
JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA (OCTOBER 12, 2010) REUTERS- A new book of former president Nelson Mandela's private writings went on sale world wide on Tuesday (October 12).
South Africans gathered at a book shop in Johannesburg to purchase a copy of a work that has been described as an intimate and personal book that is "Madiba's voice himself".
Compiled by the Nelson Mandela Foundation's Centre of Memory and Dialogue, "Conversations with Myself" gives readers access to the private man behind the public icon, drawing from letters written during his imprisonment to a draft of an unfinished sequel to his autobiography "Long Walk to Freedom".
Mandela's anguish and frustration is clear in a letter to his former wife Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, who was banished to a remote town and harassed by apartheid security police. He also writes about not being able to attend the funerals of his mother and that of his son, who died in a car accident in 1969.
With a foreword by U.S. President Barack Obama, "Conversations with Myself" is an intimate journey from the first stirrings of Mandela's political consciousness to his galvanising role on the world stage. Readers have a rare chance to spend time with Nelson Mandela in his own voice: direct, clear and private.
"So interesting to learn about his life and what he has to offer us,. I mean the Sunday Times this Sunday 'said I am not a saint', you know, just a phenomenal man, a human being that has gone through so much and has so much to offer," said Nina Gabriels, one of the people who turned up to buy the book.
The foundation spokesperson Sello Hatang said the book opens Mandela's thoughts to the world.
"Unlike other projects that we have done before, like other publications that we have done before this one is with little if not with so much little intervention from ourselves as editors, co-editor. That is Madiba's voice himself speaking for himself. So you get to meet the man from the public icon that's there, you then get to meet the person behind the icon that we all know and have come to admire," said Hatang.
Obama describes the memoirs as a story of a man willing to risk his life for what he believed in.
Mandela's release from jail after 27 years of imprisonment on February 11, 1990, set in motion the country's transformation to democracy, which culminated in the historic all-race elections in 1994 and his inauguration as the country's first black leader.