To commemorate Madiba’s death nearly a year ago, Zelda la Grange speaks to Diane de Beer about her book Good Morning, Mr Mandela.
Pretoria - Not in her wildest dreams could Zelda la Grange have dreamt up the life she has lived for the past 20 years. “But you make choices,” she says, acknowledging that her past life as Nelson Mandela’s personal assistant wasn’t completely random.
She’s doing a second round of interviews celebrating her book Good Morning, Mr Mandela to commemorate Madiba’s death nearly a year ago.
It’s been a year of highs and lows – and often indescribable loneliness – says the woman who spent 19 years making sure the most revered leader of our time would lead a smooth life.
It has been a busy year, what with writing and promoting her book, she says. But, from May next year, she’s going to study for a Bachelor in Management Leadership (BML) Degree at the University of the Free State’s business school.
Her special life also led to invitations to attend a TED conference in the US next year, as well as a conference in Bangkok.
Although she loves talking about Mandela, she says she is not comfortable in the spotlight. Given the choice she’d spend every day in a pair of jeans and at home with her dogs.
La Grange says she has spoken much and written about Mandela’s choice of her, a white Afrikaans girl, to be by his side, but there’s more to it than that.
“We both had a sense of urgency; a certain amount of obsessive compulsion and perfection in everything we did, but I know he appreciated my sense of humour,” she says.
And Madiba enjoyed that they could share a giggle in what was sometimes a “pressure cooker” environment. If someone had told her that she would be spending all those years under a magnifying glass, her every move scrutinised, she possibly may not have considered the job.
Yet, the rewards have been hers and only now, with the benefit of hindsight, can she truly understand the impact of the greatest man of his time, on her life.
She was thrown in at the deep end and there wasn’t a handbook, she says. And there were few people she could turn to if she didn’t know what to do. She says that in the early days in the president’s office, Madiba must have seen how naive and uninformed she was.
But he did not push her in a particular direction; that was something he influenced but she had to work it out for herself. She says she made many mistakes in those early days, but that was how she learnt and grew.
With the first anniversary of Mandela’s death looming, she feels the loss acutely. Like the rest of the country, she knows it is all part of the grieving process.
The past year, she says she looked to Mandela’s writings to find answers.
“There’s so much out there on the way he thought and what he would have advised,” she says. “All you have to do is some research.”
Mandela had taught her that it was easy to expect others to change but harder to change oneself.
During her years with Mandela, La Grange relied heavily on Professor Jakes Gerwel (who was director-general in the Presidency during Mandela’s term and later chaired the Nelson Mandela Foundation and the Mandela Rhodes Foundation).
“He was the go-to person for both Mandela and me,” she says. She honours him as her mentor and remembers how often she was cross at him for his advice to “wait things out”.
“He would urge me to let things go, but my immaturity got in the way.” But she said as “an obedient Afrikaner child” she had been taught to listen and, often, after time the problem would resolve itself “in its own way”.
“I haven’t had time to mourn either (Mandela or Gerwel).”
She believes that as a nation South Africa must still find its own identity. “Mandela was our moral compass. Now we don’t know who we are.”
As a country she encourages everyone to embrace exactly what we have.
“We have to actively participate and not stand on the sidelines. We can make that choice,” she says.
“Mandela said there is good and bad in every person and each one of us can decide whether good or bad wins
.”
Pretoria News