Madiba’s ‘long walk’ to continue

Nelson Mandela

Nelson Mandela

Published Dec 6, 2014

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Johannesburg - Former ANC heavyweight Joel Netshitenzhe and the Nelson Mandela Foundation are working on the sequel to Nelson Mandela’s best-selling autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom.

Verne Harris, Mandela’s archivist, told the Saturday Star this week that Mandela had written 10 chapters from 1998, but had “run out of steam” four years later.

The handwritten drafts are kept with his other personal papers in the Mandela archives at the Nelson Mandela Foundation.

In one neat passage, he details his worries about being idolised by so many around the globe.

“One issue that deeply worried me in prison was the false image I unwittingly projected to the outside world of being regarded as a saint. I never was one even on the basis of an earthly definition of a saint as a sinner who keeps on trying.”

The contents of the chapters are “powerful”, says Harris, who runs the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory and Dialogue.

“These are the drafts to chapters he wrote and rewrote. But he never finished it. He ran out of steam. We are working on it now, with Netshitenzhe.”

People always asked him what Mandela thought of President Jacob Zuma, Harris said.

Then he asked: “Do you want to know who worked on it?”

Harris pulled out a sheet of paper in which Mandela decreed who was to be given the 10 chapters on a “strictly confidential basis”.

They were Zuma, Deputy President Cyril Rampahosa, John Samuels, the foundation’s former chief executive, Mac Maharaj and Netshitenzhe.

“He would send it out for their comments.

“Then he works it, reworks it. Then it becomes a collective account.” - Saturday Star

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