Seven years since his death (2013), Nelson Mandela still occupies an extraordinary place in the global imagination. Internationally, Mandela’s renown seems intact and invulnerable. In South Africa, however, his legacy and his place in the country’s history have become matters of contention and dispute, especially amongst younger black South Africans. The essays in this book analyse aspects of Mandela’s life in the context of South Africa’s national history, and make an important contribution to the historiography of the anti-apartheid political struggle. They reassess: the political context of Mandela’s youth; his changing political beliefs and connections with the Left; his role in the African National Congress and the turn to armed struggle; his marriage to Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and their political relationship. By providing new context, they explore Mandela as an actor in broader social processes such as the rise of the ANC and the making of South Africa’s post-apartheid constitution.
The detailed essays are linked in a substantial introduction by Colin Bundy and current debates are addressed in a concluding essay by Elleke Boehmer. This book provides a scholarly counterweight both to uncritical celebration of Mandela and also to a simplistic attribution of post-apartheid shortcomings to the person of Mandela.
This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Southern African Studies.
1. The Challenge of Rethinking Mandela
Colin Bundy
2. The Headman, the Regent and the 'Long Walk to Freedom'
Philip Bonner
3. Mandela: The Untold Heritage
Xolela Mangcu
4. Mandela and the Left
Tom Lodge
5. The M-Plan: Mandela’s Struggle to Reorient the African National Congress
Paul Landau
6. Mandela’s Army: Urban Revolt in South Africa, 1960–1964
Thula Simpson
7. News from Robben Island: Journalists’ Visits to Nelson Mandela during his Imprisonment
Martha Evans
8. The Impossible Contract: The Political and Private Marriage of Nelson and
Winnie Mandela
Shireen Hassim
9. Mandela, Human Rights and the Making of South Africa’s Transformative Constitution
Timothy Gibbs
10. Mandela and Beyond: Thinking New Possibility in the 21st Century
Elleke Boehmer
Biography
Colin Bundy has retired after a career as university academic and administrator. An historian, he is author of Nelson Mandela, a Jacana pocket biography.
William Beinart is Emeritus Professor, St Antony’s College, University of Oxford, author of Twentieth-Century South Africa (OUP, 2001) and Rights to Land (with Peter Delius and Michelle Hay, Jacana, 2017). With Ed Teversham he wrote an A-level text on South Africa, 1948–94 (Pearson, 2015).
