Mandela opens archives for new memoir
Last Updated: Wednesday, October 14, 2009 | 3:21 PM ET
CBC News
Former South African president Nelson Mandela is shown April 19 during an election rally. A new memoir will include excerpts from his notes, journals and other writings. (Associated Press)Nelson Mandela plans to open his personal archives to create a new memoir that will reveal how he preserved his values during the fight against apartheid in South Africa.
British, European and international publishing deals for the memoir by the former South African president were announced Wednesday at the Frankfurt Book Fair.
The new work will be more personal than Mandela's 1995 autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, said Verne Harris, director of the Nelson Mandela Foundation in Johannesburg.
It will show Mandela "not as a saint or an icon, but as a person," he added.
"We're wanting to share with the world the Nelson Mandela they don't often see. That's him on his own, reflecting."
The foundation holds an archive of diaries, notebooks and calendar jottings that include Mandela's speeches and musings during his time as an activist, his time in prison on Robben Island and his time in office.
Rights for sale
It sold rights to the archive, to be gathered in a book called Conversations With Myself, at the book fair for an undisclosed sum.
"He's written every day of his life, and what he wants to do is to make that available," said Jon Butler, who oversees nonfiction publishing at Pan Macmillan, which has negotiated British and Commonwealth rights for the book.
The Nobel Prize-winning leader has been remarkable for his efforts to unite his country in the wake of apartheid. But excerpts from the archive show he was candid in admitting where he made errors, including his suggestion to reduce the voting age to 14.
Among the most personal material are letters he wrote while a prisoner in Robben Island.
"And it's very moving just to even see his handwriting, let alone the content. And when you see the letters to his wife, letters to his children, many which never got through, never got sent," said Jonny Geller of the Curtis Brown Agency, which worked with the foundation to sell the archive.
"But he wrote them anyway. They were almost conversations with himself, and that was extremely moving."
The royalties are to be divided between Mandela and the foundation.
Mandela, 91, has allowed this archive to be used by scholarly researchers and in the creation of a comic book story about his life. He has written a two-volume autobiography and there are also books that collect his speeches and about his impact on global politics.
