The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

as autobiography, in what was presented as Mandela’s own words. In important ways the
text was Mandela’s. However, the scale of intervention entailed in interviewing,
overwriting, rewriting, editing, adding, abridging and reordering suggests that in crucial
ways, the production of Mandela in Long Walk was as much biography as autobiography,
the two operating together. Nevertheless, it is the autobiogaphical ‘I’ that gave Long Walk,
the epic life story of struggle, sacrifice, resilience, survival and victory, its authoritative
and sacrosanct quality and status of truth. 197 It also served to produce Mandela in perhaps
the most personal way, enabling for the reader not only a first‐hand encounter with “one
of the great moral and political leaders of our time”, 198 but also an experience of emotional
closeness and direct communication with the pater familias.
Moreover the text itself, once published acquired its own biography. This happened in
relation to who read it, where it was circulated and the meanings that were attached to it
as a cultural product and icon by layers of South Africans and outsiders seeking to
understand South Africa and its leader. 199 The transformation of Long Walk into further
forms, from hard back to soft cover, abridged and illustrated and its entry, in these
changed forms, into worlds of reading and imagination different from the original were
part of the biography of the book. The auto/biographical text, now with its own
biography, had taken on a life of its own, as icon, cultural object and national symbol.
Encounters in the act of reading with a narration of the South African past told through
Mandela’s life resulted in new readers being incorporated into the nation. This
incorporative nationalism drew on different readership markets of different versions.
Even outsiders, readers from other countries, were able to participate, and through
reading, they could simulate the fantasy of becoming members of Mandela’s nation.
197 A similar case of auto/biography was the ‘autobiography’ of Sam Nujoma, Where Others Wavered: The
Autobiography of Sam Nujoma (London: PANAF, 2001), which was prepared by long‐time sympathiser
with Namibian nationalism and SWAPO publicist, Randolph Vigne.
198 Long Walk To Freedom, Dust Cover.
199 In a poll of British readers run by Channel 4 TV and a bookstore chain, Long Walk To Freedom made it
(at 90th) into the top 100 of the UK’s “best books of the [twentieth] century”. See Sunday Times, 16
February 1997.
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