The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

By 1973, when a new edition of No Easy Walk was published to mark Mandela’s tenth year
of incarceration, the unseen hero was becoming an enigma, more than ever before bearing
the mantle of leadership. In a new foreword to the book by Ruth First, Mandela was
eulogised as the symbol of a people in chains, his aura of moral authority sanctified by the
Island experience:
Mandela, it is whispered through prison walls, is as magnetic a
political prisoner as he was once mass orator and underground
political commander and he continues to radiate the confidence,
the strength and the moral authority that has sustained the
African freedom struggle in its most difficult days, and that will,
in time, bring the apartheid system toppling down. 256
The biographical efforts of Benson and First seem to have been the initial steps in a
genealogy of meanings constructed around Nelson Mandela. This genealogy saw
biographies produced under different circumstances and for particular political purposes.
Mandela’s selfhood was narrated into particular discursive locations and networks of
operation. Each stage saw the intervention of supporters and promoters as narrators,
representers and image producers. Far from Mandela’s life being simply a rather
competitive space over time, various producers of Nelson Mandela’s biography have had
very close links with each other.
I have noted Mary Benson’s close connection with Anthony Sampson. Benson described
her first encounter with the late Ruth First at a South African Indian Congress conference:
the “only ... other European ‐ dark‐haired, striking woman, clearly Jewish and a
journalist”. Ruth First, Treason Trialist in the late 1950s, would later become Benson’s
“valued friend”. Benson also got to know Fatima Meer (and Ismail Meer) during a
Christmas recess in the Treason Trial, with whom she experienced “Indian hospitality”.
Finally, while Jürgen Schadeberg has narrated Mandela’s life through photographs, he has
also photographed Benson herself. 257 Of course, I am not suggesting a grand ‘conspiracy
theory’ of Mandela’s biography. However, it is necessary to draw attention to the
256 Nelson Mandela, No Easy Walk To Freedom, Forward.
257 See Mary Benson, A Far Cry, pp 84, 116, front cover photograph.
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