Book brings Mandela's quotes to life
12 October 2010
Nelson Mandela's new book,
Conversations with Myself, draws from the great
man's vast personal archive to offer an unprecedented insight into his remarkable life,
giving readers access to the private man behind the public figure.
"Nelson Mandela is one of the most inspiring and iconic figures of our age," the Nelson
Mandela Foundation said in a statement ahead of Tuesday's worldwide release of the
book.
"Now, after a lifetime of taking pen to paper to record thoughts and events, hardships
and victories, he has opened his personal archive ... from letters written in the
darkest hours of Mandela's 27 years of imprisonment to the draft of an unfinished
sequel to
Long Walk to Freedom."
Mandela's personal archive spans 80 years, comprises many thousands of pages and
includes diaries, letters, personal notes and audio recordings.
"Here he is making notes and even doodling during meetings, or recording
troubled
dreams on the desk calendar of his cell on Robben Island; writing journals while on
the run during the anti-apartheid struggles in the early 1960s, or conversing with
friends in almost 70 hours of recorded conversations," the foundation says.
"An intimate journey from the first stirrings of his political conscience to his
galvanizing role on the world stage,
Conversations With Myself is a rare
chance to spend time with Nelson Mandela the man, in his own voice: direct, clear,
private."
Introduced with a foreword by US President Barack Obama,
Conversations with
Myself was published worldwide in 22 editions and 20 languages on 12 October
2010.
Compiled by the Mandela Foundation's Centre of Memory and Dialogue, the book
allows for the first time unhindered insight into the human side of the icon.
"In these pages he is neither an icon nor a saint," the foundation says. "Here he is like
you and me."
SAinfo
reporter
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