Volume 42, Number 2 · February 2, 1995
The Liberator
By William Finnegan
Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela
Little, Brown, 558 pp., $24.95
This may seem a strange time for the autobiography of Nelson Mandela to appear. He has only recently been elected president of South Africa; presumably, his days will continue to be packed with newsworthy if not historic events for the next few years at least. Mandela's life, however, has already been so full, so improbably long and mythologically complete, that his current employment can almost be read as a postscript. Certainly Long Walk to Freedom does not give the impression of being a premature work. It is, in fact, timely in that some of its main themes—the complex alliance between South African Communists and African nationalists, the generational conflicts within the democracy movement, the tension between rural traditionalists and Westernized city folk—prefigure major political issues in the new South Africa. More than that, the book answers, not always intentionally, some fundamental questions about the extraordinary Mosaic figure who has become South Africa's first democratically chosen leader.
Review, 4842 words
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