Volume 56, Number 2 · February 12, 2009
Will He Rule South Africa?
By Joshua Hammer
In November, I paid a visit to the Nelson Mandela Foundation in Johannesburg, where ninety-year-old Madiba—as Mandela is affectionately known in South Africa—was making a rare public appearance. The gathering brought together leading figures from the African National Congress, the ruling party in South Africa, including the surviving defendants of the 1963–1964 Rivonia treason trial, at which Mandela and seven other ANC leaders were sentenced to life in prison. Also attending was George Bizos, the anti-apartheid activist and attorney who defended Mandela in the trial, and Nicky Oppenheimer, son of the late chairman of the Anglo-American Corporation, who had chosen the year of Madiba's ninetieth birthday to donate to the state the trial documents his father had acquired from the state prosecutor two decades earlier. (The occasion also marked the handover to the foundation of the interview tapes that Mandela had made with Richard Stengel, his ghostwriter on Long Walk to Freedom.)
Feature, 4427 words
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