“No person is born a racist. You become a racist by influences around you. And I had become a racist by the time I was thirteen years old. By that calculation I should not have been Nelson Mandela’s longest-serving assistant. But I did.”
These words by Zelda la Grange sum up her story in her recently published memoir, “Good Morning, Mr. Mandela” and are a tribute to the late President Mandela’s talent for persuading and power of transformation.
The memoir charts the unlikely journey and Damascene conversion of a conservative Afrikaner typist from the idyllic middle-class environs of Pretoria to the office of the first Black President of post-apartheid South Africa and later, as de facto Chief of Staff and spokesperson for the Nelson Mandela Foundation where for some 14 years she ran and organised the affairs of the most adored global political figure in the history of humanity.
But as Grange is quick to point out, her book is neither about him nor is it a work of “great political insights or a thematic dissection of his life”. It is quite simply a peek into the most unlikely partnership anyone could have imagined possible in South Africa only a couple of decades ago.
Despite her close and proximate access, this is not a tell-tale book. On occasions, however, one is let into the inner sanctum of Mandela: we get to know an “unknown” woman visited Mandela while on a state visit to France early in his presidency. She turned out to be Mrs Graça Machel. That at Mandela’s insistence, East Timor’s Xanana Gusmão, was secretly taken in handcuffs to him in the Presidential guest house during a state visit to Indonesia.
And that Mandela’s wardrobe was in part put together by Stefano Ricci of Brioni, the famous high-end Italian fashion brand, in collaboration with his long-time tailor Yusuf Surtee.
Grange, the Afrikaner “beore-meisie” (meaning farm girl) as Mandela occasionally referred to her, was born in 1970 into a white middle-class family of Dutch and French Huguenot descent. Her parents and grandparents were not wealthy by any means. Her mother was brought up in an orphanage in Cape Town after her maternal grandfather died in a motorcycle accident. But the institutional privileges of apartheid, such as they were, trickled down even to average white folk like their family.
Whites lived in the best neighbourhoods and although much of their contact with blacks was limited to nannies, what they thought and believed about blacks were shaped by news reports on bomb atrocities and recycled racial myths. As Grange recalls, white South Africans believed that “all black people were communists and atheists” and they had good reason to fear them.
At the age of 19 Grange did not really know who Mandela was or what his release symbolised. Her father’s reaction to Mandela’s release from prison in February 1990 was “[n]ow we are in trouble … [t]he terrorist has been released”, to which Grange responded: “[w]ho’s that?”
Years later, that same father would volunteer to plant full-grown trees on Mandela’s farm in his village of Qunu to protect the view of his house from the road, for free. The irony was not lost on the Grange family who were quick to point out jokingly to her father that “you see, times have changed ... here you are, the old conservative, planting trees in a black man’s garden.”
In the immediate aftermath of the first multiracial election that brought Mandela into power, Grange, who was then 23, was among those tasked with processing applications of blacks who wanted to join the civil service as part of an effort to make the government more representative.
She applied for the job of a typist in the President’s office but what she did not bargain for was that she would end up “in an office ... closer to the political centre of beliefs [she] still opposed” — the office of the new President’s private secretary.
In the ensuing years as she came to know Mandela and many of the so-called erstwhile “enemies”, her fears began to subside. She immersed herself in learning the untaught history of the nation and as she became more enlightened about the past, gradually began to alter the fundamental beliefs she had grown up with.
The memoir is organised in four parts and begins with a brief autobiographical sketch focusing mainly on the author’s early years as a child growing up in apartheid South Africa. The second part deals with Mandela’s years as President of the new South Africa. In part three, we get a backstage view of Mandela as a globetrotting global statesman and über-fundraiser for good causes including education and HIV/Aids. The last part of the book recounts the final years but is sadly dominated by internecine family and staff conflicts that are both unedifying and regrettable.
While the book is written around Mandela’s itinerary, we get to know more about his “terrifying” secretary who was always in the background but not known much to the world outside South Africa. Her preternatural innocence about the ways of the real world comes across in the early chapters of the book and is rather charming.
When then President Mandela asked her to be part of his entourage to Japan she responded with “[t]hank you Mr President but I don’t have money to go to Japan right now”. President Mandela could not help but burst into laughter. She was doubly shocked to realise that not only did she not have to fork out any money for the trip — which by the way was her first trip outside South Africa — she would also be paid “an extra allowance for travelling abroad”.
We get a glimpse of Mandela at work as a president who saw his main job as healing and uniting his country. He delegated much of the business of running the country to his then deputy and later President Thabo Mbeki. Mandela was a very keen reconciler determined to bring various factions and ethnic groups together and went to great lengths to ensure there was broad, if not equal, representation in everything he did: from the selection of his staff, the schools he visited, to the mix of children invited to his Christmas parties.
His magnanimity and lack of bitterness after his 27-year incarceration shamed many world leaders but it also gave him the right to speak his mind without fear. Asked what he thought after he visited the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem he responded thus: “[t]his is a tragedy that happened to the Jewish nation, but one should never lose sight of the fact that this burden is carried by the German people too.”
Naturally, some of his Israeli hosts were none too pleased with this gesture of reconciliation but he could not be bothered. Jewish South Africans had been prominent in the anti-apartheid movement and many of Mandela’s closest friends and comrades such as Ruth First, Nat Bergman and Joe Slovo were Jewish and his defence team at Rivionia included Joel Joffe, Harry Schwarz and Arthur Chaskalson (whom he later appointed Chief Justice). But, it couldn’t have escaped his Israeli hosts that the man who led the charge against Mandela as state prosecutor during the trials in 1963, was the aggressive Percy Yutar, the first Jewish Attorney General under apartheid.
If Mandela could forgive Yutar, even invite him to lunch as he did, then surely his hosts could not be offended by his comments about sparing a thought for the Germans too.
The memoir is suffused with devotion and loyalty but one sometimes wondered whether Grange was not trying too hard to over-compensate for the evils of apartheid. Comments such as “I couldn’t remember as a child being tucked in my bedroom by my parents, yet here the man we all feared in the late 1980s (when we became aware of his existence) was covering my feet, worried about my well-being” made me cringe at times.
But my biggest disappointment with the book is the absence of any serious discussion about the Afrikaner, and perhaps the broader South African white community, post Mandela. Her father makes fleeting appearances at the beginning, at the 1995 Rubgy World Cup finals when then President Mandela famously wore the Springbok jersey and a couple of times later. Apart from the brief biographical appearance at the start, mum hardly features. Tensions with white and Afrikaner friends are mentioned here and there but there is no real discussion about the views of the Afrikaner people nearly 20 years after Mandela and the black majority assumed power.
The overall impression I came away with about South Africa was that racial divisions were far more seared into the South African psyche than I had imagined. As recently as 2013, even Grange was surprised by a gesture of goodwill shown her by an unknown black man who hugged and comforted as she shivered and cried inconsolably at the loss of Mandela. After everything she had experienced over the past couple of decades she says gestures such as these “touched my inner core when strangers, black people reached out to me in this way”.
Mandela’s departure has clearly left a palpable void in the author’s life and one gets the sense that writing the memoir was a way of coping with her loss and part of her overall adjustment process. One cannot help but feel sorry when she reflects on her future and asks “[m]aybe I will find another job and perhaps I will find a man to spend time with, one who knows and will respect that a piece of my heart has already been taken ... given to an old black man who was once my people’s enemy and is now lying like an ancient King, deep in the soil of South Africa’s golden hill of Qunu”. She is at her lyrical best when she writes about her personal feelings.
“Good Morning, Mr. Mandela” is Grange’s swansong for the man she called “Khulu” (meaning Grandpa in Xhosa) to whom she quite literally devoted much of her adult life. It paints a broader portrait of a great man but at its core is a beautiful story of a harmonious multiracial relationship in modern South Africa that was the quintessence of the man and emblematic of the change he brought about.
Ekow Nelson is a Telecom Industry Executive based in the UAE and the UK and occasionally writes on African and World Affairs.
Good Morning, Mr Mandela (2014), by Grange is published by Allen Lane of the Penguin Group
