Mandela book biography csu

Before we get to the wonderful selection of books you’ve chosen to understand Nelson Mandela and South Africa: you’ve ended up having a professional interest in South Africa as a writer and journalist for more than 20 years.

Can you tell us more about how that happened?

I’ve been a journalist for 30 years now. I’ve mainly been a foreign correspondent.

Mandela book biography csu university

I’ve been based in half a dozen places and I think I’ve actually worked as a journalist in about 50 countries. South Africa is the one that left by far the deepest imprint on me. I was there at an extraordinary time, during the transition from apartheid to democracy.

I arrived in 1989 as a correspondent for The Independent in London, which meant that I caught the last year of full-on, hard apartheid. Then after that there was Mandela’s release and the very painful birth pangs of the new nation, leading to the elections of 1994.

It was a period of immense drama and continual dou