Mandela: The Authorised Biography - Tapa dura

‘A magisterial, detailed and invaluable account of one of this century’s greatest figures ... it is hard to believe that a better biography will ever be written.’ Justin Cartwright, Sunday Telegraph

Nelson Mandela is perhaps the most admired statesman in the world today, his story of opposition to apartheid and subsequent jailing at the hands of the South African all-white regime made familiar through the international success of his 1994 autobiography LONG WALK TO FREEDOM.

Now the eminent writer Anthony Sampson (who has known Mandela since the 1950s) has been given complete access to all his personal papers, to Mandela himself, his friends and political associates, to write the full extraordinary story of Mandela’s life. In addition to covering his years before, during and after his incarceration, he assesses Mandela’s impact as President on South Africa and the world. He also reveals many features of the apartheid system that have hitherto been hidden, and describes the changing attitudes of big business to the ANC and to Mandela himself. The result is a compelling and authoritative biography of one of the greatest men of the 20th century.

The life of Nelson Mandela, from the personal and the global perspective, is one of the epic stories of the twentieth century. It is also one of the most inspiring. Twenty years ago, Mandela was an almost forgotten figure languishing in jail on Robben Island; today, as he leaves office as President of South Africa, he is one of the most widely admired leaders on earth.

By giving Anthony Sampson unprecedented access to 27 years' worth of unpublished correspondence from prison, as well as to other unpublished writings including his original, suppressed, autobiography, Mandela has enabled the author to write the most comprehensive account of his life to date. Sampson, who has known Mandela from the early 1950s, has also conducted hundreds of interviews with colleagues, family and friends as well as prison warders and Afrikaner ex-cabinet ministers, and he is the first person to have examined prison archives in South Africa and diplomatic papers in Great Britain, the United States and South Africa.

As a result, the book sheds new light at every turn on the moral dilemmas and personal choices of both Mandela's private and public life. In the struggle for freedom against the apartheid system, Mandela paid a tragic price, becoming alienated from his wife Winnie and remote from his own children. Prison, which he turned into a kind of university, transformed him from 'raw revolutionary' into a consummate statesman dedicated to reconciliation.

The book provides many new insights into Mandela's story. It shows how British and American diplomats cold-shouldered him before he went to jail; how he foresaw the need for free enterprise in a statement which Communists suppressed; how his colleagues dreaded that he was selling out to the government in his last years in jail; how British right-wingers encouraged the Zulu Chief Buthelezi in his war against the ANC; and how Mandela trusted P.W. Botha while distrusting de Klerk.

Sampson does not conceal Mandela's own failings – his stubbornness, fixed loyalties and princely detachment. But the human story that emerges from this masterly, authoritative biography is a fitting complement to Mandela's celebrated autobiography and will enthral all who read it.