Nobel Literature laureates Nadine Gordimer and JM Coetzee have both written articles in honour of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Nelson Mandela, who passed away last night.
Writing in The New Yorker, Gordimer notes that, “His was a way of living for the freedom of others”. She relates how she was called to see him after he left Robben Island and recalls going with Mandela to Sweden when he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993:
To have lived one’s life at the same time, and in the same natal country, as Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela was a guidance and a privilege we South Africans shared. I also knew the privilege of becoming one of his friends. I met him in 1964, during the Rivonia Trial, when he was being tried for acts of sabotage against the government, and I was present in court when he was sentenced to life imprisonment.
In 1979, I wrote a novel, “Burger’s Daughter,” on the theme of the family life of revolutionaries’ children, a life ruled by their parents’ political faith and the daily threat of imprisonment. I don’t know how the book, which was banned in South Africa when it was published, was smuggled to Mandela in Robben Island Prison. But he, the most exigent reader I could have hoped for, wrote me a letter of deep, understanding acceptance about the book.
“Mandela held a turbulent country together during the dangerous years 1990-94, exercising his great personal charm to persuade whites that they had a place in the new democratic republic while step by step emasculating the separatist white right wing,” writes JM Coetzee in The Sydney Morning Herald.
“He was, and by the time of his death was universally held to be, a great man; he may well be the last of the great men, as the concept of greatness retires into the historical shadows.”
Nelson Mandela has died after a long life – long yet lamentably truncated in that he spent 27 of the best years of his manhood incarcerated at the pleasure of the state.
Incarcerated, he was hardly powerless. During the final years of that long sentence he in effect exercised a power of veto over the foreign policy of his country, exerting more and more of a strangehold over his jailers.
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- No Time Like the Present by Nadine Gordimer
EAN: 9781770102590
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- The Childhood of Jesus by JM Coetzee
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EAN: 9781846557385
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