Remembering Mandela

 

“When I first met him in Johannesburg, when he was in charge of the ‘defiance campaign’ of 1952, he already had a formidable presence”, writes Anthony Sampson in his review of Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom (TLS, December 30, 1994).

Sampson, a British journalist who lived in South Africa for four years in the 1950s and attended the Rivonia trial, published his own biography of Mandela, which Randolph Vigne reviewed together with F. W. de Klerk’s autobiography in the TLS of July 9, 1999: “It was the Robben Island period which formed Mandela the liberator . . . ”.

We remember the extraordinary life of Nelson Mandela.