There are four principal areas that biographers of Nelson Mandela have tended to neglect, all crucial for an assessment of this major, though flawed, political leader.

Relationship with the SACP

The first is the exact nature of his relationship with the South African Communist Party. Understandably, a wide range of organisations - the SACP itself, the African National Congress, the Anti-Apartheid Movement and a very broad spectrum of left-liberal opinion in Britain, extending to the Labour Party, the Liberal Party and the more conciliatory wing of the Conservative Party, with nearly the whole of the media thrown in to boot - fought shy of the issue.

Mandela's most celebrated biographer, Anthony Sampson, who had known him in the Fifties while editor of Drum magazine in Johannesburg, gives some of the materials essential for forming a judgement but does not investigate the matter with the care with which a top-rate British biographer would explore, say, a protagonist's closet homosexuality. Important potential first-hand witnesses on the subject of Mandela's relation with the SACP appear not to have been interviewed, even on conditions of anonymity.

The 62-page text in Mandela's handwriting on ‘How to be a good Communist', discovered by the police in July 1963 in their raid on the secret headquarters of the ANC/SACP military wing, Umkhonto weSizwe, at Lilliesleaf Farm in the Johannesburg suburb of Rivonia, deserves a far more thorough textual analysis than provided by Sampson. My own judgement, as a then member of the SACP and editor of the underground journal of Umkhonto during the Rivonia trial - that in all likelihood Mandela  had been a very senior member of the Party, though not for long - was shared by at least one of his fellow-accused.

I think he was a member of the SACP in a period between the massacre at Sharpeville in March 1960 and his return from a secret trip to Britain and several African countries in 1962, in which he discovered the extent of hostility among leaders of newly-independent African states to too close a relationship of the ANC with the Soviet Union, the great power always standing behind the SACP; and to its close relationship with certain whites and ‘Indians.' Umkhonto had been formed in 1961 by senior leaders of the SACP (many of them white, or of ‘Indian' background) and by leaders of the then banned ANC, including Mandela, then in hiding in South Africa. It would be surprising if documents were not eventually to prove his Party membership at this time.

My suspicion is that Mandela and colleagues in the underground leadership of the SACP then agreed that he distance himself. In any case, there was never any serious problem at this or at any later stage in the working relationship between the two organisations, each of which needed and respected the other in the conditions of underground violent resistance to a powerful and ruthless state. Nearly all the men convicted with Mandela in the Rivonia trial, including two of his closest fellow leaders of the ANC at this period, Walter Sisulu and Govan Mbeki, father of Thabo Mbeki, were in any case open or secret members of the SACP.

Statesman of national opposition

The second area of neglect concerns Mandela's outstanding role as a statesman of the national opposition, rather than as a party-political leader, during his more than 20 years of imprisonment on Robben Island. This extended to his winning the respect - as a prison statesman - even of entrenched political adversaries in the Pan Africanist Congress within the prison. His stature and wisdom then later formed the bridge to the ANC of many young activists from the Black Consciousness Movement convicted after the Soweto school students' revolt of June 1976, who gained a measure of him at first-hand in prison.

His leadership role in prison required that he stand up on occasion against a more brutal, Stalinist, retributive and Party-political attitude towards non-ANC oppositional currents, on the part of SACP stalwarts such as Govan Mbeki and Harry Gwala; which he did. This was crucial later in prison to his seizing the initiative when the opportunity presented itself for secret negotiations with the state, which required again that he stand up against the last-ditch, scorched-earth outlook of Govan Mbeki and Gwala; which, again, he did.

He later played a further crucial mediating role in ending the conflict with Inkatha in KwaZulu-Natal, as shown in the memoirs of the former Umkhonto soldier and subsequent warlord of Inkatha and Caprivi hit-squads, Daluxolo Luthuli. Mandela had prepared for this work of statesmanship over many years because, as Anthony Sampson writes in his biography, Mandela in jail ‘had been careful to keep on good terms' with the Inkatha leader, Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi.

Openness to truth

The third area concerns Mandela's unique role at the head of the ANC, after his release in February 1990, in acknowledging the truth of reports of human rights abuses committed by the ANC against members of its own organisation in exile. He began to do this within three months of his release.

The deputy chairman of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Dr Alex Boraine, recorded in his book A Country Unmasked (OUP, 2000) that time and again opposition from the exile leadership of the ANC to further disclosure of its own abuses was overcome with the support of Mandela's crucial intervention.

In this respect, his role within his own organisation bears some parallel to that of Gorbachev within the Soviet Union. Even earlier still, within only a few weeks of his release from prison, he defended the right of the then Weekly Mail to have published details of murderous abuses in exile by the ANC's sister party in Namibia, Swapo - then newly in government - when young ANC activists in his entourage bitterly accused the Weekly Mail journalist, Eddie Koch, of betrayal: a very dangerous charge, at that time.

This role, as independent moral witness, had begun earlier while still in prison with his demand that his then wife Winnie Mandela disband the infamous Mandela United Football Club, following its rampage of murder and mayhem in Soweto. It continued later with Mandela going completely contrary to the government of his successor as state president, Thabo Mbeki, in acknowledging a relationship between HIV and AIDS in the pandemic that has devastated the black population in southern Africa.

A certain decline

The fourth area marks a certain decline. Mandela's role as a global icon - prepared for him initially by the SACP, which organised the campaign of support for the Rivonia accused under his sole name, with its slogan ‘Free Mandela!' - took its toll on his judgement in his later years. Whether in lending his name to the international marketing of prints of landscape views from Robben Island purportedly created and signed by himself - and even of his own handprints! - or in his relation of financial dependence on characters such as the South African casino king, Sol Kerzner, Mandela's judgement in this period was compromised by his fetish-status as a celebrity.

A very extensive pursuit of money either by Mandela himself, or on his behalf, appeared to sanction a practice of corruption in government and in public affairs, and tended to invalidate the heroism and dignity of the major achievement of his life. It is very noticeable that nothing of this kind could ever be said of Mandela's senior, guide and comrade, Walter Sisulu.

Yet even this judgement must be qualified. 

In summing up the very best values from its history, South Africa was perhaps more fortunate than it deserved in finding such a leader.

This is a slightly adapted version of an article that first appeared on ever-fasternews.com (25 June 2007)

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