• DOI:10.1080/17532520701786202
• Corpus ID: 218645921

(Mis)Understanding Nelson Mandela

@article{Suttner12007MisUnderstandingNM,
  title={(Mis)Understanding Nelson Mandela},
  author={Raymond Suttner1},
  journal={African Historical Review},
  year={2007},
  volume={39},
  pages={107 - 130}
}

• Raymond Suttner1
• Published 1 December 2007
• History
• African Historical Review

Since Nelson Mandela is a contemporary giant of international and South African history, he has attracted many biographers, most of whom have dwelt on his heroic and symbolic qualities.2 Some of the biographies aim to sustain or augment this vision with accounts of his early life and lineage, notably Fatima Meer’s early work. Tom Lodge’s recent book and the earlier publications of Martin Meredith and Anthony Sampson aim at explaining rather than purely narrating the meaning of Mandela’s life. In the case of Lodge, he sees the development of Mandela’s life as having been ‘managed’ in a way that has elevated him to ‘messianic’ status. In all these accounts Mandela is at certain periods an active agent in achieving his stature as a leader, but at others, especially when in prison, he is largely what others make him to be, outside the prison walls. The broad international anti-apartheid movement elevated Mandela as a symbol of the liberation struggle and transformed him from being virtually forgotten to the most famous prisoner in the world.3 Within prison it is now documented how he exercised agency, in a framework where the aim was to deny prisoners subjective power and have