Richard Stengel Reveals 10 Things You Didn't Know About Nelson Mandela

My first meeting with Nelson Mandela didn’t go very well.

It was 1992—he’d been out of prison for a year and a half. I had been hired to work with him on his autobiography (eventually titled Long Walk To Freedom). When he first saw me, he said, “Ah, you are a young man”—36 at the time, half his age. This was not a compliment. Mandela had a deep reverence for age.

He’d been behind bars for 27 years, fighting apartheid. Now a free man, he was writing South Africa’s constitution, negotiating with the white government to hold an election, trying to prevent a civil war, and somehow finding time to talk to me. Over the next two years, we made more than 70 hours of tapes. Once, on an early morning walk in the Transkei, the rural area where he grew up, he said to me with a smile, “Many people love me from afar, but very few from up close.”

I had the privilege of loving him from up close.

Were he here today, his lesson for us would be this: Democracy requires sacrifice. It’s not, and never has been, a given. No one has sacrificed more for democracy than Nelson Mandela, and no one ever regretted it less. He told me, “I never think about the time I have lost.”

He was African royalty, raised by the king of the Thembu. At 23, he ran away to Johannesburg to escape an arranged marriage—the king’s idea. The girl, he told me, was in love with his best friend.

He played John Wilkes Booth in a high school production about Abraham Lincoln. Mandela wanted to play Lincoln, but a taller boy got the part.

A big admirer of heavyweight champion Joe Louis, Mandela became an amateur boxer; he trained by running around Johannesburg at dawn.

Unlike Martin Luther King, Mandela did not see nonviolence as a pure principle. He saw it as a tactic, and if it wasn’t working, he was willing to abandon it.

In prison on Robben Island, Mandela spent his days working at a lime quarry crushing rock. But his most important mission was studying history and politics and tutoring fellow inmates.

As late as 2008, he was still on American terrorist watch lists—more than a decade after being elected president of South Africa.

He first noticed Winnie, then a 22-year-old nurse, at a bus stop in Johannesburg. Shortly after they married, he had to go underground. Mandela told me he believed Winnie had a harder time during his 27-year incarceration than he did.

For Mandela, the hardest part about his time in prison was that he could not be the son to his mother, nor the father to his children, that he wanted to be.

Everyone marvels that sunny, smiling, grandfatherly Nelson Mandela wasn’t bitter about what he went through. But he was not immune. He just knew he couldn’t let it show if he was going to achieve a multiracial democracy for his country.

Mandela chose not to run for a second term because, he said, he did not want to be “an octogenarian president.”

The 70 hours of taped conversations between Nelson Mandela and Richard Stengel are the basis for Stengel’s 10-part podcast, Mandela: The Lost Tapes, available on Audible.