Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela
Little, Brown, 558 pp., $24.95 This may seem a strange time for
the autobiography of Nelson Mandela to appear. He has only
recently been elected president of South Africa; presumably, his
days will continue to be packed with newsworthy if not historic
events for the next few years at least. Mandela’s life, however,
has already been so full, so improbably long and mythologically
complete, that his current employment can almost be read as a
postscript. Certainly Long Walk to Freedom does not give the
impression of being a premature work. It is, in fact, timely in
that some of its main themes—the complex alliance between South
African Communists and African nationalists, the generational
conflicts within the democracy movement, the tension between
rural traditionalists and Westernized city folk—prefigure major
political issues in the new South Africa. More than that, the
book answers, not always intentionally, some fundamental
questions about the extraord