The Cambridge Companion to Nelson Mandela ed. by Rita Barnard (review)

This volume makes a valuable contribution to Cambridge’s Companion series and to general and scholarly understanding of the extraordinary statesman Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela. Like its subject, the ensemble may not be perfect but its strongest parts add depth and detail to the information already published on Mandela’s life, work, and legacy. While several biographies by individual authors appeared in the years before Mandela’s death in December 2013, chief among them Mandela: A Critical Life by historian Tom Lodge (2006), the editor of this collection, Rita Barnard, has taken advantage of the miscellany format to juxtapose different points of view, allowing each to capture its subject from a distinct angle while also orchestrating a diverse set of voices so as to highlight moments of concord as well as points of disagreement among the various contributions. These include chapters by anthropologists, historians, and political theorists, as well as critics of literary and visual culture.

The volume begins with a magisterial overview by senior historian Philip Bonner, whose investigation of the “antinomies of Nelson Mandela” provides both a persuasive explanation of apparently contradictory elements in the late president’s thoughts and actions and a powerful synthesis of his life and work in the context of nearly a century of changing historical and political trends. In particular, Bonner shows how Mandela turned antinomies between his rural, even aristocratic, upbringing as a scion of the Thembu clan within the larger Xhosa nation, and his later embrace of modern political organization in the African National Congress (ANC), or between his submission to party discipline in the ANC opposition to apartheid and his individualist grasp of political opportunities for negotiation even with the enemy, into strategies for effective political action, even if tensions remained between public obligations and private impulse, in his family life as well as in his political associations.

In addition to a structuring principle for his own chapter, Bonner’s explication of these and related antinomies establishes a solid frame of reference for more narrowly focused but analytically astute essays in the volume. Following Bonner’s, David Schalkwyk’s chapter on the “lessons of prison” works through Long Walk to Freedom, the memoir that Mandela cowrote with journalist Richard Stengel, alongside the recollections of his Robben Island colleagues such as Ahmed Kathrada, his political rivals such as Neville Alexander, and his former jailer James Gregory to explore the key antinomy between public displays of emotion and Mandela’s legendary restraint. The chapter paints a vivid portrait of Mandela as a stoic survivor who transformed his experience of incarceration under extreme duress (whether the brutality of his jailers or the news of his son’s death by a car accident) into the focused concentration needed to build long-term support systems, whether prisoner morale or the respect of his jailers. Schalkwyk argues persuasively for the indirect influence of classical Stoics such as Marcus Aurelius, by way of Kathrada who cites the Roman directly, but adds the critical reminder that Mandela was not so much “detached” from emotions as able to channel his emotion for the common good, as in exposing his second’s son’s death from AIDS to public view so as to highlight the impact of the epidemic.

Approaching his subject as an anthropologist as well as a fellow Xhosa, Zolani Ngwane scrutinizes the familiar but misleading antinomy between tradition and modernity to show how Mandela deployed his experience of traditional practices from the initiation into manhood shared with his age-mates to his more idiosyncratic response to the Thembu clans’ plans for his succession, which prompted his flight to Johannesburg and his career as a political activist, to fashion himself as a modern African nationalist. Noting critically that this opportunity for self-fashioning would not, in the mid-20th century, have been available to women in the clan, Ngwane demonstrates how Mandela was able to blend modern and traditional conceptions of manly authority to seize the role of nationalist leader, to maintain...