By Neelika Jayawardane
A lesser man may relish, cultivate, and aid the construction of living icon-hood (see Out of Africa Redux). But in Conversations with Myself, the “sequel” to Long Walk to Freedom, Mandela reveals “anxiety about how his life as leader of the anti-apartheid struggle affected relatives”, insistent that the public should not, in fact, mistake him for a mythical hero:
One issue that deeply worried me in prison was the false image I unwittingly projected to the outside world; of being regarded as a saint. I never was one, even on the basis of the earthly definition of a saint as a sinner who keeps trying.
The book project began with an extraordinary mandate: “Take my personal archives, and do what you want with them,” says Bob Simon of 60 Minutes. Verne Harris, chief archivist at the Mandela Foundation was charged with presenting former president “warts and all”: Mandela told Harris, “You don’t have to protect me,” and to use material from personal notebooks without asking “Is this too personal … potentially embarrassing?”
Given such a mandate, what a pity that Yuill Damaso, whose re-mix of Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn’s “The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulip” (1632)–in which the South African artist painted Mandela in flat planes of desert browns, dead and undergoing an autopsy–created such a fuss back in July this year: for doing a bad painting that was meant (in the artist’s own words) to get South Africans to see Mandela as a human being – warts and all.
