Stengel on Never-Before-Heard Interviews with Nelson Mandela

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, HOST: Now, in South Africa, President Cyril Ramaphosa is resisting calls to resign over allegations that he might have covered up at the theft of hundreds of thousands of dollars from his private farm. As a powerful union leader, he had played a key role in ending apartheid and became a close ally of President Nelson Mandela. Our next guest worked with Mandela on his autobiography, “Long Walk to Freedom.” That was in the ’90s. Now, journalist Richard Stengel is revealing never before heard audio from those interviews. It’s all in his new podcast series called, “Mandela: The Loss Tapes.” And he tells Walter Isaacson what he learned about the great South African leader and about himself from their conversations.

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WALTER ISAACSON, HOST: Thank, you Christiane. And, Rich Stengel, welcome to the show.

RICHARD STENGEL, WRITER AND NARRATOR, “MANDELA: THE LOST TAPES”: Walter, great to be with you.

ISAACSON: This new audio book podcast is based on tapes you did when you helped Mandela write his autobiography a “Long Walk to Freedom.” Let’s go back to that. In 1990, he gets out of jail. In 1992, you and I are — been at “Time Magazine.” You get a call to be his writer on it. Tell me how that happened.

STENGEL: So, what — you’ll actually know some of the characters. I wrote a book, as you recall, about South Africa called “January Sun,” about a force removal in a township. And Little Ground (ph), the publisher that was the known by Time.inc had signed up Mandela to do his autobiography. And Bill Phillips (ph), who was the head of Little Ground (ph), had read my book, “January Sun.” And one morning, he called me at home and asked me to come and see him about a project. And we talk for a little while. And then he said, would you be interested in collaborating with Nelson Mandela on his autobiography? And it was the proverbial offer you can’t refuse. And about a month later, I was on my way back to Johannesburg.

ISAACSON: And tell me what it was like talking to Mandela and wouldn’t it have been odd for a white American guy to be chosen by him to write the book?

STENGEL: Yes. And part of it was that they had struggled to find a collaborator. And so, the American publisher ended up choosing an American journalist. And the real difference in a strange way was not so much grace or even national origin. It was age. I mean, he was about 30 years older than I was then. And he had this enormous respect for age. And when I actually first met him, which was an awe-inspiring experience, the first thing he said to me was, oh, you are a young man. And that wasn’t meant as a compliment. I had to overcome the fact that I seemed young to him because he had such great respect for age.

ISAACSON: What was a like to hear him again now?

STENGEL: I hadn’t really listened to the tapes because, as you know, when you are working on a book, the first thing you do is you have them transcribed and you want to work with transcripts. You don’t work with — you know, with having to listen. So, listening to them really for the first time was a very emotional experience. You’re hearing him, somebody I love, but then, I’m also hearing a 30-year younger version of myself, which isn’t always comfortable. And so, I mostly was pretty buttoned up. But there were times when I heard like, well, I didn’t get the answer I wanted but I didn’t do follow-up or I chickened out with a question that wasn’t as direct as I should have asked. It’s not easy to ask Nelson Mandela uncomfortable things, but I knew that I had to. So, it was — it — I learned a lot about myself. I learned more about him. You know, looking back, when a much closer to his age than I was then, he sounds more vulnerable to me. He sounds a little lonelier. He sounds almost more wistful than I remember thinking at the time where, you know, when you are in that room, you are thinking, what can I use in a book and what can I and how do I get him to talk about things that I can use? And now, I heard some emotion in his voice that I don’t think I heard back then.

ISAACSON: I want to play a clip of when Nelson Mandela was stopped when he was driving a car and he had a revolver with him in 1962.

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NELSON MANDELA, FORMER PRESIDENT OF SOUTH AFRICA: Now, I had a revolver which was unlicensed and I just took it out and put it in between the seats.

STENGEL: That’s Nelson Mandela. He’s talking about the time he was driving down a hill with a gun and got stopped by the South African security police.

MANDELA: And at one time, I thought I could open the door fast and roll down. But I didn’t know how long this hill was and what was there. I was not familiar with the landscape.

STENGEL: Mandela could always think on his feet. He’d only have begun a few weeks. He was young and fit but didn’t of the countryside or what was beyond that hill. When that Ford V8 pulled in front of his car outside of Howick Falls, South Africa on August 5, 1962, Mandela new instantly what had happened. He was caught.

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STENGEL: So, that was August of 1962. Mandela earlier year had started (INAUDIBLE) spear of the nation, the armed wing of the ANC. He had decided that nonviolent protests just didn’t work anymore and the government was responding with violence. They had to respond in kind. So, he went on a trip to Africa to raise money for the ANC and for MK, as it was known. And he was summoned back and he had been given a revolver by Haile Selassie and 200 rounds of ammunition and he had it in his belt. And when he was driving from Durban to Johannesburg, posing as a chauffeur, because a black man driving a car, it wasn’t something that was that common in those days, and they were pulled over by the special branch of the South African police.

ISAACSON: You talk about Mandela as a cautious revolutionary. Quite a phrase. Explain that to me.

STENGEL: Well, he wasn’t a revolutionary by temperament, as some people are. He wasn’t a rebel by temperament. He was the son of a chief. He was raised by the king of the Tenbu people. He was an aristocrat. And so, in some ways, he was conservative. In a different society, he would have — you know, as he once said to me, I would’ve been, you know, a local chief with a big belly. And — but when he went to Johannesburg as a young man, when he encountered racism, apartheid, the incredible disdain with which he was treated and the lack of opportunity, it shifted him, it changed him, it did ultimately make him into a revolutionary. But it was a slow process. And originally embraced the vision of nonviolence that, by the way, had started with Gandhi in South Africa 40 years before. But when the government began responding to nonviolent protests with violence, he realized he had to respond in that same way, and he was reluctant to do that. I mean, you’ve met him, Walter, there was something incredibly sort of peaceful about him. I mean, he loathed violence. He told me the story once of when he was training at Liliesleaf Farm with a BB gun and he shot a sparrow, he felt heartbroken that he had killed the sparrow. I mean, so, it was a very, very reluctant process. But once he embraced it, like he embraced everything, he went all in.

ISAACSON: Tell me about, there must of been a real tension in his life then if he’s deeply committed to nonviolence, has a peaceful temperament and he had to be a revolutionary. How did he deal with that attention?

STENGEL: Well, the way he dealt with everything, I mean, I guess we use the modern word repression. But he was very, very, very tasked focused. And so, what did he do? He started reading books about guerrilla warfare. You can hear in the tapes him saying, you know, he read Mao’s autobiography. He read about Fidel Castro. He read about Ben Bella in Algeria. He was a student, in a way.

ISAACSON: But did he also read Gandhi?

STENGEL: Well, he had been steeped in that already. Remember, the ANC was formed in 1912. It’s the oldest African liberation movement in history. It was formed as a nonviolent movement to bring rights and freedoms to people of color in South Africa. So, he was steeped in that. He — I mean, he had — I think he had read Gandhi earlier the thriller. He talked about reading Nehru in prison. So, the thing he had to learn was the path to violence and how that worked. And remember, that era, Mao Tse-tung, Castro, Mandela, they were successful revolutionaries in the ’50s and ’60s and ’70s.

ISAACSON: I once got to go to Robben Island to the cell with Nelson Mandela when he was giving President Clinton and others a tour. And it seemed almost like it was a touchdown for him, that little cell, and how that forged him. How did it forge him?

STENGEL: I believe prison was the thing that made Nelson Mandela who he became, who we saw. Prison acted as a, kind of, crucible to melt away any unnecessary elements. It made him, kind of, pure. He had to focus on his goals. And so, he also became — and you hear me asking him this over than over in the podcast, how did present change you? One day he said to me, I came out mature. And that word which doesn’t sound all that thrilling to us, meant a lot to him. It meant self-control. It meant having an even temperament and not overreacting. All of the things that he thought leaders need to have. Prison, I think, was the way he got that. Was the way he achieved that. It steeled him. And that’s how he became Nelson Mandela.

ISAACSON: One of most amazing about Nelson Mandela’s 27 years in prison, all of these things, and yet he seems to come out without spite, without hatred. He’s able to do the truth and reconciliation. How hard was that or was that part of his nature, just to forgive?

STENGEL: I think it was harder than it seemed. He realized early on that if he was going to bring freedom to South Africa, he had to reconcile white and black. He realized that in prison. And he used the guards in prison as a kind of focus group, a test audience. He learned Afrikaans in prison. He would talk to them in Afrikaans. He realized he had to bring those people along. And the thing that whites, the white minority regime, who — and they were — it was a white supremacist regime, what they were afraid of was black vengeance. It was that sparked gevaar, as they called it in Afrikaans, the black threat. And he understood that he — when he came out, he couldn’t seem threatening. He had to preach reconciliation. I think in his heart, he was deeply wounded. But he understood that as a politician, as a statesman, as a leader, he could never show that he was wounded. And he — and by temperament, he wasn’t ever someone who wanted vengeance or wanted to repay something that happened to him. He wasn’t like that at all. But he understood that he had to hide any of those feelings, if he had them at all.

ISAACSON: There’s another clip where Mandela discusses being separated from his wife, Winnie Mandela, for 27 years. Let me play that one.

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STENGEL: You’re sentenced to life in prison. You’re gone for many, many years. She has a life outside. She meets other men. What — it must be very difficult to think about that. That perhaps she, you know, meets other men that she might like or might take your place temporarily. How did you deal with that?

MANDELA: Well, that was a question, you know, which one had to wipe out of his mind.

STENGEL: Uh-huh.

MANDELA: You must remember, I was underground for almost two years before I went to jail. I took a deliberate decision to go underground. And in other words, what those issues were not material issues to me. And then one had to accept that the human issue, the human fact, the reality that a person will have times when he wants to relax, and one must not be inquisitive. It’s sufficient that this is a woman who is loyal to me, who supports me, and who comes to visit me, who writes to me. That’s sufficient.

STENGEL: And then everything else you — that’s sufficient, and you put the other things out of your mind?

MANDELA: Oh, yes.

STENGEL: Because they’re not important?

MANDELA: Yes.

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STENGEL: First of all, I wasn’t always very successful in getting him to talk about personal things. I asked him a lot of questions about his first wife, Evelyn, and he rebuffed them almost completely. The issue with Winnie, which was kind of lovely, was that even though at the time he was separated from her and wounded by her. He talked about her, when he was reminiscing lovingly, it was almost as though he could transport himself back to that time when he first met her. He talked about how he saw her waiting at a bus stop when he was driving and he was just struck by her beauty, he said. And it’s lovely when he’s talking about her in the past. He’s much more circumspect than talking about her in the present. And what was also going on in South African politics at the moment is that she was much more aligned with the more radical wing of the ANC who were critical of Mandela. And so, he had to navigate that personally and politically. And it was incredibly delicate.

ISAACSON: You talk about him as being temperamentally a conservative person, then he becomes a revolutionary, but then it becomes president. And he only serves for one term. Decides to step aside. Tell me about his temperament when he becomes president. Had he become back to being more cautious and conservative?

STENGEL: So, in many ways, he’s a natural conservative. What changed him was facing racism and apartheid. But once he became president, he realized — he reverted, in some ways, to his more conservative nature. He wanted to prevent the country from descending into a civil war which he really was afraid was going to happen when he was running for president. So, he’s been criticized in recent years for being too even subservient to whites. To be more concerned about placating white interest than helping blacks. But at the time, when you go back to that time, the country really was at a tipping point. There was something called the third force, this right-wing dark force that was trying to tip the country to civil war. That’s what Mandela was concerned about. And I think he believed that once they could go over to a democratic election, he could get elected, then he could heal the breach. And that’s what he tried to do.

ISAACSON: You said you didn’t expect people would listen to these tapes ever again. And wasn’t sure what whether Mandela, what he would feel about that. Tell me about the ethical concerns you may have had about putting them out now.

STENGEL: So, the tapes are owned by the Mandela Foundation. I kept them for years and years. And in 2010, they asked me to come down and donate them in a lovely ceremony with him. Even that, of course, I didn’t really think about them being listened to. The Mandela Foundation did make them available to be listened to if you would physically go there and listen to the tapes, which not many people did. I think he would have been circumspect about it. I think he would have felt that these tapes were personal, even though when you hear them, they’re certainly not personal by our standards. And so — but at the end of the day, Walter, I think, you know, more Nelson Mandela in the world is better than last Nelson Mandela in the world. And we’re living in a time where democracy itself isn’t a threat to. And he was maybe the greatest democratic revolutionary in history. And to hear him talk about these things which such focus and passion and emotion about how they fought back against racism and fought for democracy. I just think it’s a great moment to be able to listen to him.

ISAACSON: Rich Stengel. thank you so much for joining us.

STENGEL: Thank you, Walter.