This is him not geared primarily to the needs and expectations of an audience. Here he is drafting letters, speeches and memoirs. Here he is making notes (or doodling) during meetings, keeping a diary, recording his dreams, tracking his weight and blood pressure, maintaining to-do lists. Here he is meditating on his experience, interrogating his memory, conversing with a friend. Here he is not the icon or saint elevated far beyond the reach of ordinary mortals. Here he is like you and me. As he himself expresses it, ‘In real life we deal, not with gods, but with ordinary humans like ourselves: men and women who are full of contradictions, who are stable and fickle, strong and weak, famous and infamous, people in whose bloodstream the muckworm battles daily with potent pesticides.’

For most of his adult life, Mandela has been a diligent maker of records and an obsessive record-keeper. How else to explain his collection of Methodist Church membership cards recording his annual membership between 1929 and 1934? How else to explain his daily diary entries while travelling through Africa in 1962, or his habit of drafting most letters in a notebook during the prison years? Of course the archive has been ravaged by his years of struggle, of life underground, of life in prison. Records were secreted away or given to others for safe keeping. Some were lost along the way. Records were confiscated by the state, then either destroyed or used in evidence. Today the Mandela private archive is scattered and fragmentary. The single biggest accumulation is to be found in the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory and Dialogue. Significant collections are also held by South Africa’s National Archives, the National Intelligence Agency, the Mandela House Museum, and the Liliesleaf Trust. Myriad fragments are located in the collections of private individuals, mainly in the form of correspondence.

*  *  *

Conversations with Myself, as a book project, has its origins in the 2004 inauguration of the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory and Dialogue as the core function of the Nelson Mandela Foundation. At the outset, the Centre’s priority was to document the scattered and fragmented ‘Mandela Archive’, but very quickly the collecting of materials not yet in archival custody became equally important. Mandela himself made his first donation of private papers to the Centre in 2004, and continued through 2009 to add to the collection. Very early on it became apparent to me as the Centre’s Memory Programme Head that an important book could be crafted from the materials, under the Centre’s purview. In 2005 a team of archivists and researchers began the painstaking work of assembling, contextualising, arranging and describing materials. Simultaneously they undertook preliminary identification and selection of items, passages and extracts that could be considered for the book. The team comprised the following members: Sello Hatang, Anthea Josias, Ruth Muller, Boniswa Nyati, Lucia Raadschelders, Zanele Riba, Razia Saleh, Sahm Venter and myself.

In 2008 I began discussing the book with publishers Geoff Blackwell and Ruth Hobday. These discussions crystallised the Centre’s thinking about the book, and introduced the project’s final phase. Mandela was briefed and gave his blessing, but indicated his wish not to be involved personally. Kathrada agreed to be the special advisor to the project. Senior Researcher Venter and Archivists Hatang, Raadschelders, Riba and Saleh were deployed under my direction as project leader for the final selection and compilation process. Crucially, historian and author Tim Couzens was drafted into the team to bring to bear both specialist expertise and the eye of a scholar not enmeshed in the Centre’s daily work. Finally, Bill Phillips – who had worked as senior editor on the Long Walk to Freedom project in the 1990s – came in during the project’s final editing phase.

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In a real sense, Conversations with Myself is Nelson Mandela’s book. It gives us his own voice – direct, clear, private. But it’s important to acknowledge the editorial role played by the team. The words in this book were winnowed from a mass of material, primarily on the basis of theme, importance and immediacy, and that mass was defined by what exists and what was accessible.