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Good Morning,
Mr. Mandela
by Zelda la Grange
c.2014, Viking
$28.95 / $33.00 Canada
368 pages
By Terri Schlichenmeyer
The Truth Contributor
You are entitled to change your mind.
You don’t have to apologize or admit you were wrong. Just
act on your new convictions and, sooner or later, someone
will notice your different opinions, improved ideals, and
open mind.
For most of her life, author Zelda la Grange held
beliefs that everyone around her shared. In the new book
Good Morning, Mr. Mandela, she explains how those
tenets changed, and who led her there.
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Though she was born into a “very poor” family, Zelda la
Grange had it better than the black citizens of Johannesburg
in 1970: as an Afrikaner “boere-meisie,” she enjoyed
legal privileges that came with being white.
“We were happy children growing up in apartheid South
Africa,” she says, having been taught that blacks and whites
never mixed. Blacks were “dangerous.”
After receiving secretarial training, la Grange’s first job
was with the South African government. It was a “riveting
and dangerous” time then: apartheid had ended, whites feared
black reprisals and South Africa had inaugurated its first
democratically-elected black president whose office happened
to need a typist. Knowing very little about the man for whom
she’d work, la Grange applied for the position.
The first time she met her new boss, she cried. “It was all
too much,” she says; perhaps because Nelson Mandela kindly
addressed her in her “home language,” and not his own.
Soon, Madiba (his clan name) began to rely on la Grange for
everything. She read to him, helped with speeches, traveled
with him, soothed his temper and protected his time. He
called her on her phone, sometimes a hundred times a day.
The “same man my Afrikaner compatriots warned me against”
became like a beloved grandfather to her, and she fretted
over his needs and his health until the end of his life,
when his office closed, she was demoted, and was denied
access to his sickroom.
“I made a promise [to stick with him],” she says. “I was
going to be there right to the end, even if it meant I had
to stand at a fence outside his farm… when they laid him to
rest. Unbeknown to me, that would be close to the truth.”
We do love our saints, which is why Good Morning, Mr.
Mandela is so interesting: author Zelda la Grange gives
us a beautiful portrait of a beautiful man, but it’s a
picture with surprising exposure.
This intimate peek into Mandela’s persona starts out with la
Grange’s biography, which stages where we’re going. Get past
that, and the pay-off is rich: la Grange describes Mandela
as having a keen sense of humor, but who sometimes engaged
in mean-spirited teasing. He was generous with his time, but
not always respectful of that of others. Mandela couldn’t
say “no” to anyone, but was prone to fits of “furious.”
In other words, human, which is what makes this book
so enjoyable. Yes, Good Morning, Mr. Mandela has its
first-time-author flaws and yes, it can be repetitive, but
catch that hero-as-a-man facet, and I don’t think you’ll
mind. |
