Nelson Mandela’s autobiography has been filleted and served up in a new, shorter and cheaper version. PHILIPPA GARSON reports
IF reading President Nelson Mandela’s autobiography Long Walk to Freedom is still on your “things to do” list, chances are the century will draw to a close before his bestselling tome gets taken off the shelf. But take heart. A short-cut to hours and hours of dedicated reading is now on offer, giving insight into the mind and soul of the president and enabling contributions to coffee-table conversations around one’s “favourite Nelson Mandela anecdote”.
Long Walk to Freedom, as abridged by editors Coco Cachalia and Marc Suttner, will soon be in the bookstores, published by Little, Brown and Nolwazi, educational wing of Macmillan’s South African operation.
At one-sixth the length of the original,
and at R19,95 less than half the price of the soft-cover edition, and written in plain English, the paperback is accessible and easy-to-read. And, while it has been whittled to the quick, say Cachalia and Suttner, it still “retains some of the juicy stuff”.
Experts in the field of adult literacy, they approached Mandela with their idea of condensing the story of his life into a version accessible to the millions of marginally literate South Africans who are, after all, among his most ardent supporters. “He was very receptive once we put the idea to him, and immediately saw the importance of producing an abridged version of his book that was easy to read and affordable,” says Cachalia.
After lengthy negotiations with Little, Brown (who published the original) and Nolwazi-Macmilllan, the two sat down to extract the essentials of the biography and rewrite sections into simpler English. The process took four months. The final product was then handed to Ahmed Kathrada for checking.
“Although we rewrote in parts, we kept to the original as much as possible. We had to stay true to the spirit and content of the primary version and follow the whole thread of his life – his personal and political development,” says Suttner. “We were driven by the fact that the majority of people in this country who historically constitute the president’s followers couldn’t benefit from the original.”
But the result is a worthwhile read for anyone who wants to get some historical facts straight and a sense of Mandela’s remarkable life in a single sitting. Some episodes gain a greater impact in this shorter setting.
An example is the anecdote about how, during the Rivonia trial, Govan Mbeki tricked a particularly nasty Lieutenant Swanepoel by secretively writing a note and circulating it among the trialists. “Swanepoel dashed over and grabbed the piece of paper out of his hand … a few moments later he rushed in and shouted, “I will get you for this!’ Govan had written in capital letters: `ISN’T SWANEPOEL A FINE-LOOKING CHAP?'”
For Cachalia and Suttner, the work “tells the story of South Africa from a very special man’s point of view and stands alone as a book in its own right”. In putting together this abridged version of Mandela’s life story, they hope to elevate accessible- language writing into a genre of its own, provide the impetus for more such works and stimulate the creation of new supplementary reading matter.