What's left to say about Nelson Mandela? More than a decade after the death of South Africa's most recognisable liberation icon and the country's first democratically elected president, is there more we can learn about Madiba?
Troublemaker: The Story Behind the Mandela Tapes, a new documentary directed by Antoine Fuqua, is betting "yes". The film is built around more than 70 hours of audio Mandela recorded with Richard Stengel while writing Long Walk to Freedom, paired with animated sequences by artist Thabang Lehobye.
The film premiered at the Sundance film festival in Utah, United States earlier this year to a standing ovation and, by film producer Markus Davies's account, some genuine disagreement.
One crowd wanted a 10-part series while another thought 90 minutes was too long. It doesn't have a distributor or a confirmed release date but Davies tells me the timing has to be right. He's guessing they'll release it in the first or second quarter of next year but he won't commit to more than that.
With Mandela Day approaching, I spoke to four people who spent years inside this film — Davies, historian and archivist Gordon Metz, Mandela's friend and fellow struggle veteran Mac Maharaj and Lehobye — to find out what a new documentary can tell us about a man whose story has been told in countless books and films.
And, more pointedly, how they respond to the growing number of young South Africans who believe Mandela compromised too much in the negotiations that led to democracy, sometimes to the point of labelling him a sell-out.
Metz has spent years working on exhibitions dealing with struggle history and his interest in the tapes started with the book, not the film. He became fixated on how Long Walk to Freedom was smuggled out of prison in fragments and why, once finished, it sat unpublished for two decades. What struck him, he says, was realising the book wasn't written to explain Mandela to the world but rather to give black South Africans a chronicle of their own resistance that nobody had put down in one place before.
"It's a chronicle of the story of all black South Africans in the fight against apartheid," he says. The framing, a collective story channelled through one voice, is what he thinks the tapes are good for.
Turning that into a 90-minute film took the better part of a decade once Fuqua came on board. Between the Stengel recordings and roughly 60 more hours from Ahmed Kathrada's private collection, there was enough material for something far longer.
Maharaj, who worked closely with Fuqua on the edit, says the director made the call that the Stengel tapes alone gave the film its clearest baseline: Mandela narrating his own life with nobody in the room to perform for.
"This is not him standing in front of an audience. This is not him giving a press conference," Metz says. "This is actually a very intimate, authentic exchange for Mandela speaking, without any intention to convince anybody about anything."
Maharaj agrees and puts it even more plainly: Mandela on these tapes isn't aware there's an audience he needs to win over.
For most of the film's runtime, there's no moving image of Mandela. There's just his voice and Lehobye's animation filling the gap.
Lehobye, a printmaker by training, built his visual language out of South African protest art instead of faking a documentary realism the archive can't support.
Reconstructing the Mandela who broke branches as a boy in the Transkei and later stole his guardian's cattle to fund his escape to Johannesburg, took hundreds of frames pieced together from old photographs and illustration. "Tedious but worthwhile work," is how he describes it.
But the tapes are in service of an argument and that's where things get interesting. I ask Maharaj directly why, after decades of books and films about Mandela, this one has anything new to offer. His answer isn't really about the archive.
"I come from a position that I think legends have to be revisited by each generation," he says.
"We should not cast legends in stone. It's only when each generation interrogates a legend that they can draw their own lessons. When cast in stone, a legend becomes an icon full of mythology."
What exists right now, in his view, is a Mandela built more out of commentary than fact and a public debate with no shared floor to stand on. The film isn't meant to end the debate. It's meant to give it something to argue about.
There's a second thread to his answer that stuck with me more.
Which brings me to the sell-out question. It's become common enough among young South Africans, frustrated with a democracy that hasn't delivered economically, that I wanted to put it to Maharaj without softening it.
He doesn't dodge it but he also refuses to put the blame on the people asking. "When I hear that view expressed, I don't start off by blaming the young people. I blame ourselves for the way in which we have told the story," he says.
"There has been a tendency to tell the story of South Africa's transition as a great man story. It is not told as a story located in history. So young people make that expression based on lack of knowledge... They look at their current situation and say: This does not achieve what we hoped for."
He points me to the closing pages of Long Walk to Freedom, where Mandela is explicit that 1994 was a beginning, not an arrival, that political freedom had been won but the harder work of economic transformation lay ahead. Maharaj argues that reading gets lost entirely in how the transition gets taught.
The 1994 settlement, he says, was conceived internally as a platform rather than an end-point and he points to the ANC's Harare Declaration from 1989 as proof: a document about winning democracy that says nothing about having achieved economic transformation in the same breath.
"Democracy is not the answer to your problems," he says. "Democracy provides you with the mechanism by which you can mediate conflicts of interest, contradictions in society. And I use the word 'mediate', not 'resolve' because the lesson of humankind's history is not the resolution of the contradiction but moving it forward, a few steps at a time."
Reading 1994 as a broken promise, in his framing, misunderstands what any negotiated settlement was ever capable of delivering.
Metz comes at the same question from a different angle: how thoroughly the public version of Mandela has been watered down.
He points to a moment in the film where Mandela, describing his early years in Johannesburg, insists he arrived with no political ambitions at all.
It's only after meeting Walter Sisulu that he becomes one of the architects of the ANC Youth League, the body that radicalised the movement and eventually put him in command of uMkhonto we Sizwe.
"People forget that Mandela was the commander-in-chief of the liberation army in South Africa," Metz says. "It's just amazing that anyone could even countenance the notion that this man would sell out. You can only come to that suspicion through a disconnection from history."
Neither man treats this as a rebuttal, though. Maharaj is emphatic on that point.
"I am not looking to frontally challenge the sell-out version. I want a debate about it, on facts," he says. "One person says X, another says wait a minute, justify that — what are your facts? That kind of discussion. Because at the moment, worldwide, people are talking past each other."
The film will keep sitting in distribution limbo for a while yet and the debate Maharaj wants isn't going to resolve itself before it lands. But Fuqua's involvement, coming off the record-breaking success of Michael, all but guarantees Troublemaker a bigger audience than most Mandela documentaries get.
Davies is counting on that reach to do something the archive alone can't: put an unfiltered Mandela in front of teenagers who mostly know him as a name on a public holiday, rather than a person who was, by his own telling, fairly troublesome.
Lehobye put it the simplest of all when I asked what he hoped people took from the film: he hopes it leaves people a little more forgiving of their own uncertainty.
Mandela's own name gave him the instruction long before anyone thought to make a film out of it. Rolihlahla. Troublemaker. Someone who pulled at branches knowing some people would call it a nuisance, because he thought it mattered more to shake something loose.