EXTRACT | ‘What Nelson Mandela Taught Me’ by Zelda la Grange

ABOUT THE BOOK 

“It is not our mistakes that define us, but how we learn from them ... I can’t blame you if you can’t forgive me. I struggle to forgive myself. But I have realised an act doesn’t have to be forgiven in order for you to learn from it. I have learnt to speak about my mistakes so that others, too, may find courage to do so.”

For almost two decades, Zelda la Grange stood beside former president Nelson Mandela as his closest assistant. With his death she had to face hard questions about herself and her life’s purpose. Her mourning for Madiba was compounded by the loss of the South Africa he had envisaged as possibility and dreams died during former president Jacob Zuma’s years. Tired and angry, La Grange sent off a barrage of extremely hurtful tweets, sparking a public outcry.

“Have you learnt nothing from Mr Mandela?” critics asked.

Deeply ashamed, La Grange set out to distil the lessons from her 19 years of first-hand experience at Madiba’s side, observing his interactions with people ordinary and famous, including cricketer Hansie Cronjé and former US president Bill Clinton.

In the memoir, she shares Madiba’s teachings about humility, respect, honesty and the biases and blind spots we all have. It is only by truly listening — trying to understand, not listening only to respond — that we can overcome that distrust among us. La Grange also explores the toxicity of social media and how Mandela’s lessons are equally relevant in the digital age.

Filled with wisdom and hope, the book invites each of us to honour Madiba’s legacy by living with integrity. Because, as La Grange says, “he gave us the courage not to try to change those around us, but to change ourselves”.

EXTRACT

During Covid-19, I did a podcast about my thoughts on lockdown and the insights we could take from Madiba’s incarceration about remaining hopeful. The main points were: Get up every morning with a positive mindset. If Madiba and his comrades had decided at any point that they were losing the fight and should give up, they would never have achieved freedom. Again, his leadership was on full display: being hopeful is a choice. Take time to contemplate. Madiba often said that he missed prison.

I quickly told him that wasn’t something he should say in public.

But he explained that he hardly had time anymore to sit and think about problems. When you take time to contemplate, even just by putting down your mobile phone and taking five minutes to view a problem from all sides, solutions often become clear. Draw strength from the knowledge and experience of those around you. We’ve all had different experiences in life, and our particular skill sets may not always seem helpful to us but could be the answer for someone else. Listening to understand, and taking time to discuss problems and challenges, creates new possibilities.

Another point Madiba raised was how much enjoyment he got in prison from listening to those around him, drawing on their experiences and arming himself with new ideas and solutions. Remain clear and committed about the end goal. Throughout his imprisonment, Madiba didn’t fight for his own freedom as a priority; the struggle was about freeing all people from oppression. He was clear that his freedom would be pointless unless all his people were afforded freedom, dignity and equality.

Read and study. Reading in prison gave Madiba and others the opportunity to travel outside the limitations of their imprisonment. Books transport you to far-off places, allow you to share in others’ experiences and broaden your horizons. Consuming social media is not reading. We need to read novels and biographies to help us see beyond our frustrations and circumstances, which often blind us.

Have gratitude. I believe that gratitude creates fortitude. When you speak to people in rural areas of South Africa, people who have never known anything but the struggle to survive every day, they’ll always tell you they’re grateful for something. Throughout this imprisonment, Madiba remained grateful for his colleagues, for life and for his intellect. In the letters in Conversations with Myself, his gratitude for experience, kindness, friends and family shines through.

From these points, we can look at our own situation. We want bearable lives. Hope often seems to evade us. Among other things, endless hours of load shedding at times and poor service delivery across the country frustrate us. It’s unacceptable, and we should be angry, but let’s channel our anger into action that uplifts and strengthens.

I wish I could have asked Madiba about social media, for his thoughts on how people sometimes push others’ buttons and bring out the worst in them. It’s hard to imagine what he would have made of our world with social media in it, although they must have had a non-tech version of it in prison – talking to and about others and experiencing the flaws of those around them daily. As many journalists can attest, while Madiba was alive, when they had written critical articles about him, he would invite them to breakfast to discuss their differences in opinion. It is therefore hard to imagine that he would have ignored social media criticism if social media were part of his life.

Madiba always protected other people’s dignity. At worst, he would say, ‘Oh, that one will give you trouble,’ or ‘He is a difficult person,’ but he would never attack someone’s character or speak disrespectfully of them. Highly evolved people never ponder the flaws of others but rather focus on the positive things they can take from their experiences.

He was adamant that if you believed the best of everyone around you, that is what they would deliver.

To be inspirational requires that we remain hopeful even during the most challenging circumstances when conditions have become a breeding ground for hostility. Instead of looking for inspiration from outside, we need to find it within ourselves.

When I travel abroad, I frequently come across teary-eyed expats telling me how much they miss South Africa. They emigrated for opportunities and what they believe to be a better life, and I won’t judge them for it. But they miss home and profess that life in South Africa was generally better than where they are now. There’s a lesson in that for us all. Don’t get me wrong: I sometimes have to pull myself away from social media because the negativity infects me, too. But then I think of Madiba in prison and how the hope he held on to certainly did not come from outside. So, I tell myself that now is not the time to lose hope. If he could remain hopeful every single day for 27 years, what’s your excuse? Our country isn’t what so many had dreamt of when they cast their democratic vote 30 years ago, and it’s easy to forget what we’ve survived as a nation. It’s also easy to get sucked into engaging in the blame game.

I’m reminded of what Madiba often said to me, using words similar to these quoted in Nelson Mandela by Himself: ‘It’s been easy to blame all of our troubles on a faceless system: the Crown, the church, hierarchy, globalisation, multinational corporations; the apartheid state. It is not a hard task to place the blame. But we must look within ourselves, become responsible and provide fresh solutions if we ever want to do more than complain or make excuses.’

Extract provided by NB Publishers