South Africa: Portrait of the Prisoner as a Young Man
Above - May of 1961, a 42-year-old Mandela giving his first-ever interview to ITN reporter Brian Widlake as part of a longer ITN Roving Report program about Apartheid. Maria Popova writes over at Open Culture, ..."at that point, the police are already hunting for Mandela, but Widlake pulls some strings and arranges to meet him in his hideout." Fastfoward... Nov of 2010 - author Peter Godwin reviews Mandela's lastest bio Conversations with Myself for the Guardian:
By going to his most personal of jottings, we finally get a glimpse of the man behind the mask. Luckily, it turns out that Mandela has always been something of a hoarder, as well as a copious note-maker, though many of his notes were seized by the police over the years, so there are inevitable holes... One is reminded, too, of how steeped in history and the classics Mandela is. He read catholically, quoted liberally from War and Peace, and when preparing to launch "the struggle" consulted texts as diverse as Machiavelli, Clausewitz, Mao Zedong, and Menachem Begin. He studied the Anglo-Boer war in detail, and was later to use the Afrikaner arguments against his own jailers. But the Mandela we see here can also be abrasively self-critical. In a letter to Winnie, his wife, he quotes from As You Like It, "Sweet are the uses of adversity ... ", then says he has been looking over some of his earlier speeches and is "appalled by their pedantry, artificiality and lack of originality. The urge to impress and advertise is clearly noticeable."
__________________________________________
>via: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyW05DxDK1Q&feature=related