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“... of the real South Africa, not just of its fictional representation in the pages of A Land Apart, Nelson Mandela would be prime minister before the year was out.In the Afrikaans section, the narrator of Elsie Joubert’s story, ‘Back Yard’, says: ‘I live on the periphery of an existence which I don’t understand.’ She meditates upon the fact ...”

“... teachers of cultural wisdom and moral integrity’. Even the notoriously bellicose Winnie Mandela is portrayed here as a tolerant and compassionate creature, and a ‘devout Anglican’ to boot. One scans this book in vain for exceptions. Indeed, one closes it feeling that Africans are innately virtuous, incapable of cruelty and violence unless driven ...”

“... disbanded. Fergal Keane has packed up his microphone and gone home. In Trafalgar Square, a beaming Nelson Mandela casts a paternal eye over the lobby of South Africa House. Joseph Shabalala and Ladysmith Black Mambazo have been signed up by Heinz to carol ‘Inkanyezi Nezazi’ in an advertisment showing blond children eating tomato soup. In Britain we ...”

“... appropriate. There were those who lobbied for statues of Air Chief Marshal Sir Keith Park or Nelson Mandela, but it was in the end decided that the answer was a cycle of temporary pieces. That is now in progress. (The statue of Mandela ended up in Parliament Square, and a few weeks ago a bronze statue of Sir Keith ...”

“... would find controversial or objectionable, unless there are places where Raoul Wallenberg and Nelson Mandela are despised. The treatment is anodyne even when there might be scope for detached assessment. Now that not one person in a hundred who passes Edith Cavell’s statue opposite the National Portrait Gallery has any idea who she was, it might be ...”

“... Electronic Elephant is the record of a journey through Southern Africa, made at some point after Mandela’s release. The title is taken from an encounter with a life-size model elephant made of wire, wood and painted plaster, mounted on a bogie, with a driver’s seat inside and a steering wheel from a cannibalised tractor. It has been delivered to a little ...”

“... And some clever-dick made a megaphone with his hands and shouts: “What about our leader – Mandela?” And the PM answers, cool as they come: “Mr Mandela doesn’t want to be free. I’ve told him a hundred times if he wants to be free just sign along the dotted line below the small print. I’m a humanitarian. And ...”

“... character than Johnson’s crazed czar. Johnson sees Mbeki as race-obsessed, ruthless and mad. Nelson Mandela, who shuffles in and out of this account as an amiable old buffer only occasionally able to rise above a myopic loyalty to his noble notion of a non-racial, rainbow ANC, was outwitted by Mbeki, while the ANC itself, on its return to South ...”

“... Communist Party leader Chris Hani was the belief that Hani was the most likely successor to Nelson Mandela as head of the ANC – and thus the next-President-but-one of South Africa. It’s an interesting thought partly because its airing in an ANC paper signals both that the matter of the succession is in the air and that it is now publicly ...”

“... a diplomat from the South African embassy to speak at one of its events. In those Cold War days Nelson Mandela was still a terrorist and defenders of apartheid were heroes to some on the hard right. But protests seemed likely and the university authorities felt compelled to withdraw permission for the meeting. When a few weeks later a meeting with the ...”

“... this year. The possibility of bloody battles taking place in townships around the country haunts Nelson Mandela, who has gone out of his way to preach unity and reconciliation since his release from jail. At the same time, almost everyone respects him today. Some of the UDF’s bitterest opponents in AZAPO went to visit ...”

“... one hundred years ago, Joseph Conrad produced a remarkable, and peculiar, essay arguing that Nelson was a great, and a modern, artist. His genius was to revolutionise ‘not the strategy or tactics of sea-warfare, but the very conception of victory itself’. In pursuing a total annihilation of the enemy, Nelson led ...”

“... apartheid, I preferred to stay away. But now it had to be a very different place, 18 years after Nelson Mandela walked free from prison, 14 years on from the day when South Africa had its first democratic election. I was going to be there anyway – Cape Town was the end point of another journey – and I thought I’d spend a couple of weeks and look ...”

“... Mobutu. But we also think we can do better than … Thomas Sankara; we think we can do better than Nelson Mandela.’ He invoked a generation of young Africans who don’t want to migrate, or beg, or live in dictatorships, or wait at the end of the queue in a global hierarchy of rich and poor. ‘We are in contact with young people all over Africa … the ...”

“... confirmed the police theory. Baker and O’Reilly travelled to South Africa in April 2002, and Nelson Mandela publicly appealed for anyone with information to come forward. The trail went cold, however, and the police had to admit that since no vital organs had been removed, this was unlikely to be a muti murder of the classic kind. But they stuck to ...”