“Mandela’s Way: Fifteen Lessons on Life, Love, and Courage” (Crown, 256 pages, $23), by Richard Stengel: WWNMD _ What would Nelson Mandela do? That’s the question writer Richard Stengel asked himself repeatedly while collaborating with Mandela on the iconic South African leader’s autobiography.
“It was a powerful exercise. It always made me, at least in those moments, a better person _ calmer, more rational, more generous,” Stengel writes in his new book, which seeks to inspire similar self-improvement in its readers _ even if it sometimes misses the mark.
“Mandela’s Way: Fifteen Lessons on Life, Love, and Courage” draws on stories from Stengel’s almost three years of shadowing and interviewing the revolutionary political prisoner who became the first democratically elected president of South Africa in 1994.
Behind his famous smile, Stengel writes, Mandela buried a lot of hurt. The best years of his life were spent behind bars. His family life was sacrificed in the struggle for justice. But he created the appearance of someone who had forgiven and forgotten in an effort to make the image a reality (Lesson No. 5: Play the part).
Other morals are not all that original (Lesson No. 1: Courage is not the absence of fear), although Mandela’s resume does give them more heft.
Among the more interesting parts of the book are details of Mandela’s dealings with white South Africans (Lesson No. 8: Know your enemy). Stengel explains how Mandela won over a hostile prison commander with talk of rugby, practically a religion to whites yet hated by black South Africans who saw it as a symbol of Afrikaner brutality. Later, when he was president, Mandela donned the national team’s jersey and attended a game, causing the crowd to chant his name.
“That was the moment when I understood more clearly than ever before that the liberation struggle was not so much about liberating blacks from bondage, it was about liberating white people from fear,” a former prisoner told an interviewer. Mandela was prescient in the way he helped heal his country post-apartheid.
Above all, accounts of Mandela’s preternatural calm and equanimity are striking. “Mandela knew that the surest way to defuse an argument is to listen patiently to the opposing point of view,” Stengel writes (Lesson No. 4: Lead from the back). And even when talking about the most cruel people, Mandela would say they were better men than how they behaved (Lesson No. 7: See the good in others).
While Stengel opens the book seeming to promise a behind-the-scenes, unvarnished view of Mandela, by the end, the reader questions his objectivity. Stengel, now the managing editor of Time magazine, gave both his sons a Mandela-related middle name and is unabashed about his infatuation with the 91-year-old former South African president.
Stengel glosses over more difficult parts of Mandela’s biography, writing at one point: “He has made many, many hard decisions in his life _ decisions that may have been wrong or unfair, decisions that have hurt and wounded people, even cost them their lives.” Frustratingly, Stengel leaves it at that.
“Mandela’s Way” grew out of a Time cover piece Stengel wrote on the occasion of Mandela’s 90th birthday. It’s unclear that there was much benefit to expanding it into a compact book. Nevertheless, it can’t hurt to be reminded of Mandela’s wise and honorable example.
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