The story of Zelda la Grange, Nelson Mandela's personal secretary, is about personal growth and social change. Her story begins with institutionalised racism.
A clerk sell copies of the book in Johannesburg, South Africa.
La Grange was here in Bangkok last month for the SEA Write Award gala at Mandarin Oriental, having published her memoir, Good Morning, Mr Mandela in July. For 16 of the 19 years that she worked for Mandela, she saw him every day. She was his manager, his confidante, his "white granddaughter".
Her story as a post-apartheid South African is particularly relevant to our own society, consumed by a conflict that has split the entire population in half for years. Our differences may not be marked by race, our conflict may not trace back to the colonial era, but our cultural sphere has long been polarised into two competing ideologies.
In the past two decades, la Grange witnessed a country so immensely fractured into two extremes beginning to heal, to deal with the atrocities committed, to forgive.
As an Afrikaner in the 70s, she was born into privilege. This was the South Africa where a white person could live her life without knowing that there was a liberation struggle going on outside of her white community, without ever seeing a black person as more than a servant. This was the South African population that grew up learning that Nelson Mandela was in jail for being a terrorist.
Apartheid South Africa was divided, not just between black and white, but among tribal lines. Black people lived in townships. Segregation was absolute, travelling was restricted, intermarriage prohibited.
La Grange, like all white South Africans, was raised by a black person.
"You love and adore her. But only her," la Grange recalled. "She's acceptable but as soon as she leaves our house, she's part of a different collective."
La Grange mentioned, although she would have been only six, that she had no idea about the Soweto Uprising in 1976, when students rose up to protest against Afrikaans being the language of instruction in schools. There is no uneasiness in her recollection.
La Grange was a part of the minority oppressing the majority. The press was controlled by the apartheid regime. Living in comfort meant there was no reason to ask questions. It was living in blissful ignorance.
La Grange feared the African National Congress. She voted for the conservatives. She voted against the abolishment of apartheid in a referendum. When her brother had to serve in the army, her biggest fear was that he was going to fight black people and therefore die. In a sense, she was a true Afrikaner. She wanted to marry at 23, have three children and raise them, and have a regular job.
It wasn't until Mandela's passing on December 5 last year that la Grange had the time to pause and reflect on his impact — not on South Africa and the rest of the world — but on herself.
She began writing down her experiences with Mandela in 2009, when a colleague had told her, "It's not just Mr Mandela who's getting old. You are too". She never before had time to take notes, but that night, she began recollecting her memories. When she finished, her account was 500,000 words long. She put aside her notes until last year when, with the help of a journalist friend, she began extracting parts that made up her memoir.
"I would be very irresponsible if I didn't measure the complete metamorphosis I've been through from the real beginning. I have to go back to admitting that — though very few people in South Africa would own up today — I was a racist," she said. "It would be unfair to [Mr Mandela] to say I was a bit liberal because I was not."
La Grange began working for Mandela's secretary in 1994. She was in her early 20s and while she has begun recognising the problems with apartheid, its abolishment didn't affect her directly.
"I still lived a privileged life," she admitted.
She found herself suddenly working for a black person who had a better education than her. Mandela's secretary at the time was educated outside of South Africa.
"We, as Afrikaners, were brought up to respect authority. Even with the roles reversed, I thought they were my boss and I respected them. She (Mandela's then secretary) treated me with respect," la Grange explains.
She had a great connection with Mandela — they had the same sense of humour and intolerance of inefficiency — and she became a poster child for Mandela's ideal of a rainbow nation.
She recalled friends of her family cutting her parents off when they saw her serving tea to a black man, President Mandela, in a documentary about his presidential office. She remembered, too, that after Mandela strategically wore the Springbok captain's jersey at the 1995 Rugby World Cup, she arranged to have his books signed at the request of the same friends. Eighteen years later, a month ago, these friends came to la Grange's speech in South Africa.
She learned from Mandela that "you have to allow people to come around at their own time, to go through their own processes". She understood she had changed quickly because of the world opened up to her by Mandela, and what she was exposed to travelling the world with him. During Mandela's post presidency years, la Grange was the only person standing between him and the rest of the world.
"Forgiveness is a decision," she said, quoting him. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission set up during the transition to full democracy, la Grange believes, was very important as a channel where people could begin to unload their emotions. While such an approach has been reproduced and imitated in various capacities across the world, la Grange conceded that, for some, the public hearings hadn't provided closure for all levels of society. The Afrikaners essentially got away scot-free.
"But any attempt is better than nothing," she said.
Two decades after the abolishment of apartheid, la Grange is honest about the troubles and the resentment that still plague South African society today. Inequality has slowly shifted from racial to economic, but the economic is still largely racial.
The new constitution begins: "South Africa belongs to all who live in it."
"Today, a black person has the freedom to live in a white suburb, but [the majority of] black people still cannot afford to live in a white neighbourhood. It has been 20 years. It is not going to take 50 years. It is going to take hundreds of years for us to be an integrated society. But it's a miracle that we went from 1990 to 1994 without descending into a civil war," she said.
La Grange's own existence is defined by her work for Mandela, for how he has changed her.
"For 16 years, I saw him wake up believing that if he did certain things, if he could just change one person by setting an example and inspiring them, he could change the world," she said. "He used to say, every day, that it is harder to change yourself than to change others."
She credits former president F.W. de Klerk for his work with Mandela — it takes two people to communicate. In the "anarchic" South African parliament today, she reminds people of how Mandela and de Klerk engaged with one another, how they put peace before everything else.
At 44, la Grange feels she needs maturity to comprehend the impact of working for Mandela. Her book, which she read and edited 17 times, has given her some room for reflection. It had, at the very least, occupied her time since Mandela's death. She still hasn't completely adjusted to a life without him.
"There was a boy who called into a radio station. He's young. He didn't live through apartheid. He called to say he never understood white people until he read my book. I thought that was the best compliment anyone could give me," she said.
In writing her book, la Grange has brought into practice what Mandela had impressed upon her — to engage with people individually to try to change the world.
"A week later, I got an email from an Afrikaner girl, who's 25 years old. She is a 'born-free', as we call them," she said. "Her parents are my age and she considers them very racist. She's a student at a liberal university and they fight over every meal when she goes home. She says she now knows how to deal with her parents after reading my book.
"British newspaper The Sunday Times wrote a review and they put it perfectly. They said that I was spectacularly ill-equipped for the [secretary] job."
