The British journalist John Carlin is writing a book on Mandela (Mandela. Playing the Enemy, will be published by Atlantic Books in September) and the UK Observer’s just published an excerpt from it. Carlin plays up the “unlikeliness” of Mandela’s close relationship with Zelda la Grange, the white Afrikaans-speaking “daughter of apartheid,” raised in Pretoria’s white suburbs. Carlin once had an edge as a journalist (he wrote some good journalism on Apartheid’s proxy war on anti-apartheid supporters in the townships in the early 1990s), but now writes mainly about Spanish football (he spent a lot of ink on David Beckham’s mediocre skills) so this puff piece is no exception. The piece is also a bit over the top, reeking of the Rainbowism and “Mandela as Messiah” tropes and is all about its novelty value: look she’s white, Afrikaner and does not have horns. They’re quite normal. That’s interesting enough in itself. In that way it contains a common refrain in some mainstream British journalism about (white) Afrikaners. Here’s the introduction:
It is, as they say in South Africa, a hell of a thing. Rags to riches, redemption, love: there’s a smattering of all the fairy-tale classics in the story of Zelda la Grange, a young Afrikaner girl who rose from middle-class obscurity, and a blindly ignorant apartheid past, to win the affection and trust of a black man who was once the most feared enemy of her family and her volk and is now, by global consent (volk not excluded), the greatest political figure alive.
Read the whole thing here.
I suspect that in his book Carlin will also play up the significance of Mandela putting on a replica Springbok rugby jersey in front of an overwhelmingly white crowd at the 1995 World Cup Rugby Final. He gave a hint in this earlier piece.
1 response so far ↓
Lara Pawson // June 13, 2008 at 4:28 am
John Carlin, I understand, used to be something of an expert on South Africa during the apartheid years. Today, from what I have gathered during the last 8 months reading his shoddy works, he is more interested in name dropping politician X or minister Y with whom he enjoys sharing a bottle of Chardonnay. Like so many journalists writing on Africa of a particular generation, they all jumped on the bandwagon of liberation and many did a damned fine job. But today, they - like many liberation politicians - have become corrupted. They cease to think - preferring to drink - and pat each other on the back about the good ol’ days and how ‘we’ more or less ‘won the war’. His coverage of the ANC Polokowane conference at the end of last year was dreadful: he trades on his name and his past, and South Africa’s past, but fails to listen and reflect on the present. It would be good for South Africa if he stuck to Posh and Beckham full time and ceased to dip back and forth into their beloved country.
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