Mandela's Way: Fifteen Lessons on Life, Love, and Courage
Richard Stengel
Language: English
Pages: 96
ISBN: 2:00195774
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A compact, profoundly inspiring book that captures the spirit of Nelson Mandela, distilling the South African leader's wisdom into 15 vital life lessons
We long for heroes and have too few. Nelson Mandela, who recently celebrated his ninety-fourth birthday, is the closest thing the world has to a secular saint. He liberated a country from a system of violent prejudice and helped unite oppressor and oppressed in a way that had never been done before.
Now Richard Stengel, the editor of Time magazine, has distilled countless hours of intimate conversation with Mandela into fifteen essential life lessons. For nearly three years, including the critical period when Mandela moved South Africa toward the first democratic elections in its history, Stengel collaborated with Mandela on his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, and traveled with him everywhere. Eating with him, watching him campaign, hearing him think out loud, Stengel came to know all the different sides of this complex man and became a cherished friend and colleague.
In Mandela's Way, Stengel recounts the moments in which "the grandfather of South Africa" was tested and shares the wisdom he learned: why courage is more than the absence of fear, why we should keep our rivals close, why the answer is not always either/or but often "both," how important it is for each of us to find something away from the world that gives us pleasure and satisfaction--our own garden. Woven into these life lessons are remarkable stories--of Mandela's childhood as the protégé of a tribal king, of his early days as a freedom fighter, of the twenty-seven-year imprisonment that could not break him, and of his fulfilling remarriage at the age of eighty.
This uplifting book captures the spirit of this extraordinary man--warrior, martyr, husband, statesman, and moral leader--and spurs us to look within ourselves, reconsider the things we take for granted, and contemplate the legacy we'll leave behind.
that he so loved was closest to a race war of black against white on a scale never seen before. His measured response to this crisis was a large part of the reason that South Africa did not plunge into civil war. Sometimes being calm comes perilously close to being dull, but this does not seem to bother Mandela. He would always prefer to err on the side of being calm and dull than being exciting and excitable. He likes to tell the story of a letter he received from a woman in Cape Town who had
understands the limits of any one person’s leadership, even his own. When he emerged from prison, he was a kind of African Rip Van Winkle. Friends and colleagues tutored him on everything under the sun: women’s rights, the modern media, AIDS and HIV, and dozens of other subjects. This was both a necessary remedial education and an expression of the African idea of collective leadership. Since boyhood he had understood that collective leadership was about two things: the greater wisdom of the
he thought it would make him seem more heroic to the outside world. No, he did not actually think his white jailers had been kind to him, but he wanted to show the white public that he was not angry or bitter. He always did a great deal of planning around how a policy or an action would appear. No detail was too superficial to merit his attention. He analyzed campaign posters and pondered whom he should shake hands with. Many times I sat next to him in the back of his car as he waited for the
pointed his finger at Mandela and said, “Be careful. Don’t talk about things you haven’t seen or you will get in serious trouble.” There was a silence, at which point Mandela turned to the judges and calmly said, “You can see what type of commanding officer we have. If he threatens me in your presence, you can imagine what he does when you are not here.” Mandela told that story to illustrate the worst side of Badenhorst. But then he quickly segued to a second story about when Badenhorst left the
figures and heads of state like Winston Churchill and Haile Selassie; from the words of Machiavelli and Tolstoy. But the twenty-seven years he spent in prison became the crucible that both hardened him and burned away all that was extraneous. Prison taught him self-control, discipline, and focus—the things he considers essential to leadership—and it taught him how to be a full human being. The Nelson Mandela who emerged from prison at seventy-one was a different man from the Nelson Mandela who