Pan Macmillan announces it has acquired UK & Commonwealth rights to the book which is likely to tackle Nelson Mandela’s divorce from his second wife Winnie.
“I have taken a moment here to rest, to steal a view of the glorious vista that surrounds me, to look back on the distance I have come. But I can rest only for a moment, for with freedom come responsibilities, and I dare not linger, for my long walk is not yet ended.”
So ends Nelson’s Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom, one of the best selling political memoirs of all time. But after 115 chapters and 751 pages, charting his rise from herd boy to prisoner to president, the narrative slides to halt in 1994. Which begs the question: what really happened next?
More than 20 years later, the world will finally get an answer with the posthumous publication of a sequel based on a little known manuscript that Mandela wrote by hand but never completed, chronicling his time as South Africa’s first black president. Pan Macmillan announced on March 24 that it has acquired the UK and Commonwealth rights to the book which, as yet untitled, will hit shelves next year.
The Johannesburg-based foundation has released the first page of the book, dated 16 October 1998. It begins: “Men and women, all over the world, right down the centuries, come and go. Some leave nothing behind, not even their names. It would seem that they never existed at all. Others do leave something behind: the haunting memory of the evil deeds they committed against other people.”
See full report via Mail & Guardian
