Nelson Mandela's correspondence during his prison years was prolific. Catherine Masters talks to the man he trusted to sift through and share it.
Verne Harris adores the man he calls Madiba. This is Nelson Mandela's clan name and his preferred title.
Initially, admits the 52-year-old former anti-apartheid activist, he had little time for the myth-making surrounding the creation of the new South Africa after the fall of the hated apartheid regime.
However, he says with a wry smile, it was interesting that when he was first formally introduced to Mandela he couldn't feel his knees.
"There is something very powerful about this human being... I think it has to do primarily with the extent with which his life story has become the origins-myth of the 'new South Africa'.
"You just can't get away from it. He is the living embodiment of that whole journey and just the way he conducts himself so expresses that.
"He has a gravitas which is extraordinary."
Nelson Mandela can't be here - he's 92 now and has been known to stay in his pyjamas all day.
But even if he was here sitting in the lounge area at Hotel DeBrett in Auckland alongside Harris, a trained historian and Mandela's chief archivist, and was asked a personal question it's likely Harris would give the fuller answer.
This is because Mandela is notoriously difficult to get to open up about himself. The most revered man on the planet is also one of the most private.
Which is why his latest book is so important, says Harris, who compiled Conversations with Myself, a tome which unbares the private soul of South Africa's hero.
Harris heads the memory part of the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory and Dialogue in Johannesburg and led the team which took on the immense task of reading, documenting and then compiling into a book excerpts from the long letters Mandela wrote over nearly three decades of prison - to his beloved wife Winnie and many others - and from notes scribbled on calendars or in diaries and notebooks, and also edited highlights from recorded conversations with old friends.
Harris gives a soft whistle.
"Phew ... I would say thousands [of records]. I mean, we've been through all the prison files and there are a lot of personal records there because the authorities were confiscating materials and were copying all his letters, both sent by him and received by him, I would estimate easily around 100,000 pages just in that one accumulation."
Screeds of information, in other words, condensed in somewhat higgledy piggledy fashion across more than 400 pages which capture both the pain of imprisonment and subsequent neglect of family but also the steady determination and tactics employed to continue the struggle against injustice.
The intention was to not present another seamless narrative, Harris says, because pretty much all other books on Mandela have already done so. "We wanted to suggest in the book itself the kind of fragmented, scattered nature of any personal archive, but especially his."
And so the book gently rolls along, sometimes describing the ache of an imprisoned father banned from attending a son's funeral and sometimes jumping to one of the charming conversations with Ahmed Kathrada, a fellow prisoner, as they reminisce about the past, forgetting the tape is turned on, two old friends who affectionately interrupt each other and finish each other's sentences.
The book is Mandela's voice but it was Harris' decision what to put in and what to leave out.
When Mandela began handing over his private papers to the memory centre in 2004 he was very engaged in the process but over time he tired and told Harris he could do as he pleased with the material.
"He doesn't want to be burdened with it," Harris says.
"He deserves to rest now."
Actually, he says, only the past six to 12 months have probably seen Mandela assert more freedom than he has before.
He's finally saying "enough" and has handed over to the next generations.
"He's saying 'I'm doing exactly as I please - I'm not getting out of my pyjamas today."
Or he might say, "today I want to go to Soweto," and get into the car with an old friend and off they'll go, even if the security guards are not fully prepared.
And that's great, says Harris, because after all those years in prison which were then followed by years of being surrounded by security guards and personal assistants, Mandela is doing what he wants.
That leaves quite a responsibility, for people like Harris though - to be the keepers of the memory of a man so beloved and one who may not be around much longer.
Harris quickly says that he is not a keeper of memory, but a sharer of memory.
And more than that, a troubler of memory, he says.
What does he mean by troubler?
"Well," says Harris, "and we take this straight from him, he always says to us 'stop focusing on me, find space for the people around me'.
"And so, for example, we're doing an exhibition early next year, and we're doing the research right now on Robert Subukwe who was one of the great adversaries of Nelson Mandela and who represents a contrary thread in the tapestry in Africanism and black consciousness.
"I don't think we've really come to terms with those voices and it's one of the reasons why we're struggling as a nation, I think."
South Africa has relied on Mandela but it has to move on, he thinks.
Though Mandela took the reconciliation path, that path has not addressed the many, many "voices of rage", such as Mandela's ex-wife Winnie who advocated "necklacing',' the horrific method of burning people alive by putting tyres around their necks, soaking them in petrol and setting them alight.
Only a tiny part of the book deals with Mandela's pain over the path his wife took, which he never condoned.
On page 256 Kathrada says: "You see there is this question of you ... where you are supposed to have approved of the 'necklace speech' of Winnie."
Mandela says: "Gee whiz".
There's a little more, where Mandela says he "expressly condemned the thing," but the great love affair between him and Winnie which ended in such sadness and divorce after his release will likely be the subject of another book.
Though many of Mandela's letters to Winnie are printed in this book, her letters to him are still being collated.
As a country, says Harris, South Africa has to reckon with this relationship, and Winnie Mandela herself, in a way it has not even begun to.
"I think Madiba believed that we could embrace that rage and we could enable it to dissipate, but we haven't got that right and unless we find ways now of creating space for that rage we're going to be struggling even more than we are now."
In some ways, Mandela was sheltered in those long years in jail, he says, whereas Winnie, who was younger than him, was harassed and also imprisoned and became a more radical and less forgiving voice.
"I mean, this notion of forgiveness," Harris says. "How do you forgive the unforgivable? And how can anyone expect you to, or demand, that you do it?
"I think that we did, institutionally, make that demand of South Africa through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The whole rationale was that you forgive the oppressor if the oppressor makes a full disclosure."
But this has not worked and true reconciliation may take generations.
"I think forgiveness," Harris says, "it's not an act of mercy on the part of one to another.
"I think it's more a rendezvous. It's something that comes, when it wants to come."
A peek inside prison life
Calendar entries made by Nelson Mandela when he was imprisoned on Robben Island, just off the coast of Cape Town.
August 18 1976
Received information on arrest of Zami (Winnie). CO [Commanding Officer] denies that birthday card came.
August 23 1976
Informed by W/O [Warrant Officer] Barnard that birthday card withheld.
December 8 1976
Begin reading Bury my Heart Dee Brown: sent letter U [University of] London.
December 23 1976
Zindzi's [daughter] birthday.
January 17 1977
Gossiping about others is certainly a vice, a virtue when about oneself.
January 20 1977
Dreamt of Kgatho [a son] falling into a ditch and injuring leg.
February 21 1977
Raid by approximately 15 warders under W/O Barnard.
March 2 1977
Heavy tremor at 6.55am [there had been an earthquake on the mainland].
March 11 1979
DDD Syndrome: debility, dependency, dread.
May 20 1979
Virus again active, starts from left eye to the right one.
May 23 1979
I dream of coming home at night with doors wide open and Zami asleep on one bed and in the other chdn [children], possible Zeni and Zindzi. Many school children outside. I embrace Zami and she orders me to bed.
June 1 1979
It's easy to hope, it's the wanting that spoils it.
June 2 1979
In a sick country every step to health is an insult to those who live on its sickness. The purpose of freedom is to create it for others.
Nelson Mandela: Conversations with Myself (Pan Macmillan $69.99)
