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Good Morning, Mr. Mandela by Zelda la Grange: book review



Good Morning, Mr. Mandela (2014) is the memoir of the woman who was Nelson Mandela’s secretary and personal aide for 19 years from 1994, when she was 23 years old, to 2013, when Mandela died at the age of 95.

On 10 May 1994 South Africa’s first democratically elected black president was inaugurated. He was Nelson Mandela (1918-2013), leader of the African National Congress (ANC), after his release from prison in 1990, serving 27 years for conspiring to overthrow the state. His presidency came after 43 years of apartheid – racial segregation – from 1948-1991. He was president for five years, and forever famous.

In Mandela’s aim to have an inclusive government administration, he chose Zelda la Grange, a white Afrikaner, as his typist. This is her story: the story of a young girl of white privilege who considered Mandela as a revolutionary and a terrorist. It is her journal of change and how one man – the very person she despised – led her nation to reconciliation and her life to one of duty and dedication to the person she called Khulu – grandfather.

La Grange describes the change as a ‘slow metamorphoses of the mind and a belief system’ and Mandela as her saviour.

She writes of the mundane daily life of a typist, yet it is full of political history, a history that the world followed through Mandela’s every word and deed. She writes of the first day at work as the president’s typist, when the president was already 76 years of age. She writes of his third wedding on his 80th birthday in 1998 to Graca Machel, 27 years his junior.

She also writes of the transition from his presidential office to his non-presidential years in which the Nelson Mandela Foundation developed. This included travel to visit the heads of state in other countries, and becoming Mandela’s ‘gatekeeper’ to ensure that the flow of people visiting him remained manageable.

The memoir is detailed and comprehensive, long and interesting, leaving out nothing, from the first day she met Nelson Mandela to the day of his funeral. Along the way are lessons in tolerance and understanding, forgiveness, loyalty, leadership and duty.






MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).
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