Product details
- ISBN 9781350522121
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 10 Dec 2026
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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The first biography of Nelson Mandela written by an African scholar, this groundbreaking book offers a radically de-mythologized take on a global icon of anticolonial liberation struggles.
Leading sociologist Xolela Mangcu draws on original interviews and archival research – as well as on his own unique understanding of the complexities of Black South African culture – to offer an important corrective account of Mandela’s identity, character, and political career. Mangcu not only sets the record straight about Mandela's Thembu, rather than Xhosa, heritage, but also uncovers a fundamental political pragmatism Mandela developed thanks to his family’s strategic alliances with colonialists and through his own Victorian-style education at leading British mission schools. What emerges is a Mandela whose life story belongs less to the realm of hagiography and more to the realm of real-world struggle, with all the contradictions it entails.
