<p>Conversations with Myself, which goes on sale on Tuesday, presents a more human Mandela, faults, frailties and all.<br /><br />Conversations was compiled with the 92-year-old former South African president’s blessing by a team of archivists, editors and collaborators who worked from decades of notes, letters, recorded conversations and other material.<br /><br />In a foreword, US President Barack Obama writes that Mandela, who largely retired from public life in 2004, is inspiring even if he is no saint.<br /><br />The possibility of violence within Mandela’s first marriage, to Evelyn Mase, who died in 2004, has no place in the official autobiography. <br /><br />In Conversations, Mandela puts his version on record. In a transcript of a conversation with Ahmed Kathrada, a friend and fellow veteran of the anti-apartheid struggle, Mandela denies he once tried to choke his first wife. Instead, he said, she threatened to burn him with a red hot poker. “So I caught hold of her and twisted her arm, enough for me to take this thing out,” Mandela says. “The poker away,” Kathrada responds. Mandela: “That’s all.”<br /><br />“I love playing and chatting with children, giving them a bath, feeding and putting them to bed with a little story, and being away from the family has troubled me throughout my political life,” he writes.<br /><br />Other passages are taken from notes Mandela made in calendars in his careful, upright penmanship. On Dec 12, 1984, he jotted: “Results: failed all six subjects.” He writes elsewhere of having too little time to study for his advanced law degree, taken by correspondence while he was in prison.<br /></p>
<p>Conversations with Myself, which goes on sale on Tuesday, presents a more human Mandela, faults, frailties and all.<br /><br />Conversations was compiled with the 92-year-old former South African president’s blessing by a team of archivists, editors and collaborators who worked from decades of notes, letters, recorded conversations and other material.<br /><br />In a foreword, US President Barack Obama writes that Mandela, who largely retired from public life in 2004, is inspiring even if he is no saint.<br /><br />The possibility of violence within Mandela’s first marriage, to Evelyn Mase, who died in 2004, has no place in the official autobiography. <br /><br />In Conversations, Mandela puts his version on record. In a transcript of a conversation with Ahmed Kathrada, a friend and fellow veteran of the anti-apartheid struggle, Mandela denies he once tried to choke his first wife. Instead, he said, she threatened to burn him with a red hot poker. “So I caught hold of her and twisted her arm, enough for me to take this thing out,” Mandela says. “The poker away,” Kathrada responds. Mandela: “That’s all.”<br /><br />“I love playing and chatting with children, giving them a bath, feeding and putting them to bed with a little story, and being away from the family has troubled me throughout my political life,” he writes.<br /><br />Other passages are taken from notes Mandela made in calendars in his careful, upright penmanship. On Dec 12, 1984, he jotted: “Results: failed all six subjects.” He writes elsewhere of having too little time to study for his advanced law degree, taken by correspondence while he was in prison.<br /></p>