Long Walk to Freedom, by Nelson Mandela (Little, Brown, 556 pp., $24.95)
THIS autobiography may not “electrify the world,” as its publisher promises, but it should startle readers who expected to find Nelson Mandela’s leftist credo transmogrified by recent experience. The world’s premier freedom fighter still sees in Marxism “the simplicity and generosity of the golden rule,” buttressed by “the scientific underpinnings of dialectical materialism,” and acclaims it as “offering both a searchlight illuminating the dark night of racial oppression and a tool that could be used to end it.” Revealed here is a politician still open to the possibility that democracy might “be best expressed by a one-party system” and an Afrocentrist who thinks that Cleopatra was black. In other areas, however, Mr. Mandela writes disingenuously, and he is especially reticent about revealing his persistent and rabid loathing of the West: e.g., in the first major address of his career he depicted America and the West as being governed by “tiny ruling circles” of “crazy men” intent on employing “instruments of mass destruction” in “a desperate and last-minute fight to preserve a decadent and bankrupt civilization,” which had reached “the final stage of monopoly capitalism gone mad, namely, fascism.” Mr. Mandela neglects to mention this and similar tirades. Instead he offers platitudes about having always admired the democratic institutions of Britain and the United States, which is the sort of thing he used to reserve for the Rivonia trial courtroom and other politically unreliable audiences.
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