EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW AND PHOTOS
ON A POIGNANT TENTH ANNIVERSARY
REMEMBERS THE FATHER AND STATESMAN SHE SHARED WITH THE WORLD
As the eldest living child of the world’s most revered and beloved statesman, Dr Makaziew Mandela appreciates both the privilege and responsibility that her name carries.
“I tell people I’m not related to my father,” the 69-year-old says with an easy laugh that she’s clearly inherited from Nelson Mandela, regarded by many as the greatest political leader of the 20th century. “When people ask me, I say: ‘No, the Mandela name is very common in South Africa.’
“It becomes too much. I’m not him, I’m his progeny.”
She strives, however, to keep the legacy alive. “One of the things I’ve learnt with my father is he was true and authentic to who he was. He was a proud Tembu man and he tried his best to care for and nurture people.
“When he met you, you’d feel like the most important person in the world, whether you were a servant or royalty, because he treated people equally,” she adds proudly of the anti-apartheid activist who spent 27 years in prison before becoming South Africa’s first black president in 1994. “He was a leader people wanted and desired, who touched your heart and soul.”
He also loved to gossip and had an appreciation for beautiful women, she discloses during our interview at London’s exclusive The Stafford hotel, a stone’s throw from St James’s Palace.
PERSONAL MEMORIES
A public speaker who passionately tackles issues including female empowerment, social justice and diversity, Dr Maki has spent the past year preserving her father’s memory by writing her book Mandela: In Honor of an Extraordinary Life, published in the tenth anniversary year of his death and coinciding with Black History Month.
It’s a beautiful book filled with personal photographs, letters, family stories and sketches by the man she calls Tata. It covers his childhood growing up in the village of Qunu, where his family had close links to the royal house of the Tembu people, his time in Johannesburg as leader of the African National Congress fighting apartheid, his three decades of imprisonment and his role as president and philanthropist.
