I’m no saint, says Mandela in book
October 11, 2010 03:02 am
The book ‘Conversations with Myself’ goes on sale on Tuesday, but passages printed in British and South African papers show his thoughts on everything from the danger of corruption in power to his grief at his son’s death.
Decades’ worth of letters, diaries and private recordings were distilled by his eponymous Foundation in a project that purports to show the private man behind the global icon.
Now 92, the man who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his
struggle against the white-minority apartheid government says he does not want
to be remembered as a larger-than-life saint. “One issue that deeply worried me
in prison was the false image I unwittingly projected to the outside world; of
being regarded as a saint,” he said in an excerpt printed in
In letters written to his family while in prison, Mandela
wrote that he felt “soaked in gall” by being powerless to help his then-wife
Winnie and his children, according to