The World

Yet Haile Selassie was the iconic African leader. In February 1962, he invited African freedom fighters to a Pan-African Freedom Movement conference in Addis Ababa, at which, wearing a gorgeously braided, bemedalled uniform, he was the first speaker. He was followed by a South African lawyer, travelling for the first time: Nelson Mandela. The forty-three-year-old Mandela was fascinated by ‘how small the emperor appeared, but his dignity and confidence made him seem like the African giant he was’. This was so even though Ethiopia was no democracy: ‘Only the emperor was supreme.’

Mandela – clan name Madiba – was a prince of the Xhosa people of Thembu, in Transkei, northern Cape, descended from King Zwide. His father, counsellor of the Thembu king, was sacked for defying the British, but Mandela was adopted by his people’s charismatic regent and raised with the princes. ‘My later notions of leadership were influenced by observing the regent,’ who groomed him to be counsellor, sending him to Methodist boarding schools. After qualifying as a lawyer and marrying a nurse Evelyn, the tall, handsome Mandela joined the African National Congress (ANC), because ‘To be an African in South Africa means one’s politicized from birth.’ Mandela devoted his life to the campaign against apartheid. He was repeatedly arrested, his dedication leading to the estrangement of his wife, with whom he had a son. Then: ‘As I passed a bus stop, I noticed out of the corner of my eye a lovely young woman waiting for the bus.’ Mandela fell in love with Winnie Madikizela – ‘her passion, her youth, her courage, her wilfulness’ – and ‘My love for her gave me added strength for the struggles that lay ahead,’ and two children.

In 1960, police in Sharpeville killed sixty-nine protesters and wounded 249, igniting further protests for which Mandela was arrested. But when he was acquitted ‘I became a creature of the night,’ nicknamed the Black Pimpernel. He now founded the ANC’s military wing – Spear of the Nation – which started a bombing campaign. Haile Selassie invited Mandela and his comrades for military training. But when he got home from Addis, the Pimpernel was arrested.

In prison, ‘The officer turned a blind eye [to him and Winnie] and we embraced and clung to each other.’ At his trial for high treason and terrorism Mandela, dressed not in a suit but in a Xhosa leopard-skin kaross, declared in a speech, ‘I am prepared to die.’ On 12 June 1964, he was sentenced to life imprisonment. Confined on Robben Island – from where only one prisoner had ever escaped to the mainland – the guards greeted him by chanting in Afrikaans: ‘This is the island. Here you will die!’ When he was defiant, they threatened, ‘Look, man, we’ll kill you, no fooling, your wives and children will never know what happened.’

Mandela deployed steely discipline and daily meditation to survive, writing to Winnie that prison was ‘an ideal place to learn to know yourself … At least, if for nothing else, the cell gives you the opportunity to look daily into your entire conduct, to overcome the bad and develop whatever is good,’ adding, ‘Never forget a saint is a sinner who keeps on trying.’ While he was away, his eldest son was killed in a crash, and Winnie often arrested. In his letters to her, he acclaimed ‘your devastating beauty and charm … Remember, hope is a powerful weapon when all else is lost … You’re in my thoughts every moment.’ His twenty-seven years in prison corroded their marriage yet burnished his legend.

Meanwhile, on 25 May 1963, in Addis, Haile Selassie, paragon of African rulers, invited his rivals to the first meeting of his Organization of African Unity: Nkrumah, Anglophone Marxist, hoped to lead a United States of Africa with its own army; Francophone Papa, Houphouët of Ivory Coast, mocked his ambitions. Haile Selassie held the balance between the two, leading the organization before handing over to Nkrumah the Redeemer.

‘I know decolonization is disastrous,’ said de Gaulle privately. ‘They’re again going to experience tribal wars, witchcraft, cannibalism,’ yet ‘The Americans and Russians think they’ve a vocation to free colonized populations and are outbidding each other.’ Khrushchev was the first to spot the opportunity of ‘uprisings against rotten reactionary regimes, against colonizers’, promising ‘to march in the front rank with peoples fighting national liberation struggles’. The proxy wars of the superpowers – a second scramble, this time in the name of decolonization and freedom – would kill more Africans than the first.