Long Walk To Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela.

MANDELA, Nelson .

$5,500.00

Item Number: 140892

South Africa: MacDonald Purnell, 1994.

First South African edition of this classic autobiography, which has went on to sell over six million copies worldwide. Octavo, original black cloth, cartographic endpapers, illustrated with photographs. Boldly signed on the title page by the author, “NMandela 15.3.06” and additionally signed by “Mac Maharaj 20 Sept 2007” on the verso of the front free endpaper. Maharaj was a political activist and member of the then banned South African Communist Party, who worked in a clandestine manner on anti-apartheid activities with Nelson Mandela. In July 1964, Maharaj was arrested in Johannesburg, charged and convicted with four others including Laloo Chiba and Wilton Mkwayi on charges of sabotage in the little Rivonia Trial, and was imprisoned on Robben Island with Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki and other revolutionary prisoners. In prison he secretly transcribed parts of Mandela’s memoir Long Walk to Freedom and smuggled it out of the prison in 1976.Fine in a near fine dust jacket. A unique example.

"The Nelson Mandela who emerges from his memoir is considerably more human than the icon of legend Mandela is, on the evidence of his amazing life, neither a messiah nor a moralist nor really a revolutionary but a pragmatist to the core, a shrewd balancer of honor and interests. He is, to use a word unhappily fallen into disrepute, a politician, though one distinguished from lesser practitioners of his calling mainly by his unwavering faith in his ultimate objective, ending white minority rule" (New York Times). It is the basis for the film titled Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom directed by Justin Chadwick, written by William Nicholson, produced by Anant Singh and starring Idris Elba.