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Soon after the Mandela government took power, British newspaper editors began to ask South African journalists if they could write a warts-and-all piece. “We’ve all heard that he’s a living saint, a man of heroic fortitude who stood by his principles for 28 years in jail and then showed a wonderful lack of bitterness when he came out,” they said. “But he’s also just a working politician who makes compromises and blunders and has faults. Let’s have that fuller picture.” Such requests were never answered. For Mandela, far more than Ronald Reagan, was the true Teflon president. When Graca Machel, his third wife, said “He’s so easy to love”, most of us knew what she meant. Everyone who met him, from Bill Clinton to the Spice Girls, said he was wonderful and, after so many disappointments elsewhere, the world longed for a genuine Third World hero, a black saint who could become a role model everywhere from Brixton to Soweto to Los Angeles. It would have been an act of sacrilege to criticise him. Within South Africa it would be regarded as unpatriotic. And your ANC sources would then all dry up.

This story should be borne in mind whenever you see a biography of Mandela. Anthony Sampson’s authorised biography slavishly followed the ANC line, swallowing a number of absolute whoppers. But we also have two other hagiographic biographies and Mandela’s autobiography. For another biography to be worthwhile it has to justify the word “critical”. Tom Lodge is well placed to do this: before emigrating to Ireland he was long a leading South African political scientist. He knows the relevant materials better than the other biographers and he writes judiciously and well. Despite that he fails the test.

There has, for example, been a deal of controversy over whether Mandela was, despite his denials in court, a Communist party member. At the time, the South African Communist party (SACP) routinely included many who hid their membership to evade the Suppression of Communism Act. Communist influence was extremely strong in the ANC of the 1950s, indeed its foundation Freedom Charter was drafted by a white communist and Mandela worked closely and continuously with communists likesuch as Joe Slovo, Ruth First and Bram Fischer, who would have been reluctant to repose such trust in a non-SACP member. It was only when Mandela made his trip around Africa in 1961, where he came under strong pressure from many African leaders to loosen the ANC’s ties with the party, that he seems to have reconsidered. Slovo, indeed, concluded, “We sent Mandela off round Africa as a communist and he came back a nationalist.”

Mandela’s later disagreements in jail with the SACP hard-liner Govan Mbeki (Thabo’s father) are well documented, but this still leaves his earlier party membership an open question. A great amount of one’s interpretation of Mandela’s role in the 1950s and his speedy ascent to the ANC leadership depends on what line one takes on this, yet Lodge simply ignores the entire controversy. The question of whether Mandela’s final capture by the police — he had been known as the “Black Pimpernel” — was due to a CIA tip-off is similarly ignored.

A “critical biography” might have raised many questions about Mandela’s great political trials. In these he relied on advice from Slovo and Fischer, who were, of course, not merely lawyers but SACP leaders. It was decided in both cases that Mandela should simply ignore the charges, call no witnesses, offer no evidence and simplymerely use the courtroom to make a majorsignificant political statement. This worked: Mandela’s speeches from the dock rang around the world during the long years of his incarceration, but it was also considered vital, at all costs, to protect Mandela from cross-examination. Lodge might usefully have considered what lay behind such thinking,, asalsowho had helped Mandela write those speeches, and whose idea the choreography was. In the first trial, Mandela appeared in the courtroom wearing leopard skins with a praise singer walking before him intoning his royal Xhosa lineage — a habitguise in which he was never seen before or since. Mandela was quite self-consciously a “modern” figure, emphatically not a tribalist, who loved dressing as the glamorous epitome of 1950s Jo’burg style. Tribal costume is most unlikely to have been his idea.

Lodge might also have offered his view on the fact that Slovo, despite an SACP order to its members not to leave the country, had fled abroad leaving behind a copy of “Operation Mayibuye”, which was to sink Mandela and his comrades at the Rivonia trial in 1963-4. Mayibuye called for the landing of thousands of Umkhonto guerrilla fighters, borne by planes and submarines, on the Transkei coast. Lodge does not say so but, of course, the planes and submarines were to be courtesy of the USSR, the plan thus envisaging a large-scale Soviet military intervention whichthat could easily have led to a third world war. He tells us that Slovo and Mbeki insisted that the plan had ANC approval, while Mandela insisted that it didn’t: this is left unresolved. Oddly, Lodge names the key witness against Mandela as Bruce Mtolo, a former guerrilla militant turned state witness. Mtolo was certainly deadly — he described how Mandela had instructed ANC guerrillas travelling in Africa to hide their communist affiliations and confirmed that Mandela was the Umkhonto leader — butbut his name was not Bruce, it was Bruno. Bruno may, as it is reported here, have been a recidivist criminal but I have not forgotten the pride with which his SACP recruiter introduced him to me before he decided to change sides.

Perhaps the best sections of Lodge’s book is are those concerned with Mandela’s prison years, where he has artfully spun together a telling narrative from many different sources. It is hard for anyone to deal with the Mandela presidency: what, after all, could have been expected of a 76-year-old, with no government experience, taking power? Looking back, his tolerance of corruption and his refusal even to sack Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, the health minister who disastrously neglected to do anything about Aids, were fatal flaws. Mandela’s message of racial reconciliation was, however, of such overwhelming importance that such sins easily dissolve in it.

South Africans were not at all sure what sort of man was going to walk out of the prison doors after 28 years: it could have been a Banda or a Mugabe. They were unbelievably lucky in what they got, and the years have not dimmed that judgement.

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