Tafelberg
Review: Brian Joss
Nelson Mandela’s release after 27 years of incarceration was not simply a matter of opening the prison gates and sending him on his way as a free man. The true story of Mandela’s “long walk to freedom” is detailed in these secret archives which were bequeathed to historian Jan-Ad Stemmet by Kobie Coetsee, the National Party’s former justice minister. Coetsee had a close relationship with Mandela but history doesn’t seem to have acknowledged the role he played in the future president’s life. Co-author, veteran journalist and editor Riaan de Villiers, writes that Coetsee was about to hand over more than 13 000 pages of archived material to Stemmet when he died suddenly, However, in 2013 Stemmet received a call from Huibre Lombard, head of the Archive for Contemporary Affairs (ARC) at the University of the Free State who told him they were cataloguing new material that he may be interested in. As a young historian in 2000 Stemmet interviewe