Conversations with Myself

An unprecedented personal portrait of one of the great leaders of our time

With a foreword by President Barack Obama

Nelson Mandela is one of the most inspiring and iconic figures of our age. Now, after a lifetime of taking pen to paper to record thoughts and events, hardships and victories, he has opened his personal archive, which offers an unprecedented insight into his remarkable life.

Conversations With Myself gives readers access to the private man behind the public figure: from letters written in the darkest hours of Mandela's twenty-seven years of imprisonment to the draft of an unfinished sequel to Long Walk to Freedom. Here he is making notes and even doodling during meetings, or recording troubled dreams on the desk calendar of his cell on Robben Island; writing journals while on the run during the anti-apartheid struggles in the early 1960s, or conversing with friends in almost seventy hours of recorded conversations. In these pages he is neither an icon nor a saint; here he is like you and me.

An intimate journey from the first stirrings of his political conscience to his galvanizing role on the world stage, Conversations With Myself is a rare chance to spend time with Nelson Mandela the man, in his own voice: direct, clear, private.

About The Author

Nelson Mandela was born in Transkei, South Africa on 18 July 1918. He joined the African National Congress in 1944 and was engaged in resistance against the ruling national Party’s apartheid Policies after 1948, from 1964 to 1982, he was incarcerated at Robben Island prison and then later moved to polismoor prison, during which his reputation as a potent symbol of resistance to the anti-apartheid movement grew steadily. Released for prison in 1990, Mandela won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983 and was inaugurated as the first democratically-elected president of South Africa in 1994. He is the author of the international bestseller long walk to Freedom.