The first time she met her new boss, she cried. “It was all too much,” she says; perhaps because Nelson Mandela kindly addressed her in her “home language,” and not his own.
Soon, Madiba (his clan name) began to rely on la Grange for everything. She read to him, helped with speeches, traveled with him, soothed his temper, and protected his time. He called her on her phone, sometimes a hundred times a day. The “same man my Afrikaner compatriots warned me against” became like a beloved grandfather to her, and she fretted over his needs and his health until the end of his life, when his office closed, she was demoted, and was denied access to his sickroom.
“I made a promise [to stick with him],” she says. “I was going to be there right to the end, even if it meant I had to stand at a fence outside his farm…when they laid him to rest. Unbeknown to me, that would be close to the truth.”
We do love our saints, which is why “Good Morning, Mr. Mandela is so interesting: author Zelda la Grange gives us a beautiful portrait of a beautiful man, but it’s a picture with surprising exposure.
Yes, “Good Morning, Mr. Mandela” has its first-time-author flaws and yes, it can be repetitive, but catch that hero-as-a-man facet, and I don’t think you’ll mind.
(“Good Morning, Mr. Mandela” by Zelda la Grange, c.2014, Viking, $28.95/$33 Canada, 368 pages.)
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