New book brings the Mandela years to life

Author Linda Zama, second from left, with fellow panellists at the launch of her book Beyond the Icon at the Homecoming Centre of the District Six Museum in Cape Town on Saturday. From left: Lumko Sifumba, Zama, Dr Iqbal Survé, Priscilla Stuurman Molefe and Kiru Naidoo

It was raining when the late former president Nelson Mandela queued to leave a dinner hosted by Queen Elizabeth II aboard the royal yacht in 1995.

And as the guests filed out, he turned to his lawyer, Linda Zama, and told her what he wanted her to find for him before morning.

“Linda, I want an all-weather coat, gumboots and an umbrella,” Zama quoted him as saying at the launch of Beyond the Icon , the book she wrote about the leadership lessons she had drawn from working at Mandela’s side.

The launch was held at the Homecoming Centre of the District Six Museum in Buitenkant Street, Cape Town, on Saturday, and the hall was packed.

Guests at the Queen's dinner had to start leaving at a quarter to 10 so that it could end on the hour, and none of them could speak to her unless she spoke to them first.

At 8am the next morning Zama phoned the manager of Casanova, a men's boutique on the ground floor of her Durban office building that sold imported Italian menswear, and told him what she needed.

"And he says 'but Mrs Zama, you know we don't sell these things,'" Zama said.

The manager phoned back within half an hour to say he had everything on the list and had laid a red carpet at the door.

Mandela then insisted on going to the shops himself, at month-end in central Durban, and the owner of a sports shop helped him choose the boots.

"He paid for himself, and he was insisting that he wanted to carry the shopping.

"And then I said 'no, I'll help you'. Now, that was Madiba. He yearned to be an ordinary person."

Zama told the audience at the launch a second story to make the same point, about a car ride home from a Johannesburg hospital with Mandela and his wife, Graça Machel, whom he called "mum".

"He says 'mum, all these good things that people say about me, do they really mean that,'" she said.