Kate Sidley chatted to Polity SA about her new book, 100 Mandela Moments.

The book offers insight into Nelson Mandela’s life by retelling humorous, heartwarming and momentous moments from his life, drawing from his own writing and the memories of contemporaries, historians and ordinary people.

100 Mandela Moments is divided into sections, according to the many roles Mandela played in his lifetime: Mandela the schoolboy, Mandela the student, Mandela the lawyer, Mandela the outlaw, Mandela the prisoner, Mandela the negotiator, Mandela the statesman, Mandela the elder.

‘The brief for this book was to do something that was accessible to a broad audience,’ Sidley says. ‘There are lots of wonderful books about Madiba. This one, 100 Mandela Moments, is a hundred short stories, and each of the stories is just a couple of pages long. So you can dip into it. If you read it from beginning to end it’s loosely chronological, so you do get a biography, basically, but each story is a standalone story.

‘It’s meant to be something that anyone can read. Not everyone’s up for a 500-page biography, and the style of it is supposed to be light. So even though some of the stories are quite heart-rending, some of them are more poignant, some of them are more gently amusing, and so on, but the actual style of writing is quite accessible.

‘So I’m hoping that young people can read it, who maybe haven’t been exposed to a lot of the other books and maybe would benefit from knowing more about Madiba. I think anyone could enjoy this book. People who are visiting from overseas and want to know more about him. So that’s what we are hoping is our contribution.’

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Categories Non-fiction South Africa

Tags 100 Mandela Moments Jonathan Ball Publishers Kate Sidley Polity SA Videos