18 Jul 08

Nelson Mandela at the Saïd Business School in 2002

Nelson Mandela’s former lawyer Lord Joel Joffé has visited Oxford for the launch of a book by Oxford University Professor Elleke Boehmer.

Professor Boehmer has written a book about former South African president Nelson Mandela, which is published today (July 18 2008) - the day of his 90th birthday.

Her book Nelson Mandela – A Very Short Introduction (published by Oxford University Press), was launched last night with an introduction by Lord Joffé who represented Mandela at the infamous Rivonia Trial in 1963-4. South African born Professor Boehmer, Professor of World Literature in English and Fellow at Wolfson College, has met Nelson Mandela in Cape Town in 2003 and has heard him talk on a number of occasions.

She said: ‘Nelson Mandela’s 90th birthday is a time to assess his legacy and what we can take from it into the 21st Century. The twenty-first century is fortunate indeed that this moral giant of a man, one of the few great good men to emerge from the long and violent twentieth century, whose glamour and greatness were born of another time and society, is still amongst us today, a humanist and an African.

‘In my opinion one of Mandela's greatest successes is to have redefined humanism from the point of view of Africa, whereas in the colonial period Africa was deemed to be the antithesis of the human.

‘Nelson Mandela has extraordinary charisma and charm, you just feel it when you meet him. It comes off him like a physical force. However, I am worried that his effect won’t last beyond his lifetime because so much of his appeal relies on his contradictions – he is all things to all people. Who will be able to tap into the secret of his reputation? I feel that lies in his charisma, which will die with him. Then again, for someone who has put the human back into humanism I have no doubt he’ll be remembered long into this new millennium.’