Nelson Mandela's Smile and Dapper Appearance Hid Pain of His Past _ News.com

8/13/2019 Nelson Mandela's Smile and Dapper Appearance Hid Pain of His Past _ News.com

1/13

World

news.com.au | africa

Nelson Mandela's smile and dapper appearancehid pain of his past

WE strive to judge people by the content of their character, but Nelson Mandela understood that sometimes

the best way to help others see your character is by how you appear. All his life, Mandela was concerned

with how things looked - from the colour of his shirt to how straight he stood.

Although he was a man of substance, he knew that appearances matter, and we have only one chance to make a first

impression.
http://www.news.com.au/world


2/13

Mandela loved clothes. He would not say that clothes make the man, but if you want to play the part, you have to wear

the right costume. He began to learn this as a small boy when his father cut up a pair of his own riding breeches to

make him a pair of trousers for his first day at school. His father was determined that his son would not look like an

uncivilised 'native' wearing a blanket.

In Pictures: Nelson Mandela's life and times

When his father died while Mandela was still young, he became a ward of the king of his tribe, the Thembu people. One

of his chores was to press the king's suits. A king had to look just so, and it was a job Mandela performed with great

meticulousness.

I remember him once asking me if I could help him find an iron in his hotel room because his jacket was wrinkled. He

would note the quality of the cloth of his suits and those other men wore.

He recalled with great detail the natty, double-breasted suit the king had ordered to be made for him before he went off to

university.

Sky News08 December 2013Mandela family speaks of 'grave sadness'
http://www.news.com.au/video/id-RnZm85aTob2t4aKKiaKVBKpBxfS3FoOv/Mandela-family-speaks-of-grave-sadnesshttp://www.news.com.au/news/photos-e6frf7jo-1225995453441


3/13

But Mandela was not always able to afford to dress as he wanted to. During his early life in Johannesburg, he owned

only one suit over the course of five years, which in the end had more patches than original cloth. He always

remembered how embarrassed he was to wear it.

A few years later, when he had achieved some success as a young lawyer, one of the first things he did was to find his

own tailor. His future lawyer, George Bizos, recalls meeting Mandela in his tailor's offices and noting that it was the first

time he had ever seen a black man being fitted for a suit.

Mandela had a natural sense of style and in those days was considered something of a dandy. He dressed that way not

only because it gave him pleasure, but because whites judged blacks in part by what they wore. He did not want to

appear as a common labourer but as a professional man.

When he was a student, Mandela wanted to look precise and organised. When he was a young lawyer, he wore

bespoke suits to impress the judges and his clients. When he went underground as an ANC freedom fighter, he donned

fatigues and grew a beard. When he first became President, he wore conservative dark suits.

Later, as South Africa settled down, he abandoned European-style suits and took to wearing custom-made silk shirts in

glorious African patterns. They became his sartorial signature; people called them 'Mandela shirts'. He loved those shirtsand had a wardrobe full of them.

Beyond his enjoyment of the vivid colour, the shirts symbolised a new kind of power - African, indigenous, confident. The

shirts were a statement: No longer does an African leader need to dress in a Western style to seem substantial.

7:16


4/13


5/13

Given his belief in the symbolic importance of appearances, it is not surprising that one of the first battles Mandela had

during his imprisonment on Robben Island was over clothing. The regulations said that black prisoners had to wear

shorts, whereas prisoners designated as Indian and Coloured (mixed race) could wear long trousers.

He found it insulting that he had to wear short trousers like a 'garden boy' and fought this as fiercely as any battle he

waged on the island.

Years later, in the Eighties, when he was preparing to meet P.W. Botha for the first time, Mandela felt he should notwear a prison uniform to meet the President of South Africa - that it would put him at a disadvantage.

So the prison authorities had a three-piece suit made for him, about which he was very particular. He considered this an

essential aspect of putting himself on equal footing with Botha.

When we travelled together, I always wanted to know what he was planning on wearing the following day so that I could

dress appropriately. I knew this mattered to him.

He would often comment on a suit or tie of mine, and he would sometimes express displeasure if he thought I was

underdressed (or overdressed) for a particular occasion.

In pictures: The dark days of apartheid

It helped, of course, that Mandela was tall, slim, and fit. He had beautiful posture. You never saw him hunched over or

with his head anything but upright and looking ahead. On Robben Island, he was always aware of how he carried

himself.

He knew he needed to be seen to be standing up to the authorities, literally and figuratively - even when he was secretly

negotiating with them. He understood that people took their cues from him: if he were confident and unbowed, they

would be too.

Long before jogging became a trend, he was a stickler for fitness. He used to run in the early mornings in Johannesburg

in the Fifties. Some of this was vanity: he was very proud of his slimness. He was careful about what he ate and he used

to cluck a bit at men of his generation who had bellies.
http://www.news.com.au/news/photos-e6frf7jo-1226289484141


6/13

When

we

were

together, he often noted who had aged well and who hadn't. Once we were walking in the Transkei and he saw two

women of roughly his own age from a nearby village. They commented on how youthful he looked and he beamed. They

had not aged so well.

"It is very hard, life in the country, and poverty ages a person," he said. "It is ironic that the program in prison, with its

minimal diet and physical activity, promotes long life and youthfulness."


7/13

Mandela often told me about his morning exercise routine in prison, which included running in place for 45 minutes

followed by 200 sit-ups and 100 fingertip push-ups. One day, he popped down on the floor and did two quick fingertip

push-ups for me, then dusted his hands off with a satisfied smile.

"Appearances constitute reality," he once said to me. That belief underpinned his genius at what sociologists call

'impression management'. No detail was too superficial to merit his attention.

Many times I sat next to him in the back of his car as he waited for the precise moment to emerge at an event.

Whenever he was exiting an aircraft or entering a room, he was aware of the figure that he cut and of the exact moment

that would earn him maximum attention.

He also understood that being seen to seize the initiative often confers authority. At any event, he was always the first to

stand up and clap, always the first to shake the hands of the performers, always the first to congratulate the winner.

He greeted people; he was not greeted by them. He was always the host, never the guest. When he first appeared with

the Queen in London, it was as though he was extending his royal hospitality to a reserved country matron.


8/13


9/13

One of the impressions he always sought to convey was that he did not play favourites; that he was above any kind of

prejudice.

On weekends, the prison authorities allowed the political inmates to walk to the soccer field to watch the other prisoners

play.

When he was walking to the field, Mandela would always choose an Indian or a Coloured prisoner to walk with to show

that he did not believe in grouping people by race.

Similarly, as President, he was very keen to appear as a man of the people. At events or dinners, he would always walk

through the kitchen to shake hands with the staff. At an airport, he would look for the ground crew.

As much as he enjoyed the company of celebrities and the famous - and he did - he never wanted to come across as an

elitist.

Mandela also wanted to cultivate the idea that he was a man of discipline. When we first started working together on his

autobiography, I had an appointment with him at his office early on a Saturday morning.

When I arrived, just before seven, he was sitting behind his desk in a suit, talking on the phone. It was apparent that he

had woken up the person on the other end of the line, who had said something like: "Don't you ever sleep?" And then he

said: "Ah, I am an old man, and I can only sleep two hours a night."

When he got off the phone, I asked him if that was true. He laughed and said: "No, I sleep eight hours."

Like Lincoln, who took every opportunity to have his picture taken, Mandela was aware that images have tremendous

power to shape how we are perceived.

Ever since he was a young man, long before the existence of internet blogs and social networking sites, he cultivated

and curated images of himself. He posed burning his pass card following the 1960 Sharpeville uprising; he posed bare-

chested in and outside the boxing ring; he posed in his African regalia before he was put on trial for treason; he evenposed for pictures on Robben Island.

If you look at old photographs of Mandela, you see something that is rare - even unique - among African men of his

generation: a beaming smile.


10/13

It is among the most radiant in history. It conveys warmth and wisdom, power and generosity, understanding and

forgiveness.

It was

one of

the first

things

that

fellow

ANC

anti-

apartheid campaigner Walter Sisulu noticed about the young man from the Transkei.

Mandela realised early on that his smile was part of his power. In the first post-apartheid election campaign in 1994, his

smile was the campaign. That iconic campaign poster was everywhere - on billboards, on highways, on street lamps, attea shops and fruit stalls.

It told black voters that he would be their champion and white voters that he would be their protector.

It was the smile of the proverb 'to understand all is to forgive all'. It was political Prozac for a nervous electorate.

That was the single most important message he wanted to send after his release: that he was a man without bitterness.


11/13

His great task as the first democratically elected President of South Africa was to be the father of his country, to unite a

divided, battle-scarred land into one nation.

From the moment of his release through his entire presidency and beyond, he was intent on showing people he did not

harbour any grievance. He made appearances with some of his white jailers, including James Gregory, who found his 15

minutes of fame claiming to be Mandela's friend.

He paid a very public visit to the widow of former Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, the father of apartheid. He put his

arm around Constand Viljoen, the former general who had allegedly plotted a coup against him.

All of it was in service to this one idea: that he had buried the past; that he was the father of a rainbow nation; that he

was looking forward, not backward.

But much of this was for show. The private Mandela was deeply pained that he had spent the best years of his life

behind bars. He found the views of his jailers and the white-majority leaders to be crabbed and narrow.

He did not care for Gregory, whom he found limited and who he thought was exploiting their connection.


12/13


13/13

He fiercely resented the treatment his wife, Winnie, had received over the decades. He was angered at how his political

rivals had sometimes tried to undermine him.

He believed that he had sacrificed his marriage and his family to the struggle against oppression and prejudice. But he

knew he could never let people see behind the curtain, that he could never expose his true feelings.

We live in a far more expressive era than Mandela's, but he would say that one can never be completely open about

one's emotions. That is where his extraordinary discipline came in.

And that is why the smile was also his mask, disguising any hurt or sadness, hiding as much as it disclosed.

* Extracted from Mandela's Way: Lessons On Life, Love And Courage by Richard Stengel

SOURCE: http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/nelson-mandelas-smile-and-dapper-appearance-hid-pain-of-his-past/story-fnk1378p-1226779917287
http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/nelson-mandelas-smile-and-dapper-appearance-hid-pain-of-his-past/story-fnk1378p-1226779917287

Documents

Nelson Mandela's Smile and Dapper Appearance Hid Pain of His Past _ News.com