Beyond the Bars

The day Nelson Mandela walked through her front door 41 years ago, Fatima Meer was a young student. And she was swiftly charmed by the tall, striking figure of this well-dressed lawyer.

“I must admit that I sort of responded to his physicality rather than his intellect at first,” Meer says, remembering that initial meeting at her parents’ house near Durban. “He’s a very good-looking person.”

She remembers, too, that Mandela and his friend Ismail Meer, her husband-to-be, were teasing her mercilessly.

“I was only 20 years old, and they weren’t taking me seriously that day at all,” she says.

Mandela grew to respect his friend’s new wife, and more than 20 years later, while Mandela was serving a life sentence on Robben Island, she suggested in one of her letters that he get someone to tell his life story. Only a few months later, a newly released prisoner found Fatima Meer at an anti-apartheid rally in Durban and delivered a whispered message from Mandela: “He wants you to write his biography.”

The result--18 years after that encounter--is “Higher Than Hope,” Mandela’s only authorized biography, which is being released in London and South Africa now, only days after the government freed the 71-year-old nationalist from prison. It will be published in the United States by Harper & Row on March 9.

“Higher Than Hope” is an intensely personal history of the man born to tribal royalty who rose to head one of the foremost black law firms in South Africa and to lead millions of black South Africans in protest against apartheid. It chronicles his dive underground when the African National Congress was banned by the government in 1960, his difficult decision to launch the military wing of the ANC that year and the famous trial that sent him away to prison for life in 1964 on a charge of sabotage.

Meer’s book describes the nightmares Mandela had in prison, his courtship of a young social worker named Winnie Madikizela and the abiding love he maintained for her throughout the years.

The story is woven together with Mandela’s own intimate letters to Winnie, his wife, as well as family and friends--letters never before published that tell the human side of the man who became a legend during his long incarceration.

“I love you all the time, in the miserable and cold winter days and when all the beauty, sunshine and warmth of summer returns,” he wrote Winnie in 1980. “My joy when you’re bursting with laughter is beyond measure.”

The book is a portrait, Winnie Mandela has said, “of an ordinary human being with natural emotions and desires, and not an ancient myth.”

Although Meer had never written a book before, her friendship and kinship in the struggle against apartheid apparently were enough to convince Mandela that she was the one who should tell his story.

The friendship of Meer--who is of Indian ancestry--with the Mandelas reflects the close ties between South Africa’s Indians and blacks, who share a common hatred of apartheid. Black Africans, Indians and mixed-race Coloreds were all denied the vote until 1984, when the government instituted separate, less powerful chambers of parliament for Indians and Coloreds.

“We grew up with this,” Meer says. “Wherever we went, we were classified as non-Europeans,” the South African government’s way of referring to non-whites in the country.

“Every nice seat in the park would have the sign ‘Europeans Only,’ ” she says. “Then we would have some unpainted benches for ‘Non-Europeans.’ Blacks and Indians stood in the same queues at the post office, and we traveled in the same compartment on the trains. We were discriminated against together.”

In fact, the black liberation struggle that Mandela led in the 1950s drew much of its inspiration from the Indian campaign of passive resistance.

“We were militantly anti-government,” Meer says. And although Indians are a minority in South Africa, numbering fewer than 1 million compared to the 27 million Africans, “we have a long history of resistance.”

Meer, 61, a former professor of sociology at the University of Natal, got her first taste of politics in college, where she frequently cut classes to join protest rallies organized by Indian anti-apartheid activists. She was later expelled for speaking at one of those rallies.

Since then Meer and her family have been involved in the liberation struggle, standing shoulder to shoulder with blacks such as Mandela.

In 1952, she was the first woman to be banned by the government, meaning she could not participate in politics, talk to other banned people, address meetings or be quoted in South Africa. Her husband, Ismail, was charged with treason in 1956 along with Mandela and 143 others. During that four-year trial, which ended in acquittal for all of the defendants, she often saw Mandela.

“We went through a very bad spell after 1960,” she remembers. Mandela was rearrested in 1962, convicted of incitement to strike and leaving the country without a passport and was sentenced to five years in prison. In 1964, he was charged with sabotage for his role in launching the armed wing of the ANC.

With Mandela in jail serving a life sentence, Meer grew closer to his wife, Winnie, who had been left alone with two young children to battle the constant harassment of the police. Mrs. Mandela was arrested dozens of times for violating her banning order, and Meer came to admire her courage.

“Winnie clashed constantly with the police,” Meer writes. “And each time she did, she made an issue of it. Where others would have left matters and got on with their lives, she made her life confronting the police and the system.”

Soon after Mandela relayed permission for Meer to begin writing his biography, she visited him in prison. The year was 1972, and it was the first time she had been granted permission to see Mandela since he was sentenced eight years before.

Meer traveled to Robben Island, the penal colony of South Africa’s most feared political prisoners, surrounded by icy waters, across the bay from Cape Town.

“I went down this corridor, passing little glass panes and faces behind them,” she remembers. “You know how you stick flies behind a glass case? That’s what it looked like. It was a horrifying experience, seeing these faces--no bodies, just faces.”

“And then one of the faces spoke to me and said, ‘Nelson is right at the end.’ A prison guard stood behind me and one stood behind him as we talked through the glass. He was so thin. He didn’t look at all like the man I had known.”

That was to be their last visit for 17 years. The book project was put on hold as the political crisis in the country deepened. Meer and Winnie Mandela helped found the Federation of Black Women in 1975. But a year later, after an uprising in the township of Soweto triggered widespread unrest, they were arrested and held for five months without charge.

They spent those months working on the biography, but it again was halted when they were released and forced to return to different cities, which their banning orders prevented them from leaving.

Meer’s son, Rashid, then 17, was detained along with thousands of other students for several months and then banned. Her husband also was banned, and the family had to be granted special dispensation from the authorities to speak to one another.

It wasn’t until 1984, when Meer’s ban was lifted, that she was able to resume her research on Mandela’s biography. Denied permission to see Mandela, she exchanged letters with him. But that was difficult, too, because prison rules limited the number of letters Mandela could send or receive.

Meer traveled to the Transkei, Mandela’s birthplace, and relied heavily on Mandela’s letters to his wife, the recollections of friends and Mandela’s own statements, made at his trial in 1964.

“I had to interpret him without having talked to him for 17 years,” she says. “And it was very difficult.”

The book was published in South Africa in 1988 to mark Mandela’s 70th birthday. Then last year, when the government moved Mandela to a three-bedroom home on prison grounds near Paarl in the Cape Province, Meer was granted permission for a visit.

When she arrived at the prison, Mandela handed her a 40-page list of minor corrections, neatly typed from his longhand by the prison authorities, and she began the first of three interviews to fill in details of his life.

“He agreed with my interpretation” in the first edition of the book, Meer says. “He was happy with the way I presented him, and he didn’t change that at all.”

However, she remembers receiving a telephone call from ANC President Oliver R. Tambo, Mandela’s former law partner, who was worried because the book contained love letters Mandela had written to his wife.

“He thought they were not dignified for a man of Mr. Mandela’s stature,” Meer says, and she agreed to remove them. But when Mandela was informed of Tambo’s concern, he insisted that the letters remain in the book.

“No, no, no, you leave it all in,” Meer says Mandela told her. “It’s true. It happened. There’s no reason for us to hide things. Maybe Oliver has never been in love.”

During the second interview, when she asked for more information about his early years, Meer learned for the first time that Mandela had written his own autobiography in prison and smuggled it out to the ANC at its exile headquarters in Lusaka, Zambia.

“We don’t have to waste time over that,” she remembers him telling her. “You will get it from my autobiography.”

He said he had written the autobiography in the 1970s. A copy was sent to the ANC, and the original was hidden in cocoa cans in the prison yard. When the authorities began building a new prison wall, Mandela and his colleagues dug up the cans and destroyed the original.

“The ANC says it has the copy now,” Meer says. “But it hasn’t done anything about it. That will be worth a little fortune.”

The result of Meer’s interviews was a 100-page insert in the book, covering Mandela’s prison life and the years he spent underground.

“His memory is very good on that,” she says.

Among his recollections are waking up in cold sweats, worrying about his wife and children and suffering “horrific nightmares.”

“The worst part of imprisonment is being locked up by yourself,” the book quotes Mandela as saying. “You come face to face with time, and there is nothing more terrifying than to be alone with sheer time.”

Meer says the proceeds from her book “all go to Mr. Mandela. It can all go to him, and he will work it out.”