cover image Part of My Soul Went with Him

Part of My Soul Went with Him

Winnie Mandela. W. W. Norton & Company, $14.95 (163pp) ISBN 978-0-393-02215-5

This important, topical book is about Winnie and Nelson Mandela, leaders in the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. Both have been in and out of prison, and since 1964, Nelson Mandela, head of the banned African National Congress and the man who, many agree, would be Prime Minister were free elections held, has been serving a life sentence. In a series of interviews, interspersed with Mandela's censored letters, his wifebanished in the late '70s to a remote town in the Orange Free Statetells their story. Here are their marriage and early years together, their political work and her life since his final arrest and triala time of harassment, marked by banishment and most recently the destruction by arson of the family's home and the kidnapping of a grandchild. The woman who emerges in this lyrical, poignant, tragic commentary is proud and humorous, whose majestic sense of self enables her to walk into white-only stores, demandingand receivingservice. Perhaps most significant, Winnie Mandela illustrates on a personal level the hideousness of apartheid and shares her dream of a South Africa freed of racial enslavement. First serial to Ms. and Mother Jones. Foreign rights: Sanford Greenburger Assoc. November