Young Mandela

Nelson Mandela is the greatest political figure of our age and is universally known as a heroic leader who symbolises freedom and moral authority. He will soon be 90 years old and is fixed in the public mind as the world's elder statesman - the dignified, grey-haired man with a kindly smile who spent 27 years in prison from 1962 and somehow emerged intact to become the first black President of a newly liberated South Africa.

But Nelson Mandela was not always elderly or benign. This book is about the man that people have forgotten - Young Mandela, the committed terrorist who left his wife and children behind to spend a year living on the run in the racist South Africa of the early 1960s, adopting false names and disguises and sleeping in safe houses as he organised and prepared the first strikes in a campaign of violence to overthrow the apartheid state.

“It is a brave biographer who dares the re-evaluate the man behind the myth...David James Smith's fascinating account does just that, revealing unexpected, sometimes shocking details”

-- Aimee Shalan GUARDIAN
An eye-opening account SUNDAY BUSINESS POST

David James Smith was born in 1956 and has been a journalist all his working life. He writes for the Sunday Times Magazine.

Nelson Mandela is the greatest political figure of our age and is universally known as a heroic leader who symbolises freedom and moral authority. He will soon be 90 years old and is fixed in the public mind as the world's elder statesman - the dignified, grey-haired man with a kindly smile who spent 27 years in prison from 1962 and somehow emerged intact to become the first black President of a newly liberated South Africa.But Nelson Mandela was not always elderly or benign. This book is about the man that people have forgotten - Young Mandela, the committed terrorist who left his wife and children behind to spend a year living on the run in the racist South Africa of the early 1960s, adopting false names and disguises and sleeping in safe houses as he organised and prepared the first strikes in a campaign of violence to overthrow the apartheid state.

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