When apartheid SA’s last justice minister, Kobie Coetsee, left office, he took with him a stash of several thousand documents. Among them were transcripts of hundreds of conversations Nelson Mandela had in prison, conversations Coetsee ordered prison staff to bug. Who knows why he came to see these documents as his own? Perhaps he did not trust a state in the throes of transition to bequeath to posterity a record of his own historic role.
Two decades after his death, a new book is out, based on the documents he left behind. Titled Prisoner 913, by Riaan de Villiers and Jan-Ad Stemmet, it is judicious, sober and riveting. It also shows Mandela to have been a remarkably shrewd prisoner and Coetsee to have been somewhat at sea.
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