Mandela's Way: Fifteen Lessons on Life, Love, and Courage [Audiobook, Unabridged] [Audio CD]

There are 15 short chapters, referred to as 'lessons' in Richard Stengel's new book, "Mandela's Way: Fifteen Lessons on Life, Love and Courage," I confess that after reading the first four of them, "Courage is Not the Absence of Fear," "Be Measured," "Lead from the Front" and "Lead from the Back" I felt that I had the idea and was very close to putting the book down. The themes seemed clear and were already striking me as unnecessarily redundant. Mandela is a truly remarkable person, one who has lived at least three lives; One before his 27 years as a prisoner of the Apartheid regime in his native South Africa, the second while actually in prison and the third since his release. He has changed through each and has become the patient, calm man whose vision is always the 'long view' as opposed to what he regards as the less-than-useful 'short view' that he had when he was younger.
I decided to finish the book anyway. At 239 short pages, it seemed a small investment to see if there was still more to learn about him.
Stengel got very close to Nelson Mandela. For an extended period, he was by his side nearly constantly and had many, many more conversations that Mandela had originally agreed to. Clearly, the picture developed by Stengel became as important to the subject as it was to the author. The unusualness of the man is clear and while few others could be expected to arrive at his style, way of thinking and manner of approaching friends and enemies alike, one comes away from this brief but important book with the sense that it is, in the end, unusual people with unusual ways who achieve unusual (and in this instance, unlikely) things.
Viewed as a traitor by some former comrades, Mandela managed to shape a new reality in South Africa by doing things thought impossible. Speaking with old and viscous enemies like de Klerk, discouraging active violence which he had come to espouse at an earlier time, listening with observable respect to everyone - even to those he knew in his heart were wrong ... These qualities became possible as functions not just of having led two previous lives, but from having learned things he found useful from each of them.
Conventional wisdom suggests that we learn from experience. Nelson Mandela, as he is captured here by Richard Stengel, is a man who has demonstrated that experience does not, in and of itself, teach anything. Rather, experience presents us with an opportunity for learning.
No two people experiencing the same thing might come away having learned the same things from it. Nelson Mandela learned new ways to think and reason and new ways to facilitate change by taking on a seemingly trans-human calm and long view. Given the same circumstances, another man might have become more visibly angry. It is not that Mandela was not made angry, but learned to not show it. He learned the value of self-control and even of acting as a necessary means toward a valuable end.
The current nation of South Africa, as imperfect at least as every nation is, is a far better place that it would have been without the ministrations of this ever changed man.
Occasionally redundant as it may be, this revealing and worshipful tome is well worth a read by anyone interested in the specific man, the specific country or in the process of human change and development.

What would Nelson Mandela do?

Toward the end of Mandela's Way, Richard Stengel asks this question. Stengel helped Mandela write his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, in the early 1990s, and this question helped him "internalize [Mandela] and his ideas." Mandela's Way is biographical, but with a moral point. How can reflecting on the life of Nelson Mandela help us live?

The tradition of biography as moral exercise is as old as the Greeks and Romans, not to mention Jews and Christians, but it has taken new form with the uniquely American literary genre of Leadership Secrets of X, usually some famous person. When I picked up Mandela's Way, I was hoping for the older form of the tradition but worried that I would get the newer one. Few things are more aggravating than the simplification of a person's life for the purpose of making the reader a better businessman. Stengel, thankfully, did not disappoint me.

As a college student in the late 80s and early 90s, I was aware of Mandela and the struggle of the African National Congress and others to end South African apartheid. I knew little about the man, however. Mandela's Way is an excellent introduction to his life and struggle, presented thematically rather than chronologically. If one metric of a book's quality is that it inspires you to read more on the subject, then this book is quite successful.

The subtitle of Stengel's book is Fifteen Lessons on Life, Love and Courage. My guess is that Stengel's publisher came up with this verbiage, as a nod to the newer form of moral biography. The lessons are simple--"Courage is not the absence of fear," "Lead from the front," "Lead from the back," etc.--without being simplistic. The way Stengel achieves this is by rooting each lesson in the context of Mandela's life, struggle, and self-reflection.

Prison dominates the narrative. Mandela spent three decades in South African prison. It molded him as a man and as a leader. It also cost him personally in many ways. Stengel takes measure of both the good and the bad in his portrait of Mandela's life. What emerges is a man who is morally tough, politically pragmatic--except on the all-important issue of a racially just South Africa, and personally resilient. Mandela's story inspired me.

"What would Nelson Mandela do?" reflects, whether consciously or not, a phrase popularized by American evangelicals: "What would Jesus do?" As a Christian and as a pastor, what strikes me is the absence of religion in Mandela's life. He is, according to Stengel, "a materialist in the philosophical sense." He believes that there is "no destiny that shapes our end; we shape it ourselves." Of course, he aligned with religious leaders such as Bishop Desmond Tutu, but without sharing their faith. And of course, the Afrikaner architects of apartheid were the progeny of the South African Reformed churches.

Which leads to this irony: Opponents of apartheid asked "What would Nelson Mandela do?" precisely because its proponents did not ask, or did not answer rightly, "What would Jesus do?

This book provides great insight into Mandela the man. If this book was advertised as a biography, it would earn five stars. But it is advertised as a book of lessons we can apply to our own lives. In that regard it came up a bit short for me, introducing life lessons here and there and providing broad-sweeping examples of leadership and character, but rarely getting to those golden "a-ha" moments that readers value. Basically, it takes the same life lessons we have read about in many other books and wraps them around Mandela. So it is a must-read for any student or fan of Mr. Mandela, or if you just want to understand this great leader at a deeper level. In that area, it is very good and I enjoyed reading it. But as a book of life lessons, for me it was missing freshness and impact.

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