In an interview on South Africa

It was an astonishing achievement. Of course there were other factors – it was the end of the Cold War, so the white minority’s great fear of a Communist takeover was diminished. In 1990 when Mandela was released it was a time of great hope throughout the world and everything seemed to be changing.

The fundamental, if you want, was that a minority that was entrenched in power relinquished that power voluntarily. They weren’t forced from power down the barrel of a gun, they negotiated themselves from power, and Patti’s book describes that process magnificently.

Whatever happens under the ANC, however badly they rule, nothing can take away from South Africa the transition and the brilliance with which it was carried out.

In an interview on Understanding Mandela and South Africa

Your second book, Move Your Shadow, is by the Pulitzer prize-winning author and New York Times journalist Joseph Lelyveld. One reviewer in 1985 said this book “provides the kind of authentic evidence of the ordeals of black life that few white South Africans discover”. Would you agree?

That’s certainly one important point to make. I think Move Your Shadow was actually the first book on South Africa that I ever read. I moved to the country in 1989 as a correspondent from Central America, where I had spent the previous six years. I really knew very little about South Africa. It wasn’t a place I had any prior interest in but the foreign editor of The Independent, in his wisdom, decided I should go there. Everybody told me that Move Your Shadow was the current book I had to read. So I read it, and it left a lasting impression on me.

To pick up on what you said about that review, what Lelyveld did that was most striking is that he really immersed himself in black culture and black society. He would go and spend time living in people’s huts in the countryside or in squatter settlements. He would travel vast distances across the country in buses – in fact, I think it was illegal for white people to travel on those buses. There’s that line from King Lear – “expose thyself to feel what wretches feel” – and that’s what Lelyveld did, with extraordinary integrity and courage. He really conveyed the ignominy of life for black people under apartheid but at the same time salvaged from that the tremendous courage and nobility, and indeed good humour, that people maintained, despite being submitted to what Mandela called the “moral genocide” of apartheid.

As you say, the book tells of the hardships of the black majority under apartheid. But it also shows how these hardships were the consequence of meticulous planning by the government.

That’s right. He does a good job at conveying the bureaucratic fastidiousness and overarching madness of the whole apartheid exercise. It was somewhat reminiscent of what the Nazis did. The Nazis had a tremendously efficient bureaucracy that organised the whole Final Solution to the so-called “Jewish problem”. It was a similar bureaucratic mindset and insanity that led to the grand apartheid idea of separateness, and this is what Lelyveld looks at in his book. In particular, he examines the ghastly phenomenon of forced removals, where it was decided by bureaucrats that, for example, 5,000 people living in an area of Johannesburg, where they had been living for the past 50 years, had to return to their ancestral lands. So, in the middle of the night a whole lot of police come along in trucks and knock down their houses, tell them to pick up as many belongings as they can, put them in lorries, drive them overnight for seven hours, dump them in the middle of the veldt somewhere and say: “Right, this is now your home.” And this was happening systematically. Like I say, there was something of the spirit of the Nazi Final Solution about it, though obviously with nothing like the same degree of horror or annihilation.

Lelyveld also gets into the madness behind apartheid, especially the Biblical justification that apartheid’s deeply Christian masters sought to find in what they were doing. They would look up the Old Testament and find that – as they saw it – there were actually separate heavens for black people and white people. So if there were separate heavens, according to a particular reading of the Old Testament, therefore it made perfect sense, indeed it was morally incumbent upon them, to have separateness on earth too. So in Move Your Shadow you get both the sense of the macro-madness of apartheid with a deeply close-up view of what it was like to live as a black person under apartheid. I think probably nothing like it has been written before or since.