In an article published on Politicsweb.co.za on 13 January 2014, Professor Stephen Ellis makes the following claim at the beginning of his article: “The document in question is a 627-page typescript that seems to have been placed online just a few days before Mandela's death in December 2013.”
Professor Ellis further asserts: “Why the Centre of Memory decided to place such an important and even explosive text online at that juncture is unclear. The Centre made no attempt to publicise the move, for example by announcing the publication on its homepage.”
In fact, the manuscript was first posted on the Nelson Mandela Foundation website (www.nelsonmandela.org) on 4 November 2011, with an accompanying story that can be viewed on the following link (http://www.nelsonmandela.org/news/entry/role-revealed-of-madibas-comrades-in-long-walk-to-freedom/).
In addition, Mr Mandela’s book Conversations with Myself, which was published worldwide in October 2010, contains many extracts from his “unpublished autobiographical manuscript written in prison”, as does Nelson Mandela By Himself: The Authorised Book of Quotations, published in June 2011.
We have also made it clear in our public communications that we have in our archive the recorded conversations between Mandela and Richard Stengel, made during the work they did together preparing the Long Walk to Freedom manuscript for publication.
In these conversations Mandela elaborated on what was written in the prison manuscript and fills in the missing 20 years. Audio extracts from these conversations have been used in documentaries, television and radio programmes throughout the world in the past few years.
The prison manuscript also received wide coverage when it was part of the Google and Nelson Mandela Foundation Nelson Mandela Digital Archive launch in March 2012.
See, for example, the following article in the Sydney Morning Herald.
It appears that Professor Ellis has concerns on how open the Foundation is to debate and enquiry on the life and times of Nelson Mandela. On the contrary, we welcome debate and encourage him and others to engage us directly on any lines of enquiry that relate to our continued work and core mandate on memory and dialogue.