...You could impress Nadine Gordimer, disgust her, but not fool her
No one was therefore surprised when, on being released from prison in 1990, Mandela asked to see Gordimer. And it was no ‘for courtesy’s sake’ meeting. In an amazing piece on Mandela written for The New Yorker, six months before Mandela’s death, Gordimer says: “I suppose I thought, with a writer’s vanity, that the great man wanted to talk about Burger’s Daughter. We were alone in Johannesburg, some few days later. It was not about my book that he spoke but about his discovering, on the first day of his freedom, that Winnie Mandela had a lover. This devastation was not made public until their divorce, six years later.”
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