TWENTY years ago the South African academic Jan-Ad Stemmet met the apartheid era justice minister Kobie Coetsee, who announced he had transcripts of 13,000 pages of recordings of Nelson Mandela’s time in prison.
These transcripts of the anti-apartheid struggle icon contained, he said, “bombs, atom bombs” that would blow everything up.
The pair began to discuss a book deal but only two days in the 69-year-old Coetsee died of a heart attack and the moment passed. Then, 14 years on, this trove of documents reemerged in an archive at the University of the Free State, where Stemmet taught history.
Stemmet worked with the veteran South African journalist Riaan de Villiers to piece together the transcripts of recordings made in the final five years preceding Mandela’s release on 11 February 1990 – a period of intense revolt against the apartheid regime, in which the black townships were rendered “ungovernable” and a
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