Quiet time with the President: A Doctor’s Story About Learning to Listen
A book review by Anne Sarzin
My back pressed against a tin shanty, I stared at the mob stampeding towards me.
It was January 1995 and I was with a group of journalists in Zwide township on the outskirts of Port Elizabeth waiting for President Nelson Mandela to inaugurate a sewerage project, part of a Reconstruction and Development Program for the city. Fortunately, the chanting and swaying crowd stopped just centimetres in front of us to see the President symbolically shovel a few spadefuls of red earth in a trench. Then his security minders whisked him away.
It was the only moment of fear in a day spent shadowing the President—from the Dan Qeqe Stadium to the Sisonke Community Centre in Zwide, the sewerage trenches in Mbilini and Tunyiswa Streets, and finally to the Dan Adcock Stadium. In the top tier of a packed stand, I listened as the President spoke in Afrikaans, Xhosa and English. Surrounded by a black sea of jubilant faces, with shouts of ‘Viva Mandela’ reverberating in the air, I felt relaxed and comfortable, despite my brief moments of anxiety earlier that day. At a media briefing earlier in the day, I had the privilege of meeting President Mandela, who was approachable, warm, friendly and dignified. When I told him I now lived in Sydney, Australia, he said, ‘Give my love to Bob [Hawke] and Paul [Keating]’, which regrettably I never did.
Miraculously, in the past year there had been a relatively peaceful transition to democracy and on all sides there were sounds of reconciliation. South Africans wanted to heal old wounds, and it seemed a new agenda was taking shape, with freedom and equality entrenched in the interim constitution. Mandela stated he would not tolerate attempts, through anarchy and lawlessness, to undermine democracy, and he committed his government to reducing crime. He also pledged to transform the judiciary, establish a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, end political violence in Kwazulu Natal, and create jobs and economic growth.
Recalling now my meaningful encounter of 29 years ago with the great Mandela, I turned with anticipation to the book Quiet Time with the President: A Doctor’s Story About Learning to Listen, co-written by Professor Peter Friedland and his sister Jill Margo, a well-known journalist in Sydney. I was not disappointed. This memoir is a touching, honest, informative and, indeed, mesmerising portrait of Mandela, told within the contextual framework of South Africa’s emerging democracy. It is a powerful story with the charismatic Mandela at its heart. It traces Mandela’s ascent to power amid the euphoria and optimism of his early years as President; and describes with respect and compassion his subsequent decline—both political and physical—and its impact on his legacy. While feted internationally, Mandela had his critics at home who diminished his standing in the eyes of his people, accusing him of neither advancing nor realising the aspirations of the rainbow nation quickly enough. Not least among these was Thabo Mbeki, who succeeded him as President in 1999 and, as Friedland points out, was possibly envious of Mandela’s status as a statesman revered globally. Mbeki marginalised Mandela’s participation in the affairs of the nation at home and abroad, which pained Mandela, who had a deep respect for and abiding friendship with Govan Mbeki, Thabo’s father, who was incarcerated with Mandela on Robben Island. ‘He [Thabo] wants the “old man” to mind his own business,’ Mandela said. Consequently, as Friedland notes, while he retained his international standing, he no longer had the same level of engagement.
This book is, primarily, Friedland’s story of his professional relationship with Mandela as his ENT specialist, who over several years monitored his increasing deafness, as well as, at times, issues related to his general health. While Friedland modestly asserts that he never overstepped the bounds of their professional relationship as doctor and patient, it is clear that these two men shared a friendship they both valued, which flourished over innumerable cups of tea in Mandela’s Houghton home, interludes in which Mandela personified the wise mentor and Friedland his young and admiring disciple. ‘He would tell me a story from which I had to divine the lesson,’ Friedland recalls. ‘He operated on a different level and was concerned with principles and politics, not with the minor twists and turns of people’s lives.’ Friedland speculates that this was possibly the effect of 27 years of isolation living exclusively with men, and not being in a family or community where these concerns were part of everyday discourse.
For the Jewish reader, there is an interesting exposition on Mandela’s views on the Middle East, where so many of his enduring friendships with players in the region, such as Arafat, were predicated on the support they gave to the ANC over many years. ‘Remember your enemy is not necessarily my enemy,’ he cautioned Friedland. ‘You are entitled never to forget but you must forgive to move forward.’
Friedland’s own story—from the challenges of his childhood, his army service and his traumatic experiences of the loss of close friends murdered by thugs riding South Africa’s wave of criminality—is riveting in its honest appraisal of the violence and deteriorating situation in the country and the consequent fear eroding the quality of life for those barricaded behind high suburban walls. His decision in 2009 to emigrate with his young family to Australia was not taken lightly and he dreaded telling Mandela, who had always put his country before family. ‘My memory of those last years is misted in sadness….he’d had so much time locked away from loved ones and then no time to repair his neglected relationships,’ Friedland observes. ‘While being swept up by the greater good was glorious and politically fulfilling, it was also emotionally impoverishing.’
It is clear Friedland’s priorities lay firmly with the security and future wellbeing of his family. Moving to Perth, he established himself as a leading ENT surgeon and university teacher. But it was a story Mandela told him before they parted that illuminated a path he might not otherwise have taken on arrival in Australia. Readers will discover for themselves that anecdote and Mandela’s parting advice to his doctor. Friedland and Margo as co-authors have combined seamlessly and are to be congratulated on this well-crafted and touching tribute to Mandela, as well as their perceptive saga of migration with all its challenges.
Quiet Time with the President: A Doctor’s Story About Learning to Listen
Published by:
Australian Scholarly Publishing
Melbourne.
