Long Walk to Freedom – Nelson Mandela

Rolihlahla Mandela was born in 1918 into a family well-connected to the Thembu royal house of the Xhosa nation that had for centuries inhabited the Transkei region of South Africa. His early childhood mirrored that of countless previous generations, centred on subsistence farming in the rural hinterland, and was largely unaffected by the white dominated government.

But at seven years old, as befitted his station in life, he was kitted out in a cut-off pair of his father’s trousers and sent off to school to commence a British style education, on the first day of which he was allocated a British name – Nelson.

Though not a brilliant student he was studious and hard-working, and so progressed through the black education system via boarding school to university. It was there that early brushes with the relatively benign white establishment started to build a consciousness of an ingrained assumed superiority among the whites.

While questioning that oppression he also found himself at odds with the traditional tribal authority that among other things threatened him with an arranged marriage. In limbo between out-dated tribalism and stifling white supremacy, he ran away to the city – Johannesburg – to make his own way in the world as best he could.

With a good (for a black) education he found work as a lawyer’s clerk, eventually gaining sufficient qualifications to take on his own cases, often fighting for the rights of those suffering from the discriminatory race laws. More significantly he found like-minded political thinkers in the African National Congress, through whose ranks he rose.

What followed - demonstrations, arrests, banning orders, internal exile, trials, prison and long-delayed release – is familiar; but it is no less interesting as it reveals its gradual imposition on a man trying to balance his love for and need to support his growing family with his deep felt duty to his people.

Written with simplicity of style, clarity of moral purpose, and self-effacing modesty, the book reads less that its 600 pages and places on record the life of an extraordinary man whose remarkable ability to embrace his oppressor and gaoler enabled the rainbow nation to survive a transition from apartheid to inclusive democracy that few would have believed possible.

White Nights – Ann Cleeve

In this, the second of Ann Cleeve’s “Shetland” series, the year has turned and it is midsummer in the northern isles, which means long days and “white nights” during which darkness never really falls. Even for locals like police detective Jimmy Perez it is unsettling; for visitors off the newly docked cruise liner it is a tourist attraction to be experienced.

An alternative attraction is the Herring House gallery at the remote Biddista hamlet where an exhibition by the owner Bella Sinclair and fellow artist Fran Hunter (now an item with Perez) is on offer. However the gala opening is disrupted when a stranger throws a wobbler, claiming memory loss and leaving in apparent confusion. He is later found hanging from the roof of the boathouse on the beach.

Suicide by a crazed mainlander? Perez has his doubts, and the post mortem confirms murder – but who is he, why did he come to Shetland, was his distress real or an act and, most importantly, whodunit?

Again Perez is joined in the investigation by Roy Taylor from the mainland and once more they work in uneasy alliance to solve the riddle, Taylor digging into the stranger’s ID and background while Perez seeks to find his local connection to the tight knit highland community.

There is an initial lethargy to the proceedings, reflecting the white nights’ mood of the island, but this gets ramped up as the investigation unearths events long buried but not forgotten.

The plot is tight and twisting with a pleasing but fathomable complexity typical of the author; Perez’s romance moves on but does not intrude; and the topographical detail remains authentic, but subtly different under those long days and short white nights of the “summer dim”.