To Our Readers

By ELIZABETH VALK LONG President

TIME contributor Richard Stengel, 39, always regretted having been born too late to cover the U.S. civil rights movement. As a result he was drawn to South Africa, whose revolutionary political changes he calls "the greatest civil rights story ever." He has reported that story for TIME and other publications over the past eight years, and in 1990 he published January Sun, a book chronicling a day in the lives of three families in a Transvaal town. All of this won Stengel the job of collaborating with South African President Nelson Mandela on Mandela's autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, which is excerpted in this issue.

Mandela's is "a classic, archetypally heroic story involving great suffering and great achievement," says Stengel. "It shows the value of sticking to one's beliefs." Stengel and the President embarked on 18 months of writing and editing in January 1993, starting with a manuscript Mandela had begun years earlier in his prison cell. They set to work each day at 6:45 a.m., usually meeting at Mandela's African National Congress office in downtown Johannesburg or his suburban home. On his own, Stengel tracked down and interviewed more than 50 of Mandela's friends, colleagues and family members, including the President's former prison mates at Robben Island, his sisters and a white lawyer who hired the young Mandela as an apprentice in 1941.

Stengel found Mandela to be full of contradictions -- guarded yet outgoing, sophisticated yet unworldly. "The duality surprised me," says Stengel, "but some of the naivete comes from the fact that he was away for 27 years." Stengel was also impressed with Mandela's sharp memory. "He is both calendar and camera: he can picture and re-create a scene in his mind's eye."

His years of fear and hardship in captivity made the South African leader hard to know. "He is not a publicly introspective person," observes Stengel. "He'll tell you what he thinks, but not how he feels." At such impasses, Stengel needed all his journalistic prowess. "Rick has a tremendously keen eye for detail and the telling anecdote," says executive editor Jim Kelly. "He'd be the ideal companion to sit with someone and persuade them to describe scenes and encounters in the liveliest way possible."

As it turned out, Stengel found an ideal companion of his own during his South African sojourn: he met and fell in love with Johannesburg photojournalist Mary Pfaff, whom he married last month.