For most South Africans, the disappearance of Nelson Mandela from public life has been a source of sadness - but for his family, it has been an opportunity finally to get to know him, writes Aislinn Laing in Johannesburg.
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Nelson Mandela with his great-granddaughter Zama in Kweku Mandela's film
By Aislinn Laing, Johannesburg, 7:00AM BST 17 Jul 2011
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Jailed for 27 years, president of South Africa for five and sought-after elder statesman until 2004 when he announced his retirement, he had long been a distant figure in their lives.
While everyone from Prince Charles to Baby Spice and the Pope was photographed at his side, his children and grandchildren sometimes struggled to get a look-in.
But now Nelson Mandela lives quietly at his home in Houghton, an upmarket Johannesburg suburb whose villas are shielded by high walls and electric fences, where he spends his time reading newspapers and books, eating meals prepared by his household staff and napping - or at the house he had built 550 miles away in Qunu, his childhood village in Eastern Cape.
"For a long time when he was president, he was very inaccessible but now if you want to go and see him, you just go," said his grandson Kweku, 26, the youngest son of Mr Madela's oldest daughter Makaziwe.
"In Qunu, we talk, play ping pong, rent movies and play sports. Our grandfather tends to do his own thing but we always have dinners together and he usually gives a speech or tells a little story. He does it in his own way."
Kweku gave The Sunday Telegraph a rare glimpse inside the life of one of the world's most revered figures as he prepared to travel to Qunu to join Mr Mandela to celebrate his 93rd birthday on Monday - away from adoring crowds or visiting politicians but with his family. As far as they are concerned, they have taken him back and it's not a minute too soon.
The last time the increasingly frail Mr Mandela appeared in public was at the football World Cup closing ceremony last July, where he wore a fur hat to guard against the winter chill and was helped to wave to the crowd by his wife, Graca.
Since then, South Africans have had to content themselves with occasional pictures of their icon - casting his vote in local elections in May and drinking tea with Michelle Obama and her daughters during their visit to South Africa last month.
Every time a photograph is released, dinner party conversations around the country become dominated by forensic analyses of how he looks and whether he is well.
Asked about his grandfather's health, Kweku responded with the tone of weary exasperation adopted by the Mandelas for such questions.
"At the end of the day, he is 92, going on 93, his body is slowing down and he's not as quick as he used to be," he said.
"But he's not struggling with it and that's the biggest thing for all of us. He's doing well and I think that's because of his discipline. His passing is inevitable but it's something that I try not to think about."
He said his grandfather still gets up at about eight o'clock each morning for breakfast. He has a well-documented penchant for sugary Frosties cereal but is generally careful about his diet.
"He's always been a relatively watchful and light eater which is odd because the rest of us in the family are typical South Africans and love our meat," he said.
For lunch and dinner he asks his chef Xoliswa Ndoyiya, who has been with him since his release from prison in 1990, to make him home-cooked meals of chicken and rice or umphokoqo, a crumbly maize meal seasoned with sour milk.
After breakfast and a chat with whoever is in the house, he settles down to read his newspapers. He reads six English and Afrikaans dailies and an international paper or two, and can be absorbed in the task for up to four hours.
He is fiercely protective of his reading time - almost the only way he is now connected with the outside world - and will often send visitors packing if they interrupt. If they are lucky however, he might engage them in conversation about one of the issues of the day.
"I haven't talked to him about the phone hacking scandal yet but I'm sure he'll be fascinated by it," Kweku said. "He wants to stay informed and sees newspapers as his preferred way of doing that.
"There's not much time in there for TV or an iPod. He's grasped technology to a certain extent but I don't know if he has much interest in it."
Mr Mandela also reads most of the books which are sent to him in a steady stream. Despite his long friendship and deep admiration for Tony Blair, his grandson says he was disappointed by his autobiography.
"I think he felt Tony could have done more to highlight what he achieved," he said. "It was just too much focused on the twilight years, trying to explain them. My grandfather was, like many people, furious with Tony about the Iraq war but they always had a good relationship outside of that and he respected him."
To have the inside track on his revered grandfather's opinions about world leaders is clearly a source of pride for Kweku.
Brought up in Massachusetts where his mother, Mr Mandela's daughter with his first wife Evelyn, was studying for a PhD, he did not meet him until he was five and before then knew no more about him than other children in his class.
"I remember the schoolteacher pointing out on a global map: 'That's Africa and that's where Kweku came from and Kweku's grandfather is a very special man. He is in jail for the wrong reasons,'" he said.
He finally met Nelson Mandela in 1989 at Victor Verster open prison in the Cape winelands, where his grandfather had been transferred by the apartheid government to prepare for his possible release.
"All the children and grandchildren went in this convoy of 40 or 50 cars. People lined the streets with posters saying 'Free Mandela' - it was a euphoric atmosphere," he said. "We went inside and he asked if we wanted hot chocolate and put some cartoons on for us. He was really friendly and warm. A lot of us thought: 'If this is prison, we want to go to prison.'"
Much later, during their first one-to-one encounter, he got "butterflies" in his stomach when he released that the President of South Africa was visiting his house for lunch.
"The woman who cooks for us told me to go up and talk to him so I went and said hello. He asked how I was and said I was a big strong boy and must study," he said.
Sitting in the landscaped garden of a house that serves as the headquarters of Out of Africa Productions, the film company in which he is a partner, Kweku clearly took the advice seriously.
He studied at film school in Sydney, then returned to set up his own production company. Last week, he launched The Bang Bang Club, a film starring Ryan Phillippe on which he was executive producer, about four South African photographers documenting the violence preceding the 1994 election which brought Mr Mandela to power.
Kweku is also patron of the Umuzi Photo Club, which provides cameras and training to young township dwellers aspiring to become photographers. Two of the group's pictures hang on his grandfather's wall and their project Wembley to Soweto, which documented last year's football World Cup, is currently on display at the Oxo Tower gallery in London.
For his latest project, he persuaded 22 of Mr Mandela's grandchildren and great-grandchildren to sit down with him and question him about his life.
The resulting film, Mandela's Children, will be released to coincide with the centenary celebrations of the ruling African National Congress party in February. Its mission, said Kweku, is to show the man his family have come to know behind the legend that is Mandela.
"It was the family's idea because I was always running around with a video camera at family birthdays and Christmas," he said. "The end result is endearing because you're seeing the man as opposed to the icon, the statesman, the myth."
It was also a chance for him to get to know his grandfather better.
"It was the first time I noticed that he had blue eyes," he says. "A lot of Xhosa and Thembu people do, but you have to see them in the right light."
He said the former world leader accepted being bombarded with questions with good grace.
"You had kids who are five, six, seven, then 12 to 15, then our age, 20 to 30, and 40-year-olds, all asking things that they wanted to ask," he said. "Some asked about his first girlfriend, and what he thought about Muhammad Ali.
"The girlfriend question he just laughed off, which was quite funny because we know he did have an eye for the ladies."
At this point, he half-shut his eyes behind his designer glasses, rose to imitate an old man's stoop and swished his fists through the air.
"With Muhammad Ali he just became like: 'Wow! That man was so swift, you know? He just FLEW like a butterfly and STUNG like a bee.'
"And we were all like: 'Woah, grandad!' We'd never seem him like that before."
The impression of his grandfather's gravelly voice isn't bad - but he admits that others in the family do it better. "Ndaba, one of my cousins, has a really deep voice so does it perfectly," he says.
Another favourite subject was what Mandela made of the Queen: "The first time he met her, he called her Elizabeth and she told him: 'It's actually Your Majesty. And you have to bow.'"
The interviews were conducted in one-hour slots over the course of a week, and Kweku was cutely conscious of Mr Mandela's age. "My grandad was 91 then and as a director you want to keep going - but as a grandchild you know he can only do so much in a day then you have to stop,"he said.
But the film should bt be seen as Mandela's valedictory interview, he said, nor a way of "making amends" for his long absence in their lives. "Ultimately he made a sacrifice and other people have done the same thing - look at Aung San Suu Kyi," he said.
"My grandfather dedicated himself to something which was politics. Were people hurt? Definitely. Do we want him to go back and change things? I don't think so. I think we've also made peace with the sacrifice he made.
"We've never felt that he's been trying to make amends, he's just trying to be the best grandfather he can be, as much as he knows how."
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telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/nelson-mandela/8642307/Nelson-Mandela-turns-93-Our-grandfather-the-worlds-hero.html
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