WHEN he was President of South Africa, Nelson Mandela was very careful not to overly criticise his predecessor FW De Klerk in public. In private it was a different matter.

For in Mandela’s second memoir, Dare Not Linger, which has just been published, it is revealed that Madiba, as he was fondly known, gave De Klerk and other opponents the rough edge of his tongue.

At one point De Klerk wrote to Mandela to suggest a meeting between the president, Inkatha Freedom Party leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi, deputy president Thabo Mbeki and himself, in a concerted effort to put an end to the political violence in KwaZulu-Natal – still a huge problem to this day.

Mandela had already met Buthelezi and his reply to De Klerk was stinging: “Rather than suggesting pointless meetings, I would appreciate your input on how to deal with the legacy of the inhumane system of apartheid of which you were one of the architects.”

In public, of course, the two men worked for conciliation, and jointly accepted the Nobel Peace Prize.

Mandela, who died on December, 2013, never finished his second memoir, but South African author Mandla Langa stepped in and took almost a year to complete it, using Mandela’s original notes. The book starts where Mandela’s first memoir, Long Walk to Freedom, ends and takes its title from a phrase used by Mandela at the end of the first memoir.

Langa believes the publication is well-timed as an increasing number of South Africans question Mandela’s legacy. “I wanted to reflect on the gravitas of the person, without the book becoming a hagiography,” said Langa.

“However, people must have the sincerity to look at the time when things happened and use the lens of the moment, rather than the lens of today. Hindsight is a perfect science.”

Langa was told by Mandela’s widow Graca Machel that as president he felt constrained by having to be conciliatory.

Langa said: “He wanted to build bridges, and he knew that people weren’t leaders for themselves. De Klerk was not just a leader for De Klerk and his family. He was a leader for a whole constituency of the South African reality, as was Buthelezi.

“His view was that you cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, humiliate a person like that in public, because that would in fact be a humiliation of his supporters. And so he tended in public to be very reconciliatory with people like De Klerk and Buthelezi, but privately he would really read the riot act.”

Mandela had taken on a massive task in building a new South Africa, and at time acknowledged just how big a job it was. The then deputy governor of the Reserve Bank, Gill Marcus, is quoted by Mandela: “So much is expected of us simultaneously that there is no room for sequencing. There is too much to do and we are trying to do it all.”

Langa added: “The ANC and the country right now is in a crisis, and he really would’ve lamented the situation. But I would think that Mandela had a sense of history and that history has got ups and downs and is not linear. He would’ve seen this as the extended birth pains of a different dispensation.

“Perhaps, if people read the book they’ll realise how possible it was at one stage to be great. And I think that’s the only legacy we can think he left them with.

“People look at Mandela and look at today’s circumstances and do not see that one of his major preoccupations was to create a foundation for a democratic South Africa. Now, it’s up to the ones who are living in that house that has been built to make sure it stands the battering of the element