Is there an index of the letters of Nelson Mandela?

by waltonics

Please excuse me if this question is innappropriate for this forum, it's more of a quick answer than a discussion, but I am out of ideas of where to look.

I am trying to source a letter that Nelson Mandela apparently wrote while in prison urging South African intelligentsia to leave the country and thus deny it of their intellect. It was suggested the date was around 1976.

It's not the sort of research I normally do in my line of work, and I just assumed that there would be an easily findable online repository of Mandela letters, but that doesn't seem the case.

If there are any Mandela historians out there, are you aware of such a letter? And if so, is there a resource where I might look for it? I live in a capital city in Australia, so the State Library would probably have any text you might recommend.

sowser

My South African research has only ever very lightly touched on Mandela, so I can't personally attest to the probability of such a letter existing. To my knowledge there is no single repository of all of Mandela's personal papers - depending on the nature of the material, it could be held in a number of places, and may not have been digitised or printed elsewhere.

Two potential sources spring to mind:

  1. It might be included in the letters in the book Conversations with Myself published a few years ago, though I don't think it is. Sadly, I don't have my copy with me at the moment to check.
  2. If it has been digitised at any point, it may be held by the University of KwaZulu Natal's digital archive. UKZN's digital archive is bursting with material; unfortunately, UKZN also seems to have servers about as old as apartheid, and the archive is regularly down (it is at the moment). If you do check it when it returns to life, use the Browse function and look at the correspondence collection - the search function is horrendous and misses most of the relevant content.

How did you come to learn of this letter? Knowing that might make it easier to track down.