Dear Comrade President

This was a massive undertaking. It's the heaviest literary work of my life, in a way. I was involved in the project because I'd been through that whole process of imagining having a Constitution, setting up the Constitutional Committee, the ideas we had long before the Berlin Wall fell, long before Mandela met with captains of industry; we were already laying the foundations. Oliver Tambo was key to that, and it's a great story for the world to know. The initial idea was, André Odendaal and I would work together, but we actually couldn't work together. Two white guys of a certain age, dogged, independent, forceful, butting heads quite a lot, always intellectual about it; and we ended up with a modality. André had a knowledge of South African history seen from the point of view of African writers, thinkers, journalists and church people, going back for 200 years. It was almost unique, black and white. He was more knowledgeable, I think, than anybody, and through his research and work he had been there, and knew about families, connections, and relationships.

I knew about the inner workings of the ANC in relation to a particular theme. And we ended up where he would produce texts, and I would provide him with materials. He'd do his own research, and I would then jump in on what he said. I would support some things, and I would cut out others and add different things. He would take out some of my additions and put other items back. I would give racy titles and strong opening sentences, like I used to do with judgments in the court. One way and another, we ended up with, I think, one of the great pieces of literature produced in South Africa, maybe in the world of historical presentation, reasoning, very well documented.

He was so precise, a real historian in a classical, old-fashioned sense of if you make a statement, you've got to give your source. If it's your own view, it's got to be clear it's your own view. And I'm introducing an experiential side, filling in gaps, pointing to things that you might know about. The documents don't contain everything. There's lots of stuff that's not the real documents, helping with the periodisation, the emphasis, the importance of things, learning so much from him.

When I was blown up, I was out of off the scene for almost the whole of 1988 when the Harare declaration was being developed, which became the basic template developed by Oliver Tambo support from Govan Mbeki and other people inside the ANC. That was all new to me, as well as many of the historical connections between people, the backgrounds, and family relationships – all very rich and very new to me.

Finally, the book came out. There was one little amusing scene where we had a launch in the Constitutional Court in Johannesburg. It was quite dark, and there was a platform; it's my turn to speak, and I rush forward, and I go over the edge and disappear. I'm very independent, particularly when I've fallen in front of everybody. And I want to show up, so I get up and go to the platform, and I have my say.

This book has had a major impact. What it shows is African agency in the imagining, crafting and final drafting of the Constitution, deep in African history, with huge African thought going into it, with Oliver Tambo, Pallo Jordan and others playing an absolutely critical role in all the major decisions all the way through. And the exiles who'd lived everywhere in the world and had seen firsthand how constitutions worked, and we were able to draw from the problems such as with the people's republic of Mozambique, with so many wonderful breakthroughs made, but a lack of openness, the civil war and destruction; we were learning all the time. And that story is told here in this book.

All the stories don't end with our generation. They don't end with our books. They’re waiting to be told, and they are rich stories. We've got something here in South Africa. There's something in our culture of resistance, the culture of accommodation, the culture of finding solutions, the culture of love of language, the culture of speaking to each other, even when we’re fighting with each other. I'm, in that sense, hopeful that great books will come out in future that will record in an honest and exciting and attractive and sometimes puzzling and delighting and dismaying, and all the different ways that books can enchant and disenchant, all of those things will come forward in future, even if I'm not around forever to be part and parcel of the production.