Mandela Day 2026

The Book on Mandela's Desk

A Leon Louw Reflection: Remembering a Friendship With Nelson Mandela

Today is Mandela Day. It falls on 18 July, Nelson Mandela's birthday, and it asks something specific of people: 67 minutes, one for each year Mandela gave to public life, spent in service of someone else.

It is a good instruction, and worth taking literally, though the idea behind it runs deeper than the minutes. Mandela himself put it plainly, at his 90th birthday: it is in our own hands to make things better. For Leon Louw, that idea is bound up with a personal history that predates 1994.

Louw's connection to the Mandela family began through Winnie, a family friendship formed during the anti-apartheid movement, where he worked alongside Winnie Mandela and Albertina Sisulu, including grassroots work helping families in Soweto improve their homes and gardens. It was through that friendship that Louw's ideas first reached Nelson Mandela directly, while Mandela was still in prison.

In 1986, Louw co-authored South Africa: The Solution with his wife, Frances Kendall, a detailed proposal for a free-market, federal alternative to apartheid. Winnie brought the book to Mandela in prison and asked what he thought of it. He approved of it, and told her so. It was, by his own later account, the moment he first understood free markets as something that could work for the poor rather than against them.

Louw met Mandela in person for the first time within weeks of his release in February 1990. Louw, then a long-serving member of the University of Fort Hare's council, collected Mandela from East London airport and drove him to a graduation ceremony at the university. They spent the day together and talked, among other things, about how a free market would actually work. Driving through the Ciskei, Louw pointed out villages where freehold property rights had been granted alongside those without, and the visible difference between them: homes improved, trees planted, small businesses started, against neighbouring villages with none of it. At the ceremony itself, Louw sat on stage between Mandela and Oliver Tambo. He was so exhausted by then that he fell asleep, seated between the two of them.

Leon tells this story in his own words on the Phumlani Majosi Show.

Watch: Mandela's Impact on South Africa →

Louw and Mandela at a later Fort Hare University occasion, 1998. Their connection to the university went back to Mandela's release in 1990.

This photograph is one of the few that exist. The bulk of what passed between the two men was conversation, not ceremony, carried on the ordinary way, without a camera in the room.

So today, give the 67 minutes, and give something else too: the willingness, in whatever argument you are having this year, to actually listen to the other side before deciding it is wrong. That is a harder thing to give, and it is closer to what the day is really asking for.

There is a clear record of Mandela doing exactly that. Both he and F.W. de Klerk had copies of South Africa: The Solution on their desks throughout the negotiations that followed. And after attending the World Economic Forum in Davos, Mandela returned and told the ANC's National Executive Committee that "we will never talk about privatisation, nationalisation again." The word left the ANC's vocabulary from that point on. It says something about how carefully he was prepared to weigh an argument, even one from an unlikely source, at the exact moment it could still matter.

To a great man of vision, courage and unfailing patience.