The Meaning of Mandela: A Literary and Intellectual Celebration

These engaging and witty lectures bring together the ideas of three renowned scholars—Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Wole Soyinka, and Cornel West—as they reflect on Nelson Mandela's image in the public imagination and his role as a symbol of African pride. Gates, a powerful academic presence in the United States and chair of the department of African American studies at Harvard University, urges South Africans to think creatively about building their archives and suggests the work of W. E. B. Du Bois as well as his own Encyclopedia of African and African American Experience as models. West, a scholar at Princeton University and author of the influential book Race Matters, places Mandela as an exemplar in the great democratic tradition, while Africa's great man of letters Wole Soyinka, the first person of African descent to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, offers his remarks on global culture in "Views from a Palette of the Cultural Rainbow."