Nelson Mandela: A Biography, by Martin Meredith, Hamish Hamilton, 596pp, £20 in UK
Katiza's Journey: Beneath the Surface of South Africa's Shame, by Fred Bridgland, Sidgwick & Jackson, 300pp, £16.99 in UK
These two books, both by journalists, offer fascinatingly different perspectives of the triumphant and yet troubled history of South Africa and its extraordinary leader. Meredith's is painted with a broad brush, expertly compressing threequarters of a century of history around the life of the South African president. Bridgland's is a miniature, focusing with an astonishing sense of detail on one episode - the death of Stompie Moeketsie in January 1989 at the hands of the "Mandela United Football Club".
Each writer is driven by a different passion. Meredith wants to chart Mandela's undeniable greatness; Bridgland wants to expose a massive injustice. The critical question is whether there is a link, thin as a spider's web but with the same sort of tensile strength, between the greatness and the injustice.
From a very early age, Mandela had some sense of personal destiny. He was of royal African blood, and spent much of his youth in comparatively privileged surroundings. He could not accept everything that came with his lineage, however, and kicked over the traces to escape an arranged marriage, fending for himself in the tumult of Johannesburg, forging a political consciousness even as he was building a legal career. As a young man, he was given to prophesying that one day he would be prime minister of South Africa. He celebrated his early legal successes by buying an Oldsmobile. He was a young man about town, but there was a cutting edge, a sense of defiance about him, that marked him off from other young Africans whose upward mobility was merely social.
The electoral triumph of the Afrikaners in 1948 set white South Africa - and Mandela - on a collision course. He was deeply involved in the emergent African nationalist movement (who now remembers that wise and patient man, Albert Luthuli?), where he was renowned for his anti-communism as much as for his organisational and rhetorical prowess. Right from the beginning, he had leadership stamped all over him. His anti-communism co-existed with remarkably warm friendships with individual communists, so that when African nationalists and communists eventually made common cause, he immediately became a key figure.
Meredith's account is good not only about Mandela, but about all the others who played such notable parts in what was going on: Tambo, Sisulu, Fischer, First, Kotane, Slovo - the whole roll of honour. He also charts skilfully and economically the way in which the ANC and the Communist Party moved, hesitantly, erratically and inexpertly, away from non-violence and towards its campaign of sabotage and armed resistance.
The South African government, of course, were hardly dispassionate observers of this process, or of Mandela's role in it. They got him, finally, in the famous Rivonia trial, and he was sent to Robben Island for life imprisonment after a four-hour speech from the dock which still has an enormous emotional charge, more than three decades after it was delivered.
The long years of imprisonment, as Mandela himself put it, "matured" him. The bleak walls of Robben Island could not prevent him from thinking, talking, writing. When he emerged it was only a matter of time before his role in the creation of the new South Africa became, with that of de Klerk, absolutely pivotal. Here, too, Meredith offers a gripping account of the negotiations, shot through and through with a grim realpolitik, in which the two leaders hammered out the future. Arms decommissioning, Irish readers will note with interest (although the situations are hardly analogous), was disposed of in what seems like a matter of minutes.
Behind all of this was a cloud, small at first, which grew until it threatened to blot out the horizon. This was the problem of his personal life, which at one level was damaged in the way that so many politicians' personal lives are, but which at another level assumed a political significance of its own. His first marriage succumbed to politics; his children by his first wife remained, to a greater or lesser degree, estranged from their father. But his second marriage, to Winnie, seemed the ideal blend of politics, emotion and physicality. The famous photograph of them holding hands on his release from prison seemed to say to the world: this is where love and loyalty defeat the forces of darkness.
The reality was light-years removed from that image. During the years of his imprisonment, Winnie had become increasingly wayward, both politically and personally. She had embarked on another relationship, and her "Football Club" gang had become a byword for a vicious and personalised form of political leadership which could end only in disaster.
Bridgland's book, based in large part on the carefully researched and widely corroborated testimony of a former member of the club, Katiza Cebekhulu, provides damning evidence that Winnie Mandela was directly responsible for Moeketsie's death; that her alibi for the occasion was paperthin; that she was responsible for many other acts of violence and may even have instigated other murders; and that Katiza himself, whose evidence could have put Winnie behind bars, was mysteriously spirited away to Zambia to prevent him from testifying against her.
The chief questions raised by Bridgland are: why did the South African authorities look so earnestly away from much of the evidence which could have convicted Winnie of these and other crimes? And who engineered Katiza's disappearance?
The implication - unproven, but unavoidable - is that the South African police ignored many of Winnie Mandela's activities because pursuing them might destabilise the peace process. And the most alarming suggestion of all is that Mandela himself was involved in the disappearance of the witness who might have put his former wife behind bars.
Kenneth Kaunda, the recently defeated president of Zambia, told Bridgland that he had taken Katiza in at the border and locked him up because Oliver Tambo had asked him to do so, saying that he was acting on behalf of Mandela himself. Tambo is dead, and Mandela is silent. We are forced to choose between two almost equally difficult judgments: that Mandela did bring about Katiza's disappearance and detention (Katiza is now free, but unable to return to South Africa) because he could not bear to see the woman he had once loved sent to prison, even though she had caused him unspeakable pain; or that Tambo acted without Mandela's knowledge, but in his name, to save a man he regarded as the incarnation of South Africa's freedom from a crisis whose personal and political effects could not safely be predicted.
The Tambo option is, on balance, the preferable explanation, but we may never know. The tantalising thing about history is that it delivers so much, but cannot give us all the answers.
John Horgan's latest book is Sean Lemass: The Enigmatic Patriot