[First published in AM New York]
JOURNALISM TOOK BIG losses this week. New York lost the greatly lamented columnist Jack Newfield; the world lost Anthony Sampson (left).
I didn’t know Mr. Newfield, regrettably; I am grateful I did know Tony.
Tony wrote for newspapers and magazines internationally through five decades, and topped it all with brilliant books. “The Seven Sisters” dissected multinational oil conglomerates incisively, and “Arms Bazaar” did the same for the weapons trade. “Anatomy of Britain” helped more than one New York Times London correspondent find their political bearings.
But the constant thread through Tony’s work was his devotion to South Africa – ever since as a fresh university graduate he was invited to run Drum magazine in Johannesburg. “I knew nothing about business, journalism or Africa“, he later recalled, “so I went.” He became friends with Nelson Mandela and covered his 1964 terrorism trial, which condemned the freedom fighter to life imprisonment.
During one of our occasional, always long lunches, Tony predicted that it was in New York – meaning Wall Street – that apartheid would meet its end.
I was skeptical, but within a few short years, global divestment had helped bring the white supremacists to their knees, Mandela was released from prison, and free elections installed Tony’s old friend as president. Not surprisingly Mandela asked him to write his biography. It’s the definitive account of that complex hero – respectful and admiring, but pulling no punches to portray a man, not a myth.
AMONG ALL THE INSPIRATIONAL sayings being spread around at Christmas time, there have been yet more citations of an ubiquitous – but totally spurious – quotation from Mandela. You’ve probably seen it. He is supposed to have urged us all – at his 1994 presidential inauguration, specifically – not to be fearful of expressing our bright individual value to the world: “It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous?”
The words “gorgeous” and “fabulous” should make anyone sense something wrong. I was at Mandela’s inauguration, and he certainly didn’t say those words.
But the Internet keeps regurgitating the fallacy, and print publications have fallen for it, too, including the New York Post, the Atlanta Journal & Constitution and the Knight Ridder chain of newspapers. It turns out the passage actually comes from Marianne Williamson‘s 1992 book “A Return to Love.”
I wanted to double-check that Mandela hadn’t perhaps spoken it sometime, maybe even quoting Williamson, so l consulted Tony. Overnight he confirmed that Mandela simply never had. And on a personal note, he wrote: “Glad you asked that question – l’ve just been arguing with a friend who used it [the quotation] at her husband’s funeral“.
Some hours after that e-mail he died in his sleep. Right to the end as always, Anthony Sampson was helping to establish, in small matters as in large, what was true and what was not.
