Overview

Vusi Mavimbela is one of South Africa's foremost political adventurers and wanderers. His memoir Time is Not the Measure provides penetrating pen portraits of many South African and African political actors and a galaxy of senior ANC exiles. He illuminates the personalities of many influential people in South Africa's early democratic governments. But the heart of Mavimbela's narrative lies in his unique experience of working as a top administrator and counsellor in the offices of both Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma. He describes the conflict between those two flawed principals and captures the drama of their struggle and its destructive fallout for the new South African state. Mavimbela offers a potent warning: loyalty and long service to a political party is no guarantee of wise and effective leadership.

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9781928341727

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This is the most freely written and undiplomatic memoir of a former Umkhonto we Sizwe combatant (and later super spy) that I have read. It is not filled with gossip and scandal, nor with anger or exaltation. Rather, it displays a wild, irrepressible energy all of the author's own. I loved reading it. It went on and on, but I wanted it to just go on even further. This book was completed shortly before the great changes in national leadership took place in December 2017. It took some courage to write it then. It says something for the author that not a line needs to be altered now. If it has one overarching motif, it is that long service in the struggle in itself carries no entitlement to either power, riches or fame. As the book's title signals, this is a book about time. And it's about time that this book appears. - Albie Sachs

Author Information

Vusi Mavimbela is South African Ambassador to Egypt. He is the author of an anthology of poems.

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