Nelson Mandela's daughter: I don't know if my father loves me. Sometimes children are not really loved by their parents

Not bitter...just sad: 'When we meet I hug and kiss him - but I don't know if he loves me,' says Nelson Mandela's oldest surviving child, Dr Makaziwe Mandela.

The inner thoughts of former South African president Nelson Mandela were laid bare last week when a collection of his writing, jottings and letters from his long years of captivity on Robben Island were published in a new book, Conversations With Myself.
Increasingly frail at 92, Mandela is revered around the globe for his warmth, dignity and moral authority. Indeed, unlike most political autobiographies, the book appears not to seek justification or aggrandisement.
He dismisses any suggestion that he is a saintly figure and discloses that he never sought to be president of South Africa, preferring instead that a younger man should take the job.

Mandela’s oldest surviving child is Dr Makaziwe Mandela, known as Maki, his daughter from a troubled first marriage to nurse Evelyn Mase. And although she is now at peace with her father, she says that she struggled for years with feelings of anger and abandonment and that her older brothers Thembi (who died in a car crash in 1969) and Makgatho (who died of an AIDS-related illness in 2005) felt very much the same.
Still a child when her parents divorced, Maki grew up during her father’s long years of imprisonment. Yet even after the extraordinary scenes surrounding his release from Robben Island in 1990, she says his family took a back seat to politics.
In her first major newspaper interview, Maki says: ‘As a child, before my father went to prison, I yearned to have both of my parents in my life, but it was my mother who brought me up. I had a father who had been there but not really there. He was not available to us.
‘I used to talk to my brothers about it and they would tell me, “Don’t look for your father. He’s given his life to politics. He lives and breathes politics . . .”
‘It sounds strange, but Dad and I developed a better relationship when he was in prison.’
Even though the letters sent by Mandela were lacking in emotion, they at least provided Maki with some personal contact. ‘But,’ she says, ‘when he came out of jail, he was just swallowed by the world and by South Africa.
‘I still think that after he was released, he should have created some space for the family, for his children. We were ignored, or at least not acknowledged, while he was preoccupied with politics.
'I really do think he could have done things a little bit differently. Even now, when he’s got more time, he doesn’t make the effort to really engage. He’s open and extrovert to the world, but awkward in his intimate personal relationships with his own family.’
Sitting on the terrace of her large, modern home in a smart suburb of Johannesburg, Maki looks every bit the successful businesswoman she has become. She sits on the boards of major industrial concerns, including South African Nestlé, and charitable foundations, and attributes her drive, and her subsequent success, to her mother rather than her father.
‘My mum was a strong woman,’ she says.

‘She is the one who was married to him the longest. And for a long time, she was the sole breadwinner. She paid for his education and she made him what he is, in terms of the lawyer and the man in good standing in the community.
'My mother used to say, “I did all of those things for your father and then when he had made it, he showed me the door". She also used to say that Winnie [the second Mrs Mandela] was not the cause of her marriage break-up. Yes, my dad likes beautiful women but I think she was not the cause, there were other ladies before her.’
But Maki adds: ‘While I have a strong will and the courage of my mum, I also think I definitely have the stubbornness of my father. I’m also very opinionated.’
Growing up, Maki needed all the stubbornness she could get. Named after an older sister who died in infancy, she didn’t have the most auspicious start in life.
Nelson Mandela was 26 when he married 23-year-old Evelyn in Johannesburg in 1944. But by the time Maki was born in 1953, her father was already an increasingly distant figure at home. He had gained a reputation as a charismatic and ambitious lawyer and civil-rights activist. He was also, according to many who were there at the time, an unabashed womaniser.
Furthermore, in a report filed during their divorce in 1957, Evelyn claimed her husband repeatedly assaulted her and even threatened to kill her with an axe unless she left their home in Soweto. Mandela disputed her claims and they were never tested in a court of law.
Maki says: ‘When I was young, my father was a fleeting presence in my life. First he left home, then he went into hiding and then he went to jail, so I’ve never had this sort of intimate daughter-father bond with him. And by the time he came out of jail, I was a married woman with my own children. In his mind, I was still the five, six or seven-year-old girl that he lost.
‘My father is so old-fashioned and traditional. He still treats all his children like children. He believes he’s the authority figure who knows it all . . . but he doesn’t really!’