French weekly magazines review 19 November 2017

On this weekend's contents pages, sexual harassment, the first party congress of Emmanuel Macron's Republic on the Move, a look at the chaos of contemporary Algeria and an exclusive on the "confessions" of Nelson Mandela.

__ DR

Sometimes it's hard to imagine what the magazine editors have in mind.

Take this week, for example.

Marianne and Le Nouvel Observateur are straigtforward enough: the first goes for a front-page story on sexual harassment, with a hard look at a loophole in French law which has left 2,000 victims in a judicial vacuum. In the wake of Weinstein, Spacey and others, you can see where they're coming from.

L'Obs takes the occasion of the first national council of Emmanuel Macron's Republic on the Move, held yesterday near the city of Lyon, to see how well the rest of the marchers are keeping up with the man they helped to elect. A few of the faithful seem to be running out of steam. You can see the editorial logic.

But then there's Le Point which devotes a special issue to Algeria, describing the north African former French colony as the most mysterious country in the world. A strange choice and a very strange description of a nation administered by the French for over 130 years.

Mandela's presidential years remembered

And what can you say about L'Express, which gives the cover to an exclusive on the so-called "confessions" of Nelson Mandela, simply because some smart publisher had the lucrative idea of completing the memoirs of South Africa's first black president, left in the form of a draft at Mandela's death?

Dare Not Linger is thus offered as the continuation of the momumental Long Walk to Freedom. You could say there's never a bad time to be reminded of Madiba and to read the thousands of words of original speeches and notes which are included. But why now? Especially since the African National Congress won't meet to choose the next party president, and probable future leader of South Africa, until next month?

L'Express offers a sort of answer, saying it is precisely the mess the current president, Jacob Zuma, has made of Mandela's legacy, that makes a return to the source refreshing and necessary.

And the other contributor to this second volume is not your average ghost-writer.

The novelist and journalist Mandla Langa was born in 1950 in Durban. After being arrested in 1976, he went into exile and lived in Botswana, Mozambique and Angola, as well as Hungary, Zambia and the United Kingdom, where he was the ANC’s cultural representative. So he knows the territory.

But given Mandela's capacity to throw away the prepared text to speak from the heart, you have to wonder at the value of the material collected in this new book.

A prophetic warning to today's ANC

Mandela frequently ignored the carefully prepared official discourse, as he did during his farewell speech at the ANC's elective conference in December, 1997, when he warned the incoming leaders against surrounding themselves with yes-men and women.

As Gillian Slovo says in a review of Dare Not Linger, the book reminds us of Mandela’s insistence on making his own hotel bed and shows the famous photo of him cleaning his own shoes. It helps us to remember the man who, with his closest comrades, was responsible for the miracle of South Africa’s peaceful transition. But it also raises the question of what part those stalwarts, and in particular Mandela, played in laying the ground for South Africa’s current dystopia.

The book's French title could be translated as To Be Free, an echo of the president's observation that "To be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others."

Who's in charge in Bouteflika's Algeria?

As for Le Point's special on Algeria, Africa's second most powerful military power after Egypt, no one knows who is really in charge, given that the current president, 80-year-old Abdelaziz Bouteflika, is under medical supervision in a private clinic in the coastal town of Zeralda following a seies of incapacitating strokes.

French President Emmanuel Macron is due in Algiers for an official visit early next month. It's still not clear who exactly will be welcoming him.