NELSON MANDELA17 JUL 2026Let Mandela speak for himselfMore than a decade after his passing, a new documentary, ‘Troublemaker: The Story Behind the Mandela Tapes’, offers…Kibo Ngowi8 min read

Using rare recordings made while writingLong Walk to Freedom, a new documentary lets Nelson Mandela tell his story in his own words. The filmmakers hope it challenges myths, nostalgia and accusations that he sold out South Africa’s future What’s left to say about Nelson Mandela? More than a decade after the death of South Africa’s most recognisable liberation icon and the country’s first democratically elected president, is there more we can learn about Madiba?

Troublemaker: The Story Behind the Mandela Tapes, a new documentary directed by Antoine Fuqua, is betting “yes”. The film is built around more than 70 hours of audio Mandela recorded with Richard Stengel while writing Long Walk to Freedom, paired with animated sequences by artist Thabang Lehobye. The film premiered at the Sundance film festival in Utah, United States earlier this year to a standing ovation and, by film producer Markus Davies’s account, some genuine disagreement.

One crowd wanted a 10-part series while another thought 90 minutes was too long. It doesn’t have a distributor or a confirmed release date but Davies tells me the timing has to be right. He’s guessing they’ll release it in the first or second quarter of next year but he won’t commit to more than that.

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With Mandela Day approaching, I spoke to four people who spent years inside this film — Davies, historian and archivist Gordon Metz, Mandela’s friend and fellow struggle veteran Mac Maharaj and Lehobye — to find out what a new documentary can tell us about a man whose story has been told in countless books and films. And, more pointedly, how they respond to the growing number of young South Africans who believe Mandela compromised too much in the negotiations that led to democracy, sometimes to the point of labelling him a sell-out. Metz has spent years working on exhibitions dealing with struggle history and his interest in the tapes started with the book, not the film.

He became fixated on how Long Walk to Freedom was smuggled out of prison in fragments and why, once finished, it sat unpublished for two decades. What struck him, he says, was realising the book wasn’t written to explain Mandela to the world but rather to give black South Africans a chronicle of their own resistance that nobody had put down in one place before.

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