EXTRACT

I approached Fivaz and he quite correctly sent a team to interview the sequestered Cebekhulu in England. But of course - postmortem - all that detail is omitted and elided.

But two things amazed me in this brazen attempt to clumsily rewrite history. First, on receiving Fivaz's response to me - a year later - that Cebekhulu was an "unreliable witness", it was I who provided his letter to the newspaper, which aptly gave it front-page splash treatment. And then Mrs Mandela herself, and notwithstanding very public and parliamentary clashes between us, sent me a hand-written note of appreciation. It sits - should any of the angry revisionists be of mind to search - with my papers housed at the Archive for Contemporary Affairs at University of the Free State. And the entire episode appears in granular detail in my biography.

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