IT WAS under "the brightest orange moon I had ever seen" that Nelson Mandela’s private secretary, Zelda la Grange, realised she was free.La Grange was driving alone from Qunu to Mthatha after Mandela’s funeral last year, having a mental conversation with the man to whom she had devoted her adult life.She knew Mandela would have insisted on a security guard for the trip. Thinking about this made her smile. "But I kept my eye on the moon and realised that he had freed me from the shackles of my own fears. I had finally grown up," she says in her self-penned memoir.Her despair at Madiba’s death, her banishment by Makaziwe Mandela, firstly from his bedside and then from his homes in Houghton and Qunu, had devastated her. "I don’t know what I will do for the rest of my life," she pondered back then. She has still not decided.None of this turmoil is apparent when we meet, shortly before she is to jet off across the world to launch her book. La Grange has been doing back-to-back interviews...
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