Follow Christiane on social media:
What time is Amanpour on CNN?
Check showtimes to see when Amanpour is on CNN where you are. Or watch online.
Idris Elba on playing Mandela: I wanted to do an ‘interpretation’ not an ‘impression’
By Mick Krever, CNN
When Idris Elba was cast as Nelson Mandela, he decided he was not going to try to do an impersonation of the revered South African president.
“It’s a big ask for the audience to watch myself play Mandela,” Elba told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Tuesday. “I don’t look anything like Mandela; I’m considerably younger than the older Mandela.”
“So it was important that I didn’t do an impersonation of any actor, or Mandela himself, but sort of an interpretation.”
He purposefully did not watch previous portrayals of Mandela, like Morgan Freeman’s performance in 2009’s “Invictus,” lest he be influenced by them.
Elba, most famous for his roles in the TV series “The Wire” and “Luther,” stars in “Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom,” a biopic based on the autobiography.
It has set box office records in South Africa; it had its premiere in London last week on the very night Mandela died.
Indeed, Elba and a producer on the film, Anant Singh, were forced to announce Mandela’s passing to the audience just after the credits had rolled.
Francois Pienaar on seeing Mandela wearing his Springbok rugby jersey: ‘I bit my lip so hard. I wanted to cry.’
By Mick Krever, CNN
When former South African rugby captain Francois Pienaar was getting ready to attend Nelson Mandela’s memorial on Tuesday, his sons – godchildren to Mandela – told him there was only one thing he could wear: His team jacket.
“They said, ‘Dad, you’ve got to wear this,’” Pienaar told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour and Anderson Cooper. “Because if it wasn’t for Mister Mandela this emblem” – he pointed to the crest over his breast – “would not have survived.”
In 1995, Pienaar was the white captain of the Springboks, the national rugby team whose base of support had always been white South Africans.
Mandela publicly put his weight behind the team in their World Cup run. They would win that year, and when they did, Mandela – the black president – strode into the stadium full of white supporters wearing Pienaar’s #6 jersey.
The story was the subject of the 2009 movie “Invictus,” starring Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon.
“In the years of apartheid rugby was a hated sport,” Pienaar said. “Mr. Mandela, when he came out of prison, against the wishes of the ANC, actually said to them, ‘These are our boys. You know, they are playing for us. We have to embrace them.’”
Cameron: As example for leaders, Mandela has no parallel
By Mick Krever, CNN
Nelson Mandela set an example for leaders, his people, and the world that “doesn’t have a parallel,” British Prime Minister David Cameron told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour at the Johannesburg stadium where world leaders gathered to memorialize the late South African president.
“The people of South Africa – indeed all of Africa – in Mandela have an immense icon, who I think will be looking down at them in the future, and they’ll be looking up to him and hopefully emulating and treasuring his memory.”
It is, he said, “rather like in British politics.”
“When you have, you know, massive figures like Winston Churchill that have sat in the chair that you now sit in, it doesn’t mean sadly that you’re automatically like them, but it does mean that you’ve got heroes to try and live up to.”
Journalist brought horrors of apartheid to insulated white South Africans
By Mick Krever, CNN
When Nelson Mandela was still behind bars, the brutality of the apartheid regime was making its cruelty felt on the streets of South Africa.
Black anti-apartheid protesters had their whole community behind them; whites who joined the anti-apartheid movement were all-too often shunned by their friends, neighbors and family.
Max du Preez, a journalist, was one of the first to bring the stark realities of apartheid to the insulated white population. In 1988, he started the first Afrikaans newspaper to write about the government's official policy of violence and humiliation.
“There was a remarkable absence of understanding of what was really going on,” du Preez told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Monday.
“I was convinced if Afrikaans-speaking South Africans heard the full story of apartheid … that they would think again about the viability and the morality of apartheid.”
They had been sold a false story, he said, that apartheid was about separate but equal development of the races, and was not a “violent ideology.”
Ghana President John Dramani Mahama describes chance encounter with his icon, Nelson Mandela
By Mick Krever, CNN
Over the years, whenever Christiane Amanpour has asked heads of state – even the most oppressive – which world leader they most admire, the answer has almost invariably come back to Nelson Mandela.
“He is a great man, that one,” Zimbabwean strongman Robert Mugabe told her in 2009.
Even the world’s longest-serving leader – President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea in West Africa – told her that Mandela was the African leader he most admired.
Of course, it is not only strongmen who admire the conciliatory Mandela.
The president of the Ghana – whose country has enjoyed peaceful elections for more than two decades – was just five years old when Nelson Mandela was thrown into prison with a life sentence.
“Growing up as a young student in secondary school, Nelson Mandela was an icon for us,” President John Dramani Mahama told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Monday.
CNN witnesses Central African Republic violence
More French troops have just arrived in Central African Republic in an attempt to disarm militias, and it was announced Monday that the U.S. military would fly African Union troops to the country.
CNN’s Nima Elbagir is on the ground in Bossangoa and witnessed the violence over the past week.
Click above to see her report from C.A.R., and her conversation with Christiane Amanpour.
American ambassador in South Africa describes his teenage fight against apartheid
By Mick Krever, CNN
The anti-apartheid movement was not just a South African struggle.
For the U.S. ambassador in South Africa, Patrick Gaspard, the anti-apartheid struggle he was involved in as a teenager felt like “Sisyphus pushing that rock up the hill,” he told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Monday.
“It wasn’t clear whether our actions would really make a difference,” he told Amanpour in Johannesburg.
Americans joined activists the world over in pushing their countries to levy sanctions on the apartheid government in South Africa.
U.S. President Ronald Reagan was against those sanctions, even using his veto at one point to block them.
“We you’re a kid, when you’re a teenager, and the president of the United States is saying this is the way we ought to go, it’s hard to be clear that you could be successful,” Gaspard said.
Mandela saved South Africa from bloodbath, says fellow former prisoner
By Mick Krever, CNN
South Africa could have been “reduced to ashes” and suffered “a bloodbath” had it not been for Nelson Mandela’s negotiations with the apartheid government, Mac Maharaj, who was imprisoned with Mandela on Robben Island, told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour.
He was responding to the criticism by some that Mandela gave up too much in the talks that brought down hundreds of years of minority white rule.
“Rwanda would have been child’s play if we had a race war here,” Maharaj said. “And there were times that we were on the brink of that.”
Maharaj would serve in Mandela’s cabinet, and is now spokesman for President Jacob Zuma. When he was released from prison in 1976, Maharaj smuggled out a draft of the manuscript that would become Mandela’s autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom.
“We had dreamt of an insurrection, and an insurrection movement was possible,” he said. “But it was the leadership of Mandela and the ANC, which said, ‘No,’ keep your eyes trained on the negotiation.”
Mandela’s closest confidant: He taught us to be ‘a forgiving nation’
By Mick Krever, CNN
In his first interview since Nelson Mandela’s death, Cyril Ramaphosa – the late president’s closest confidant during the negotiations that brought an end to apartheid – said that the man known by his clan name of Madiba was “nearly everything to many South Africans.”
“He's been a father of the nation, the builder of the South African new nation,” he said. “And he has been a mentor, a comrade, a friend, a reconciler.”
Ramaphosa is now deputy leader of the African National Congress. It is no secret that he was Mandela’s preferred successor when he left office in 1999, and Ramaphosa may yet become president of South Africa one day.
When Mandela was still in prison, during the 27 years that he would eventually serve, the future president decided to reach out unilaterally to the apartheid government.
“Whilst he was in prison, he saw the conflict rising and rising on an annual basis between the oppressor and the oppressed,” Ramaphosa said.
The only way the cycle could be ended, Mandela decided, was through negotiations with the hated regime.
Mandela articulated cause with ‘exquisite dignity’ but wasn’t just ‘Mister Nice Guy,’ says fellow anti-apartheid fighter
By Mick Krever, CNN
Nelson Mandela did not “create the culture” that ended apartheid, a fellow freedom fighter told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Friday, but he carried the cause to success than anyone else could have.
“People somehow make it sound that he was ‘Mister Nice Guy’ who brought us all together and got rid of hatred in our hearts and led our country to freedom,” Albie Sachs said. “It just wasn’t like that at all.”
“He was at the crest of a popular wave; something very deep in our society,” he said. “And he articulated more beautifully – with more exquisite dignity and precision and a mixture of great gravitas with lots of humor – something that we were all aching of, and ultimately we achieved in our new constitution.”
Sachs was in the 1960s one of the many white South Africans who not hated apartheid, but struggled against it, often at great cost.
@camanpour on Twitter
