Karen Bartlett is a writer, journalist and film maker.
Karen writes for The Times, The Sunday Times,The Guardian, WIRED and Newsweek. In broadcast Karen has made documentaries for the BBC World Service, and directed a series on the economic meltdown.
Karen’s book 'Architects of Death' about Topf and Sons will be published in March 2018. She is also the author of 'After Auschwitz', a critically acclaimed biography about Dusty Springfield, and a book about disease eradication in the Twentieth Century.
Growing Up X
Fifty years after he was killed, the daughter of Malcolm X wants to make sure her father isn't written out of history Half way down a winding country road in New York’s wealthy Westchester County, one of America’s most famous revolutionaries lies buried under three feet of crisp white snow. I...
Newsweek
How one man gave Congo’s women hope
Life is hell for women caught up in the conflict in the Congo. But one remarkable doctor helps survivors to build a future Why are the lives of African women worthless? It’s a question that Denis Mukwege asks every day that he works with the raped and mutilated women of the Democratic Republic...
The Times - World
‘If they gave me a house, I’d take it tomorrow’
All I want is to die under this mountain.” Noor Ebrahim, a slightly-built former messenger for Reader’s Digest, has returned to the area where he grew up. Now retired, he likes to remember the old days; he can point out his school — “it was tough” — the mosque where his family prayed and the spot...
The Times - World
Momma D: Dionne Warwick, the Grande Dame of Divas
She learnt her stagecraft from Marlene Dietrich; 50 years on, she’s mentor to Whitney Houston and P. Diddy Dionne Warwick opens up her arms in a stage bow: “I’m looking pretty good, don’t you think,” she says. The singer seems slightly surprised to be turning 70, and, with pearly white teeth a...
The Times - Arts
India's Barefoot Revolution
What would it be like if women ran the world? In some parts of India, it’s already happening If all revolutions begin in unlikely locations, few could be as unpromising as Borda. It’s a poor village in the poorest district of one of the poorest states in India. Only the blasting from a nearby ...
The Times - World
It’s murder on your mobile, says The Killing’s Sarah Lund
Hit crime drama The Killing is back for a second series, and Karen Bartlett talks mobile phone forensics with actress Sofie Gråbøl Detective Sarah Lund is a Luddite. The loner heroine of Denmark’s hit crime drama The Killing is as much of a 70s relic as her Faroe sweaters: She makes notes by h...
Technology
Skateistan: How skateboarding took off with Afghan kids
It’s no surprise that in a world full of rules most kids want to do something with no organisation, and no adults. “This country has more restrictions than just about any other,” Oliver Percovich says, explaining how his own passion for freedom and fun led to groups of boys and girls flying acros...
The Times - World
Life and Love with 'The Greatest': Muhammad Ali
When Yolanda “Lonnie” Williams was six years old she looked out of her front door in Louisville, Kentucky, and saw an energetic young man holding court to a wide-eyed gaggle of neighbourhood boys, including her brother. “Who’s that big man?” she asked her mother, not knowing that the answer wo...
The Times - Arts
Polio's Last Stand
Eradicating the Last 1% of Polio Is Deadly But Essential When 40-year-old Liberian civil servant Patrick Sawyer died of Ebola earlier this year in hospital in Lagos, having carried the disease from his home country to Nigeria, global health workers feared the epidemic would spread in West Af...
Newsweek
Bringing Anne Frank Home – to Germany
Like many people in their seventies and eighties, Buddy Elias and his wife Gertie are downsizing – clearing out the attic and getting rid of several generations’ worth of papers, clutter and possessions from their family home in Basel, Switzerland. Unlike most other pensioners, however, Elias is ...
Newsweek
A Race Apart: the beauty queens of the apartheid era
The Miss World finalists are now at the World Cup, but the women who represented South Africa in its past have divided memories So far the game has not been beautiful for the World Cup’s “33rd official team”. They have gone largely unnoticed in South Africa’s impressive new stadiums, despite d...
The Times - World
Maki Mandela: “As Nelson's child, I can say I am proud of him”
In the week that London marks the statesman's 90th birthday, his daughter reveals how she overcame her resentment that he was a father to the world, but not to her Nelson Mandela arrives in London today for what is likely to be his last major public appearance; a 90th birthday charity concert ...
The Times - World
The Vagina Monologues turns ten
Eve Ensler transformed the New Orleans Superdome into ‘Superlove' for a celebrity-studded event to campaign against violence towards women Few people know that New Orleans is the vagina of America. Few would suggest it. “It is fertile. It's a delta. And everyone wants to party there,” explains...
The Times - Arts
When Nelson Mandela retired after serving one five-year term as President of South Africa in 1999 he laughingly said, “It’s important to step down while one or two people still admire me…” A joke, clearly, because, as the outpouring that greeted his death proved, Mandela was one of the most admired – and loved – statesmen on the planet.
Growing up as the son of a Xhosa tribal chief in South Africa’s rural Eastern Cape, the young Mandela rarely saw a white person. It was only when he began his education, and then moved to Johannesburg to train as a lawyer, that he experienced the reality of living in what soon became apartheid South Africa. “I slowly saw that not only was I not free,” he wrote in his autobiography Long Walk to Freedom, “I saw that it was not just my freedom that was curtailed, but the freedom of everyone who looked like I did.”
Under apartheid, introduced by the Nationalist government of 1948, South Africans of different ethnic backgrounds were strictly segregated, with the best jobs, housing, transport and education reserved for whites only. Black South Africans were denied the vote and forced to carry identity cards at all times – requiring permission to travel and work in white areas. Large areas of cities were reclassified as living space for white people only, with thousands of non-white South Africans driven out of their homes. Police oppression was brutal, with many who opposed the government being imprisoned, and notorious massacres like the Sharpeville killings of 1960 when 67 unarmed black protestors were shot dead by the police.
After qualifying as a lawyer Mandela set up his own practice – the first black law firm in South Africa, and became increasingly involved in the anti-apartheid struggle. Tall, handsome and educated, Nelson Mandela was a natural leader who quickly rose to prominence in the opposition ANC movement. He was, after all, the son of a chief – as well as a ‘man about town’ who wore tailored suits, and drew admiring glances as he drove his swanky Oldsmobile through Soweto. With his boxers’ physique and high cheekbones, Mandela was soon known as a ladies man, divorcing his first wife Evelyn, the mother of his first four children, when she wanted him to choose religion over politics. Soon after he spotted a young beautiful Winnie Madikazela standing at a bus stop, and stopped to offer her a ride.
They married and had two more children. Soon, however, Mandela was to give up his family life, and his profession for years on the run as the leader of an underground resistance movement, the ANC. As apartheid grew harsher, he became convinced that liberating South Africa could only be accomplished by organised violent resistance – a course that led to his capture and imprisonment for 27 years, 18 of which he served on Robben Island a desolate former leper colony off the coast of Cape Town. He was in solitary confinement for various periods for smuggling newspaper clippings and organising secret study groups with other prisoners. During that time he was said to have drawn particular consolation from the Diary of Anne Frank – especially when he learnt of his son Thembi’s death in a road accident.
His release in 1990 after an international campaign – including a 1988 charity concert at Wembley – was greeted with worldwide jubilation, and marked a new course in South African history as he led the country to its first democratic elections in 1994.
Despite the many problems the country faced, those early years of democracy were exciting and vivid, with an explosion of protests and opinions. Suddenly South Africans felt that their country, belonged to them. Much to my amazement working as a local journalist there I once found myself ushered into the President’s office for a soft drink and a chat with one of his senior advisors. When I said that such a thing would never happen in Downing Street, he shrugged and said “It’s a government of the people.” At an official function in Johannesburg I watched a room full of white middle-aged business men together with young students from every race throng around their President, hustling to shake his hand – and call him father.
Mandela always said that he would only serve one term, vowing to hand over power to a younger generation, and determined not to fall into the trap of becoming another African aging dictator. In office, he was always a figurehead, offering wide advice, rather than a hands on administrator.
Still, he became a global icon, loved from everyone from Naomi Campbell who called him her ‘granddad’, to The Spice girls, who upon meeting he said were “his heroes”, proving he’d never lost his touch with the ladies. After a messy break-up, Mandela divorced Winnie in 1996 saying he felt “the loneliest man” in their marriage, and wed his third wife, Graça Machel, two years later on his 80th birthday.
But behind the genial image, Mandela had suffered deeply. In the lead up to his 90th birthday in 1998, I interviewed his eldest surviving child, Maki Mandela. “My father had a lot of pain in his life. He has lost three children, and both of his sons,” she told me.
She told of how her father loved spending time with his grandchildren and telling them stories – but she regretted never having those experiences herself. “I was 6 or 7 when he went into hiding,” she told me. “Then I went to boarding school and he went to prison. As a child, you always want your father to be there through your trials and tribulations. I used to be very resentful that he wasn’t.” Famously she said, “He was a father to the world, but not to me,” with their contact limited to a few letters and occasionally visits.
Decades in prison left him “very introspective,” she added – something that other friends commented on when they were reunited in the 1990s. “When he was released from prison he would come for his lunch and would be very relaxed, but a side of him was somewhere else, thinking about other things,” the renowned anti-apartheid activist Amina Cachalia, who died earlier this year, once told me. “He had forgotten how to be with people. He talked to me as if I were a prison warder.”
Mandela was traditional, but could also be witty and irreverent – and loved mingling on first name terms with world leaders. When the Queen phoned he had been known to call her Elizabeth. “Why not?” he teased shocked guests at dinner parties. After all, she called him Nelson.
Above all, he was masterful politician – a good shepherd, he said, who directed his flock gently from behind – and who led his country though a peaceful transition to democracy whilst leaving it unchanged in many ways. More than 20 years after those democratic elections a black elite now rules the country alongside the white elite that always wielded power. For most South Africans, however, poverty remains a way of life, with widening, not decreasing inequality. Crime grew to epidemic proportions during the 1990s and 2000s, while the economy stagnated. Politicians’ unwillingness to get to grips with the country’s AIDS crisis meant that when I visited in 2008 one HIV activist told me so many people were dying the country was “running out of graves.” Mandela’s own son died of AIDS, a fact that he grieved over privately, before admitting the truth.
As a supreme statesman and leader, Mandela never lost the love of his people – but he remained very much human. “He is only a man, not a product that can save South Africa from its worst impulses,” writer, and former head of the Mandela Foundation, Achmat Dangor told me.
It’s safe to say the world would have been a very different place if Nelson Mandela had, as was expected, been sentenced to death at his trial in 1964 – instead of life imprisonment. It was a sentence he was prepared for, scribbling in his court notebook, “If I must die let me declare for all to know that I met my fate like a man.” But ultimately he told friends his greatest legacy was that after 1994 his countrymen no longer had to declare the colour of their skin, “You only have to say, I am a South African.”
Welcome to my website. I hope these pages give you a flavour of some of my work in books, print, onl…
Last week I was in Istanbul attending a Youth Forum for teenagers from around the world. But not eve…
When Nelson Mandela retired after serving one five-year term as President of South Africa in 1999 he…
I’ve just returned from China, after a gap of about 16 years, and I met these undergraduates – comin…
Eradicating the Last 1% of Polio Is Deadly But Essential
When 40-year-old Liberian civil servan…
When Yolanda “Lonnie” Williams was six years old she looked out of her front door in Louisville,…
She learnt her stagecraft from Marlene Dietrich; 50 years on, she’s mentor to Whitney Houston and …
What would it be like if women ran the world? In some parts of India, it’s already happening
If…
*Life is hell for women caught up in the conflict in the Congo. But one remarkable doctor helps surv…
All I want is to die under this mountain.” Noor Ebrahim, a slightly-built former messenger for Rea…
Hit crime drama The Killing is back for a second series, and Karen Bartlett talks mobile phone foren…
It’s no surprise that in a world full of rules most kids want to do something with no organisation…
Fifty years after he was killed, the daughter of Malcolm X wants to make sure her father isn’t writt…
Like many people in their seventies and eighties, Buddy Elias and his wife Gertie are downsizing –…