The Man Who Drove with Mandela

In 1962, after a short stay abroad where he was seeking support for his battle against apartheid, Nelson Mandela returned to South Africa. As he was wanted by the government, he was smuggled across the border as the driver of an affluent white man. Mandela knew him well; it was the writer and stage director Cecil Williams, at the time also one of the leading activists in South Africa. However, when their car was stopped by the police, Williams was behind the wheel himself and Mandela on the passenger seat, which aroused the officers‘ suspicions.As everybody knows, Mandela was sentenced to life imprisonment. Williams was released after one day, but put under house arrest for five years. Who was Cecil Williams? We get to know him as a passionate man, who fought for the rights of homosexuals in South Africa and other causes. Illustrated by numerous interviews with friends, relatives and acquaintances, the life of this South African legend, who died in 1979 in London, is reconstructed.In the abundant archive footage, we mainly see the scintillating life in Johannesburg in the fifties and sixties. And in a number of dramatized monologues, actor Corin Redgrave reads from Williams‘s oeuvre. Williams, who came from a wealthy family, not only worked with black actors, who performed in his theatre. For many years, he was also the chairman of a political, Communism-oriented action group that openly laboured to improve the position of the black population. Nelson Mandela himself also briefly appears in the film, on the spot where he and Williams were arrested some thirty years ago, when nobody could even divine which position he would hold in the future.