The dialectic between history and myth-making is central in Nadine Gordimer's writing on Nelson Mandela. Deeply fascinated herself by the South African myth of Mandela as the Savior, and even apparently subscribing to it on occasion, Gordimer, in her non-fictional work as in her fiction, consistently seeks to illuminate the circumstances that nurtured the myth, while rigorously privileging history and locating Mandela's significance in the province of politics. Polemically opposed to a regime that recurrently appropriated mythology as it strove to justify and perpetuate its power, Gordimer cites Roland Barthes to draw attention to the hegemonic character of modern myth-making: if traditional myth accounts for a culture's origin in terms of nature's forces, modern mythology strives to enforce secular power by presenting it as a natural force and therefore as justified (Essential 257). And writing on the official codification of the venerable Afrikaner anti-apartheid activist, Bram Fischer, as the Anti-Christ, Gordimer identifies demonology as a specie of the National Party's political myth-making {Essential 73). Disinclined, however, to regard the Mandela-as-Savior myth as the obverse of the apartheid myth of the Anti-Christ, and thus both in the apartheid dispensation and in post-apartheid South Africa a potentially redemptive and regenerative force, Gordimer refuses an alluring narrative capable of vitiating Mandela's social relevance. Her insight is that the transformation of a historical personage into a mythic figure is an investment fraught with enormous social loss. Dismantling the myth, Gordimer projects the man; denying the god, she affirms the enormous attributes of the leader. The paradox, though, is that given Gordimer's understandable veneration of Mandela as an icon, the demythologized god of her non-fictional discourse still casts the towering shadow of a deity in her fiction. As may be expected in the work of an artist who has shown the most passionate interest in the politics of her country, in all Gordimer's three postapartheid novelsNone to Accompany Me (1994), The House Gun (1998) and The Pick Up (2001) the intense discussions of the new South African constitution, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and appropriate immigration laws that are the core of post-apartheid South African discourse find a certain resonance. But prior to Mandela's presidency in 1994 and towards the end of that era in 1999 there was just as much discussion, both nationally and internationally, about the emergent black leadership, the basic pattern of which was overwhelming confidence in Mandela's leadership and anxiety, even apprehension, about his possible successors. Just as the concern is an urgent one in her post-