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Quiet Time with the President

A Doctor's Story About Learning to Listen

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Quiet Time with the President

By: Peter Friedland, Jill Margo
Narrated by: Adam Niell
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About this listen

One Sunday in 2001 ear, nose and throat specialist Dr Peter Friedland received an unexpected call from Nelson Mandela’s personal physician. The former president was struggling to hear. Could Peter visit him at home?

Friedland discovered that Mandela was using antiquated hearing aids and was struggling to maintain them. Soon he became a regular visitor to Mandela’s home in Houghton where he experienced the elderly statesman, in the frailty of old age, away from the crowds. He was full of stories and always bearing a lesson.

But outside Mandela’s quiet house, Friedland’s life was ricocheting from treating one victim of violent crime to another. On many days he worked as a head and neck trauma surgeon and found himself drawn into the victims’ families. When his own family and friends were exposed to violent crime, he was driven to make a life-changing decision.

In Quiet Time with the President, Friedland also examines the powerful forces that push people away from South Africa and those that pull them back. Telling his famous patient that he was planning to leave the country was insurmountably difficult for Friedland, but Mandela surprised him.

He’d accept his leaving, but on one condition . . .

©2024 Peter Friedland with Jill Margo (P)2024 Jonathan Ball Publishers Africa Colonialism & Post-Colonialism Freedom & Security Politics & Activism Politics & Government Presidents & Heads of State World
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This book should be on every college curriculum. It reads like a short, gripping novel but in fact it is a meticulously researched, educative and very personal account. It describes the vibrancy and the horror and the hope permeating South Africa’s surreal apartheid history. One alternately finds oneself crying with outrage or joy, or laughing at absurdity.
When apartheid ended Dr Peter Friedland was an idealistic young white doctor in Johannesburg, adept at digging bullets out of mugged victims’ necks. Then his reputation found him entrusted with the equally surreal task of reversing Nelson Mandela’s hearing loss. So began a curiously intimate yet formal relationship between the two men.
Co-written with his sister Jill Margo, an award-winning writer in her own right, the book conveys the enchantment of Friedland’s many encounters with the great man, never forgetting the undertow of the trauma, blood and tears of the apartheid era and its aftermath. Friedland has no qualms about pushing one’s fingers into the wounds of what it means to be a doctor working in zones of violence.
Soon one realises that embedded in this page-turner is the subtle exploration of a challenge shared by the god-like statesman and the nerve-wracked healer: the quest to pick a moral path through a world of senseless violence.

Mandela’s ear

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