Oldest Mandela Daughter Snubbed in Boston Visit

AMHERST, Mass. —  Nelson Mandela’s oldest daughter says she wasn’t invited to share her father’s triumphant visit to Boston, and she doesn’t know why.

Makaziwe Mandela-Amuah said her husband, Isaac, received a call Friday saying that only he and the couple’s three children were welcome at the festivities in honor of South African anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela.

“So we decided not to go,” Mandela-Amuah said in a telephone interview Sunday from her apartment in Amherst. She is a Fulbright scholar in anthropology at the University of Massachusetts.

The 36-year-old daughter from Mandela’s first marriage said she watched her father’s entire visit on her living room TV set. She would not say who made the call.

She said she was upset at not being able to see her father.

“Why can’t my dad speak to me?” she asked. “This is a whole strange story.”

“If he’s mad, he has never conveyed that to me,” said Mandela-Amuah, who last saw her father in a prison visit last summer.

Asked earlier whether Mandela had met or would meet with Mandela-Amuah, Colette Philips, a spokeswoman for one of the groups that coordinated Mandela’s Boston visit, would not comment on what she said is a “family matter.”

Mandela left Boston on Sunday for Washington. Those representing him and his wife, Winnie, did not return telephone calls Sunday night.

Mandela’s daughter from his current marriage, Zenani Dlamini, who lives in Boston, had traveled with her father since his arrival in New York and saw him off at Boston’s Logan International Airport.