JOHANNESBURG — Nelson Mandela was livid. He believed that two of his daughters, working with a lawyer he had recently fired, were trying to meddle in his financial affairs. So he summoned the daughters, Makaziwe Mandela and Zenani Dlamini, to his home here for a family meeting in April 2005. According to two people present, he gave them a withering talking-to.

“Mr. Mandela made it clear,” Bally Chuene, Mr. Mandela’s current lawyer, said this month in a sworn statement, “that he did not want them involved in his affairs.”

At the time, the daughters appeared to acquiesce to Mr. Mandela’s wish to appoint independent trustees to a trust he had created to provide for his descendants. According to the statement, they agreed to the appointment of Mr. Chuene and George Bizos, a veteran human rights lawyer and close associate of Mr. Mandela, as trustees to a trust financed by the sale of paintings of Mr. Mandela’s handprints.

But the daughters secretly amended the trust document, with the help of Mr. Mandela’s estranged lawyer, Ismail Ayob, according to statements by Mr. Chuene and Mr. Bizos. And by 2011, they were seeking to distribute much of the trust’s money, about $1.3 million, among Mr. Mandela’s children and grandchildren, despite the insistence of the independent trustees that he wanted the money to last for generations.