Reuters
To Max du Preez, Nelson Mandela is living proof that good can prevail over evil, that there actually is something such as a shared humanity.
He brought integrity to the highest office in the country that we had not seen before or after. He brought out the best in the nation he was leading.
These were the first two things that came up in my mind when a foreign journalist asked me on Monday what I thought made Nelson Mandela stand out as a political leader.
Mandela played a role in my life for a long time. I went to study law at the insistence of my father – he said I could one day be as great a lawyer as Percy Yutar, the prosecutor who presented the State’s case at the Rivonia Trial years earlier that saw Mandela go to jail for a long time.
I remember reading a book on the trial to figure out why Yutar was such a hero. It painted Mandela and his co-accused as dangerous communist terrorists and I felt a sense of relief that these enemies of my people were now on Robben Island.
But I also remember wondering as a platteland teenager why Mandela was prepared to die for a cause that my society at the time saw as treasonous and unchristian. Could it just be that my father and the leaders of Afrikanerdom were misrepresenting his cause? My father was angry when I asked him.
I was reminded of this when as a cub reporter in Soweto on June 16, 1976, I was faced with black teenagers challenging the police to shoot them. I knew then that there was something I wasn’t getting.
In 1984 I interviewed a Swapo leader who had just been released from Robben Island where he had served many years with Mandela – Andimba Toivo ya Toivo.
He wanted to talk about Namibia, I wanted to interrogate him about Mandela.
By this time, I had had a different exposure as a journalist to what apartheid really meant. After my conversation with Toivo ya Toivo I knew that my country’s prospects for peace and freedom were tied in with the fate of Mandela. Late in 1988 I wrote Mandela an open letter in the newspaper I was then editing, Vrye Weekblad – I knew he was a subscriber in jail.
I asked him to liberate Afrikaners also when he did come out of jail to help establish a proper democracy in South Africa.
A few days after his release in February 1990, Mandela phoned me to invite me to his home in Soweto. He came out to my car with an outstretched hand and greeted me in Afrikaans.
He poured me tea and explained that he wanted to apologise for not responding to my open letter, but the prison authorities wouldn’t allow him to send it to me.
Mandela apologised for his “Xhosa accent” when speaking Afrikaans and told me about his vision of a united, free and fair – and non-racial – South Africa.
By this time I had interviewed most political leaders in South Africa as well as several African and Western prime ministers and presidents. This man was very, very different.
He had an aura of moral authority about him, he had a clear vision, he had no doubt about his calling to deliver freedom and dignity to the last country in the world where white people ruled over black people. But he wasn’t all politician, he was a proper mensch.
I interviewed Mandela several times as president and after he retired and had two private meetings with him. He was fundamentally the same person I met in February 1990.
Three years ago, the London-based publishers of the Rough Guides books asked me to write The Rough Guide to Nelson Mandela, a book that was published last year. I spent two years researching his life before, during and after Robben Island. Last year, I made an hour-long documentary on his life for the Afrikaans TV channel kykNet.
During this deep research I came across many of Mandela’s weaknesses and mistakes, all of which I documented in the book.
Rather than seeing a hero with feet of clay, it reaffirmed my view of what a special human being he was. He wasn’t a saint sent by some higher being after all; he was an African and South African of flesh and blood, a product of our history and society.
Yes, Mandela was the almost messianic figure that had facilitated the improbable transition from apartheid and white rule to an open democracy and sold a new order to white South Africans after 300 years of colonialism and 50 years of apartheid.
But let’s not forget that he was also, with Walter Sisulu, responsible for reinvigorating and modernising the almost dormant ANC in the 1950s.
To me, Mandela was living proof that good can prevail over evil, that there actually is something such as a shared humanity.
* Max du Preez is an author and columnist.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Newspapers.
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